Academia is unusually fond of titles and distinctions. Professor, Fellow, Chair, Laureate; prizes, honorary degrees, academy memberships and post-nominal letters all provide shorthand for academic achievement.

Yet some remarkable academics have appeared almost suspicious of them.

I am not thinking here of those who refuse knighthoods because of republicanism or political principle. I mean something more fundamental: the scholar who wonders what the title actually adds to the work.

The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman is perhaps the most extreme modern example. After solving the Poincaré conjecture, he declined the Fields Medal in 2006 and subsequently refused the Clay Mathematics Institute's $1 million Millennium Prize. His objection was not simply to money or fame. He had become alienated from the organised mathematical community and believed that Richard Hamilton's contribution had not been properly recognised.

Perelman therefore seems less anti-prestige than anti-proxy. If a proof has survived extraordinarily intense scrutiny, what additional truth does a medal confer upon it?

Richard Feynman expressed something similar. Although he accepted the 1965 Nobel Prize, he routinely rejected honorary degrees and eventually resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences. His famous explanation was that the real prize was "the pleasure of finding the thing out." For Feynman, discovery and the subsequent use of one's work by other scientists were more real than ceremonial honours.

Psychology got there surprisingly early

This attitude is not confined to mathematics and physics.

In 1903, William James, one of the founders of American psychology, published an extraordinary attack on academic credentialism entitled The Ph. D. Octopus.

James worried that universities were becoming places in which intellectual worth required official certification. He urged universities to keep "truth and disinterested labor" in the foreground and treat degrees as secondary. His wonderfully blunt conclusion was:

Surely native distinction needs no official stamp.

He even complained about universities wanting to "bespangle" their staff lists with doctoral titles.

Written more than 120 years ago, it feels remarkably contemporary.

James was not arguing that qualifications were worthless. He acknowledged that degrees could encourage scholarship and certify that work had been completed. His concern was what happens when the symbol of accomplishment becomes confused with accomplishment itself.

Psychologist Mary Whiton Calkins provides an even more interesting variation.

Calkins completed the work required for a Harvard PhD under James and other eminent Harvard academics, who unanimously judged that she had satisfied the requirements. Harvard nevertheless refused to award her the doctorate because she was a woman. In 1902 she was offered a doctorate from Radcliffe instead. She refused it. Not because she thought doctorates meaningless, but because she had done the work at Harvard. Accepting a differently labelled qualification would, in her view, legitimise an unjust distinction between men and women doing equivalent academic work. Calkins therefore complicates the idea of "anti-prestige". Sometimes refusing an honour means taking academic recognition extremely seriously. The objection is not to recognition but to recognition that inaccurately represents the work.

Psychology may also explain why

Psychology later provided an intriguing theoretical explanation for resistance to external rewards.

In 1971, Edward Deci reported experiments showing that some external rewards could reduce subsequent intrinsic motivation. Two years later, Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett demonstrated the related over-justification effect: children who already enjoyed an activity showed less subsequent interest when they had been led to expect a reward for doing it.

We should be cautious about applying experiments on motivation directly to eminent academics. Deci's results themselves showed that rewards are not all equivalent: positive verbal feedback could enhance motivation whereas monetary reward sometimes reduced it.

But the underlying idea is provocative.

Someone who spends decades working because a problem is intrinsically fascinating may experience an external prize almost as an attempt to redefine why the work mattered.

The institution says: this achievement matters because we have awarded it our highest honour.

The researcher may be thinking: No—the honour exists because the achievement already mattered.

Perhaps "anti-prestige" is the wrong term

The common thread between James, Feynman, Perelman and, in a different way, Calkins is therefore not necessarily modesty.

Nor is it indifference to reputation.

They seem instead to distinguish sharply between achievement and its institutional proxies.

A title is a proxy for expertise. A prize is a proxy for achievement. A prestigious affiliation is a proxy for quality. Citation counts are proxies for influence.

These signals can be genuinely useful. Academia could hardly function if everybody personally reassessed every scholar and every claim from first principles.

The danger comes when the direction is reversed: when we assume that work must be important because an important person or prestigious institution produced it, rather than allowing reputation to emerge because the work proved important.

Perhaps, then, this is not anti-prestige at all.

It is the rather older academic idea that authority should ultimately reside in the work.

Titles disappear. Institutions change. Rankings rise and fall. The most successful academic work has a rather more severe test of status:

Is anybody still reading it when the title no longer matters?

Sources and further reading

  • James, W. (1903). The Ph.D. Octopus. Later collected in Memories and Studies.
  • Furumoto, L. (1980). "Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930)." Psychology of Women Quarterly.
  • Deci, E. L. (1971). "Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 105–115.
  • Lepper, M. R., Greene, D. & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). "Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129–137.
  • Merton, R. K. (1957). "Priorities in Scientific Discovery." American Sociological Review.
  • Merton, R. K. (1968). "The Matthew Effect in Science." Science.