for someone who seems hungry to be taken seriously, this unprofessional diatribe appears an unusual way to make your case.

Digger,

The Profession of Architecture isn't very serious and Dr. Garry is spot on. He has a sense of humor and I hope it doesn't interfere with his very serious and instructive message that the Profession is bloated and Academia is chock full of do-nothings that basically suck off the public tit. His message maybe hard to listen to but we all have come to terms with the truth.

Just my 2 cents!

:-)

Digger,

The Profession of Architecture isn't very serious and Dr. Garry is spot on. He has a sense of humor and I hope it doesn't interfere with his very serious and instructive message that the Profession is bloated and Academia is chock full of do-nothings that basically suck off the public tit. His message maybe hard to listen to but we all have come to terms with the truth.

Just my 2 cents!

:-)

you crazy kids and your internets.

I don't know digger, I'm willing to go so far as to say that the problem is that as a community we put the illusion of "professionalism" before any actual standard of professional behavior. So many of the participants in this profession will dismiss Dr Garry's solid critique because of his rhetorical flair, and take seriously what DI has to say because it sounds dispassionate and impartial.

Personally, I enjoy his curmudgeonly style -- he has a well developed disaffected state school lecturer tone that makes it clear that he isn't interested in your opinion of him, but rather the quality of his evidence. And while I do like the fact that Kramer et al. have supplanted the crassly commercial Architectural Record as the official AIA magazine with something that at least pretends to represent the profession with a modicum of journalistic integrity, Garry does reasonably point out that the point at which they really ought to back up their opinion with evidence they fail to do so -- which makes it harder to believe their other reporting.

I agree with the spirit of what make said, if not the tone -- Dr Garry correctly argues that this is a profession that depends far more on keeping up appearances for the ultra rich than it is about much else, and, within that context most arguments have less to do with fact than with the appearance of fact. It is too bad that the can't apply his own very astute observation to the matter of design school rankings.

In general, I admire this guy for having the balls to start a real social science of design with nothing more than a masters and a handful of years of teaching experience with his subject -- and even more for making a genuine contribution on that basis. There are a half dozen individuals who have done a hell of a lot less with a hell of a lot more. I look forward to meeting him some day, and so I offer these criticisms in the spirit of a fellow social scientist (where we can offer criticism and not hide behind critique).

There are two other parts of Dr Garry's presentation that disappoint me. The first is a social aesthetic that would drive Goffman to distraction -- why the pediatricians moniker? Is he unaware that in the rest of the english speaking world the prefix Dr is reserved for Physicians and community college professors? Every time I see it I'm reminded of that horrible Robin Williams movie in which he wore a white coat and a clown nose.

The other is more serious. He makes a first-year graduate student mistake when he uses as citation indices from RIBA and the avery index as a measure of research quality in architecture. Alfred North Whitehead called this, "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." It is treating an abstraction as if it were a social fact (paraphrased as reification by johnny-come-lately post something-or-others). To the point however, Architects self publish and don't use citations (neither does Dr. Garry). So who cares what a citation index has to say?

To digger: Well, I'm happy to be famous. But I have no responsibility to be "professional": I regard that word as simply a sanction imposed by an occupation when it tries to restrict the behaviour of its members to the rules imposed by that occupation.

To mespellrong: Good points all.

I'll just take you up on those last two items.

In my own country, Australia, the prefix "Dr" is used by convention by people with a Bachelor's in Medicine, Dentistry, or Veterinary Science; and by those with a PhD or higher doctorate. Which qualifies me. I'd be very surprised if "community college professors" in the UK called themselves "Dr", since the UK does not have community colleges AFAIK; and the title 'professor' is reserved for the most senior ranks in universities.

And when we refer to "the rest of the English-speaking world", the great lacuna is India. I'm the first to admit I have no solid data for India. But if we are going to refer to the Anglosphere, we should really consider the use of the title in that nation, a nation with probably many more English-speakers than the United States.

I take your point about reification, the perennial problem of the social sciences. I'll get back to you.

The wonderful part of free speech is that one can speak, or write, in a manner that proves one is a jackass - and the listener, or reader, also is free to draw that same conclusion.