<nettime> Isolationism in Swiss Universities

["Claude Almansi" <almansi@bluewin.ch>]

I am neither an academic nor a geek. Untill last December I used word 5.1 on
a LC3 Mac to do translations, and had no internet connexion at home. It is
through these translations that I have slowly come to realise how backwards
the universities of my country, Switzerland, are as far as IT communication
is concerned (if you translate pages and pages for educational platforms,
you start wondering what they are, logically).

Today, I found yet another piece of evidence of this involutionary trend in
Swiss universities, while working on a translating/editing job on an article
about Jean Piaget, the psychologist and epistemologist. In the draft for the
bibliography, one of the authors had described
http://www.unige.ch/piaget/punlications/list-en.cgi?Anglais  as the
fundamental research site for English translations of his work. Yet there
were titles for which she had found no translation. Playing with the URL, I
got to http://www.unige.ch/piaget/publications/index_en.html , which gave me
the distinctly unpleasant impression that the "fundamental research site"
was only an .html version of the 1989 paper bibliography of Piaget's works,
selling at S.Fr 70.- (plus mailing costs: roughly $50). I rang the Archives
Jean Piaget and the person in charge confirmed this impression. He then very
lindly proceeded to send me the update by e-mail as a word attachment, after
first suggesting faxing it.

Apart from the waste of time for the archivist, this is not the way a
university site should work, I think. Finding a reference to
http://www.unige.ch/piaget/punlications/list-en.cgi?Anglais , researchers
would naturally assume that this bibliography is regularly updated, not that
it ent in hibernation 13 years ago. The homepage for the Piaget Archives
itself, http://www.unige.ch/piaget/, has not been updated since Oct. 20,
1999, as most pages for Geneva University, even in scientific subjects:at
http://www.medecine.unige.ch/fm/bioeth.html , the page of the Center for
Bioethics, bibliographical indications stop in 1998. No mention of the last
update.

Sory if I give the impression to be harping on Geneva university: the
situation is not better at other Swiss universities, it is just that these
are the most recent instances I came across. The Zurich polytechnic, for
instance, has a page for doctorate theses, with three buttons: Abstract,
Interlibrary Loan,  and full text. The first two work. If you click on the
third, though, you get a message saying that the full text is not available
on-line for copyright reasons.

There ARE efforts to correct this general climate of distrust, of fear of
confrontation and/or of having one's ideas "stolen". The Proprity Programm
"Switzerland Tomorrow" of the Swiss National Fund for Research aimed at
bringing research in social sciences to a competitive level on the
international scene (see http://www.snf.ch/SPP_CH/fr/einleitung.html ), by
connecting various universities, not only Swiss, around research projects
for Ph.D. students, in a kind of virtual campus. Unfortunately, according to
the evaluation report commissioned by the conceptors of the program, it has
been a failure. See http://www.che.de/html/body_nachwuchsforderung.htm  and
http://www.che.de/assets/images/Abschlussbericht0202_ohneAnhang.pdf  .

Although participants valued positively the IT means of communication put at
their disposal, these means were not enough to counter this involutionary
tendency  of Swiss universities. Another problem is the language issue:
Switzerland has three "working" languages (French, German and Italian) plus
a fourth official one (Grischun-Romantsch). People who go to university are
supposed to have acquired a decent command of at least one other national
language.Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking, and collaboration between
German- and French-speaking universities was scarce. Nervertheless, pace
Geert Lovink's very perceptive article "Language? No Problem"
http://www.thing.desk.nl/bilwet/TXT/TAAL.txt , I think that research is the
exception that confirms his thesis: English could be the means of
communication in programs like "Switzerland Tomorrow", and for "in progress"
publications, it the aim - as stated in the program - is to make Switzerland
"competitive on the international scene".

And I can't help thinking that the name of the program was ill-chosen.
Instead of "Switzerland Tomorrow", it should have been called "In the world,
NOW!"

Claude Almansi
http://communities.msn.com/BabelFans/_whatsnew.msnw

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