LLMs and secret academic business
There is an old problem in universities that can be given a useful name: secret academic business. The notion has been gestured to by a number of scholars.
Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson’s work [1] on abstract writing is useful here because it treats apparently small academic genres as learned, political and pedagogical practices rather than neutral technical form. They describe the strange business of academic abstract writing, one of those scholarly practices that everyone is somehow meant to know how to do, despite very little direct instruction. Their point was not simply that abstracts are hard. It was that academic work is full of small genres, tacit moves, institutional tricks and rhetorical conventions that are treated as if they are obvious, when they are nothing of the sort.
Marchant, Anastasi and Miller [2] used the term similarly in relation to doctoral students learning the hidden practices of publishing in journals. They argued that getting from thesis to article is complex, mysterious and often poorly taught at the micro level. Fredericks and colleagues [3] push the term harder, describing secret academic business as part of the unequally distributed rules of academic life: the things passed on to some and not others. This is the sharper meaning. Secret academic business is not just “tips and tricks.” It is the hidden curriculum of academic survival [4].
The hidden curriculum includes knowing how to read a call for papers, how to make a claim without sounding ridiculous, how to cite without looking like a tourist, how to write for reviewers, how to disagree politely enough to survive, how to signal membership of a field, and how to know when a paragraph is merely wearing an academic hat.
Some of this can be shared. We can teach writing. We can teach searching. We can teach source curation. We can teach the structure of an abstract, the anatomy of a journal article, the ritual phrases of peer review, and the deep sadness of “revise and resubmit.” But the shared version is usually an abstracted account. It is the recipe without the cook’s hands. It tells you the steps, but not the pressure, timing, smell, hesitation, and occasional panic that make the thing work. This is where LLMs become interesting.
LLMs appear to make some of secret academic business available. Ask one for an abstract and it will produce something abstract-shaped. Ask it for a literature review and it will produce a literature-review-like object. Ask it to make a paragraph more scholarly and it will put spectacles on the sentence, sit it near a window, and give it a faint air of methodological concern. This is not nothing.
For students, early career researchers, and people not already fluent in academic codes, LLMs can expose some of the choreography. They can show how a paragraph might move from context to problem to claim. They can generate examples of reviewer responses. They can help compare tones. They can explain what an abstract is doing. They can create a rehearsal space for academic moves that were once learned mainly through proximity, embarrassment, and a supervisor writing “unclear” in the margin like a tiny thunderclap.
LLMs do not reveal secret academic business so much as simulate its visible residues. They are good at the products of academic practice: the tone, the sequence, the shape, the gestures. But the more stubborn parts of academic work remain elsewhere. They remain in judgement.
Knowing that a source exists is not the same as knowing what it is doing in an argument. Knowing how to summarise a field is not the same as knowing where the bodies are buried. Knowing how to generate a plausible research question is not the same as knowing whether that question has legs, teeth, ethics clearance, and a chance of surviving contact with data. The machine can often produce the academic move. It cannot reliably know whether the move is warranted.
That’s important because secret academic business is not only about technique. It is also about taste, institutional memory, disciplinary feel, and embodied judgement. It is the almost physical sense that a sentence has become too smooth. That a citation is being used as wallpaper. That a concept has been asked to carry a piano up three flights of stairs. That the paper is pretending to have findings when what it really has is adjectives.
LLMs can mimic the forms of academic competence. Sometimes that mimicry is useful. Mimicry is how many people learn. We copy before we understand. We rehearse before we inhabit. We borrow the voice before finding out which parts of it make us stammer.
Mimicry becomes dangerous when it is mistaken for membership. The LLM can produce a passable academic surface without having undergone the formation that gives that surface responsibility. It can learn the handshake, the dress code, and several convincing noises of scholarship. It has not learned why everyone in the room is nervous.
There is a further complication. LLMs are now themselves becoming part of secret academic business. Many academics are using them. Some say so. Many do not. Or they disclose only in the safe, ornamental way: “used for editing,” “used for brainstorming,” “used to improve clarity.” These phrases may be true, but they are often as informative as saying that one used a word processor.
A student who uses a LLM may be asked to disclose, document, justify, and defend the use. An academic may use the same tool and call it workflow. The student “cheats”; the academic “iterates.” This distinction has all the moral grandeur of a parking permit. The asymmetry is worth naming. The machine has not ended secret academic business. It has been folded into it.
The new secret academic business is not only knowing how to write a journal article. It is knowing when to ask the machine, what to ask, what to ignore, what to rewrite, what not to admit, and how to make the final product look as if it arrived through respectable cognitive channels.
This is the bit that should make universities uncomfortable. Not because LLM use is inherently scandalous. It often is not. The scandal is the uneven honesty around it.
LLMs may also make some forms of secret academic business more teachable. Used well, they can turn hidden moves into objects of discussion. A supervisor can ask a student to compare three versions of an abstract and identify what each version is doing. A class can examine a LLM-generated literature review and ask where it becomes generic, where it overclaims, where it invents coherence, where it mistakes fluency for knowledge. A doctoral student can ask why one paragraph sounds like a grant application and another like a funeral notice.
In that sense, the LLM can become a “third thing” [5] in the room: not the student, not the supervisor, but a shared object around which judgement can be practised. This is the optimistic version. The LLM does not replace academic formation. It gives us something on which to practise formation.
That requires us to stop treating academic work as if its polished outputs are honest accounts of its making. They are not. Most academic writing is less like sculpture and more like plumbing done during a dinner party. Something has leaked, someone is pretending to remain calm, and by the end everyone agrees to call it structure.
The arrival of LLMs gives us a chance to talk more honestly about how academic work is made. Not just the official version: search, read, synthesise, draft, revise. But the actual version: drift, panic, overcollect, misread, imitate, cut, ask someone, move a paragraph, discover the argument halfway through, delete the clever bit, add the boring but necessary bit, and pretend this was the plan all along.
Secret academic business will not disappear. Some of it cannot be fully formalised because it lives in bodies, histories, institutions, disciplines, relationships, and scars. Some of it should be made explicit because secrecy protects advantage. Some of it will always remain craft. LLMs sit awkwardly across all three.
They expose some of the choreography. They cheapen some of the performance. They hide inside the workflows of those already fluent enough to use them well. They can provide rehearsal without apprenticeship.
So perhaps the question is not whether LLMs reveal secret academic business. They do, but only partly. Nor is the question whether they destroy it. They do not. The better question is: what kind of academic business becomes more secret when everyone has access to the performance of competence? My guess, for now, is judgement.
The future secret academic business is not “how to write an abstract.” The machine can already produce one, sometimes annoyingly well. The future secret academic business is knowing when the abstract is empty, when it is overpromising, when it has mistaken fog for complexity, and when it has made the research sound far more certain than the researcher has any right to be. That is not a technical skill. It is academic conscience with a red pen. And no, I don’t think we have been teaching that well either.
Notes
[1] Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2002). Abstract art or the politics and pedagogies of getting read. Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference, Brisbane, Australia.
[2] Marchant, T., Anastasi, N., & Miller, P. (2011). Reflections on academic writing and publication for doctoral students and supervisors: Reconciling authorial voice and performativity. International Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 16(1), 13–29. https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Reflections-on-academic-writing-and-publication/991012820658002368
[3] Fredericks, B., White, N., Phillips, S., Bunda, T., Longbottom, M., & Bargallie, D. (2019). Being ourselves, naming ourselves, writing ourselves: Indigenous Australian women disrupting what it is to be academic within the academy. In L. M. Thomas & A. B. Reinertsen (Eds.), Academic writing and identity constructions: Performativity, space and territory in academic workplaces (pp. 75–96). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01674-6_5
[4] I clumsily attempted to address this issue in a postgraduate course a long time ago.
[5] Rancière calls it the thing in common in Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford University Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment