Sphinx

Ah, the brand. The backbone of all that we do, the foundation of international success, the very heart of the institution. It’s not enough to produce excellent teaching and research if your logo fails to communicate your core values in just the wrong shade of green.

But things could be worse. I am still trying to process the fact that there is a bona fide research consultancy firm called Melian Dialogue. The strong p-hack, the weak just accept their disappointing data? Charitably, maybe it is just about the crude recognition factor of Thucydides’ name and the most famous bit of his text – after all, there is already a software testing library called Thucydides. But the ‘About Us’ section of their website isn’t wholly reassuring to a cynical Thucydidean.

Melian Dialogue dramatises a series of negotiations between Athenians and Melians written by Thucydides, a classical Athenian historian in his book History of the Peloponnesian War. It is taught as a classic study of political realism and unapologetic rationalisation of one’s actions… We use Melian Dialogue as our unapologetic approach to shape research the way we think it should be and discover practical insights and meaningful data not guided by dogma, tradition, academic convention, or expectations. We are unapologetic in our questioning of what is considered ‘acceptable’ knowledge and business intelligence.

Uh huh. The thing about ‘unapologetic rationalisation’ wasn’t supposed to be a recommendation. You can read the Athenian line at Melos as a hard-headed account of reality, as the Realist tradition in IR does, or you can see it as a critique of the self-justifying rhetoric of the powerful. Taking the latter interpretation – these are the specious justifications the Athenians offer for aggression and self-interest – as a model is… special. Maybe they’re a bit shaky on the meaning of ‘rationalisation’. ‘Cos otherwise this looks terribly like “we will get you the research results you’ve paid for by whatever means necessary, rather than those feeble people who will bleat on about academic conventions and integrity and acceptable methodology”.

So, it could be worse. As things stand, the university has yet to propose adopting ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors’ as the new webpage strapline…

Update: happy to report that, while the @DialogueMelian account does tweet out lots of vacuous inspirational quotations, including one that is allegedly Seneca, it has just to offer any misattributed Thucydides ones. Give them time…