Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay is a response to the question of whether scholars of religion in the employ of the modern university have an obligation to help meet the challenges and threats ‘to the social order sometimes linked to aspects of religion’ raised at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion. Donald Wiebe argues here that even raising the question ignores, or reveals a failure to understand, the character and purpose of the modern university, which is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The task of the professor, therefore, is simply to transmit accepted knowledge, seek out new knowledge, and confer on students the skills necessary to grow knowledge of the world and its contents. Wiebe maintains, therefore, that even considering the question amounts to an unjustifiable attempt to inflate the importance of the profession, which will result in making scholars of religion in the academy public intellectuals and departments for the study of religion a type of non-governmental organization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".