Sounds kinda right to me:
It’s an interesting spin on Steve Fuller’s Schumpeterian reading of teaching: we destroy our expertise by disseminating knowledge to our students; we then have to create more knowledge, only to repeat the cycle.
Strikes me as also relevant to the idea of transformative research.
As soon as I realized you were trying to smuggle in a crypto-Buddhist conception of impact, I figured that Schopenhauer got there first — and he did (and James and Freud followed): “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
But then the problem is what’s the difference between research that is irrelevant because it was once relevant and because it was never relevant. A true Buddhist would say no difference, which means that the preocuppation with impact and relevance is a reification of what is necessarily transient in research. But I doubt that would sell with the NSF.
Yes, I suppose I am sort of crypto-Bhuddhist about impact. Though maybe crypto-Protagorean would be more accurate. Impact makes no sense without an audience that is impacted. Or, perhaps, there is no such thing as purely intrinsic impact …. On the other hand, I’m anything but a pessimist about impact!