Ars Experientia

For some sad but lighted perspective, check out this Ponzi Scheme cartoon that aligns with much of what has been written here
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1144

The ramblings of a man who can’t hack it and wants to blame everyone but himself.

It’s astounding that academics still think they can defend what they do by appealing to some notion of “free thought”. Almost all universities nowadays — especially in the social sciences and humanities — are governed by a strict leftist ideology. Students learn quickly, if they didn’t already know, that the basic tenets of that ideology are never to be questioned or criticized. Of course, faculty know it too. Don’t expect to get hired or tenured if you are known to radically disagree with feminism or multiculturalism. Or, in most places, if you are seriously religious. Typical academics are themselves the products of this kind of indoctrination and intimidation, and apparently can’t even recognize it for what it is. When the occasional Bible thumper (or whatever) complains about the leftist garbage being shovelled into the brains of children, they suddenly discover — for the first time — the value of the “free thought” they so aggressively oppose.

It is just not the case that there is a strict leftist ideology that you have to adhere to in academia. People who say this have generally either failed at their university and are looking for someone to blame, or have just never been to one.

If you’re even in a position to be considered to be hired as university faculty, you probably have a pretty good grasp of the difference between beliefs derived from faith and those from science, and where each is appropriate to express and how. I’m pretty sure JayZ has not been in that position.

WOW, I am a retired Student Affairs Officer for a large graduate program, and I am so impressed by this article. It totally fills the bill with my experience in a University setting. Sad, but also true.

Your post elegantly summarizes many of the issues facing higher education today. In just the past two days I have been at two high level research meetings at which these very same issues were discussed. As higher education faces more and more cuts, administrators are increasingly turning to old, now outdated industrial business models–essentially turning every faculty member into a cost-center. It is truly a race to the bottom, especially when team-based science is becoming increasingly important. Creativity? Innovation? Thinking? We no longer have time for that.

Thank you for this thoughtful and useful reflection. As another associate professor who is quite serious about leaving academia, I appreciate your eloquence about many issues that I too face, and that inform my current thinking and decisions.

I agree with most of what you’ve written above.

Here’s the point on which I disagree. You observed that the 1% teaching 99% of students distortion is starting to take place, suggesting that this is a bad thing. It is if you want student-teacher interaction or lots of semi-decent researchers out there. However, it’s not clear that this is a bad thing. Overall, the system will be much more efficient, so we will be able to educate many more students with extremely high-quality lectures. This may put 95% of professors out of work, but is that a bad thing when the best research in academia happens disproportionately at the top 5% of research institutions?

My main point above is that this could be a good thing for society even if it’s not a good thing for 99% of professors. It completely justifies leaving academia for many of those 99%.

One thing you didn’t mention is that there is a huge overproduction of science (and non-science) PhDs for the current market, probably because you think about it less. The number of PhDs being generated simply is too large to allow even very bright graduates to get academic jobs. At best, this is inefficient (since it takes these students out of the workforce, where they could command salaries fivefold their stipends, and where they could focus their skills on solving real-world problems); at worst, this is taking advantage of students.

FWIW, I’m a graduate student at a top school studying ML and nearing graduation who worked at Google before. I learned more and felt like I had more impact at Google, at the expense of a bit of academic freedom. I could imagine a form of corporate “degree” being created in the future, wherein it’s a combination of ongoing internships and coursework.

As a senior mathematician and computer scientist who has done the Academia to industrial research labs and back to Academia route, I actually think it is a GOOD thing that career researchers move back and forth — even though it is usually done only out of frustration with the current job. My leaving Academia in 1980 was done because of (a) salary — my undergrads were getting jobs paying more than profs, and doubled my income, (b) I felt that computer scientist professor must get some REAL CS world experience — I also believe that Law professors must to court, just as medical professors treat patients. My leaving Industry to go back to academia in 1992, was to regain the independence of researching what I wanted to research and not what the company wanted. And the money caught up somewhat — only a 75% cut.

I’m inclined to empathise with the post, except that one is sorely mistaken if he or she feels achieving work-life balance in the large coporation is possible.

Good luck though.

Weber and experience have shown a long time ago that any large organisation eventually becomes unworkable. No doubt many corporations already reached this stage and some still have a way to go. Life work balance is not the point. The point is that more and more academics find it impossible to do properly the job they love, because the criteria by which their work is measured by managers become more and more counterproductive.

Exactly my feelings about academia vs industry.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the “mass production of education” section, I do agree with the poor incentives and lack of work-life-balance.

I am glad you are willing to speak up while most others are not. Often times I feel people don’t want to be confronted with having made the wrong choice in the first place to accept some of what you list in the article.

Thanks for expressing your opinions frankly and good luck at your new job!

I don’t think conservatives are so much attacking “education” as a particular leftist intellectual orthodoxy prevalent in the liberal arts and humanities.

I havn’t heard many people complain about it with respect to STEM fields.

This was an interesting point, but perhaps because I’m an academic in the Humanities, I found pieces of it odd. Even though administrators have been attempting to consolidate power at many schools, the tenure system still gives tremendous autonomy and leeway to senior faculty. The modern American university is something akin to a form of feudalism, where professors serve as barons, rather as employees, because barring gross misconduct, they can’t be fired. Take note of Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who was deposed in a faculty revolts of sorts by barons who proved able to subvert his will. It’s true that many administrators fairly early in their careers enter a separate career track than line faculty,but they’re still products of the same system. If universities have problems (and they do), they’re mostly the product of their own doing. I can’t speak to funding issues, but from the humanities side of the house, you STEM folks still seem *awfully* flush, both in terms of public and private funding. Sure, I’m sure things could be *better*, but isn’t that always the case? And I see schools like my alma mater, Yale, embarking on gargantuan fund-raising campaigns devoted to STEM (or the new Cornell initiative in NYC), but I don’t see ANYTHING like that in the humanities. Partly because such a thing would be unnecessary, but think my larger point stands. Private giving remains a huge advantage for American universities, even in a climate of more austere public funding, and it’s not like tuition raises have been sparse.

Furthermore, the post is most eloquent on questions of culture and community–but the people who create that culture and community are ACADEMICS themselves. The causal link argued here is pretty tenuous–drops in external funding and vague cultural currents lead to academic doom. But the ways administrators can punish professors–extra teaching loads, bad offices, etc., depriving departments of *new* hires, are still pretty modest. And STEM faculty have even more leverage, because if they’ve got the chops, they can leave for the private sector (obviously). If academics with the immense privilege of tenure (a privilege that IS abused all too often) can’t create a strong intellectual community, they really have only themselves to blame. Not necessarily as individuals, but as a collective whole.

I am also leaving academia, but without the distinguished publication record of the author of this post. I’m not a professor–my title is research associate. Since I am not leaving as an accomplished academic, mine is the easier decision to make.

Within my group I’m seen as a system administrator and IT guy, and have been steered toward support work and software development, and away from research. My hope in obtaining that position was to publish with the group and build some academic capital, but in the two years I have been there, I have not been included in any publications and have had to publish unrelated work on my own. There is little incentive to promote an individual assigned to projects that provide funding for the group, and to activities that support the research efforts of others, but which are unlikely themselves to result in publication.

The STEM disciplines are “flush” by comparison with the humanities–strictly speaking, the “M” in STEM is closer to the humanities with respect to funding than the science, technology and engineering disciplines. (I sure wouldn’t mind working in the digital humanities “in this moment.”) But life in a grant-driven research group is dictated by funding. The unremitting preoccupation with the next grant compromises currently funded projects and turns intellectuals into mental technicians and administrators.

I’m also acutely aware that I lack the superior eloquence of my more persuasive colleagues. (This inability would hamper me not only in academia but in virtually any career.) I have been unable to persuade my superiors that the system I have been assigned to create, intended to demonstrate (nonexistent) technical capabilities to a skeptical funding agency, has already been executed by several competent, experienced and well-funded teams of more than one person. The project is an all-consuming, deeply anxiety inducing death march for which I am unqualified. Against this, I have at least three competing projects which cannot receive the exclusive attention they deserve, and I am continually interrupted with trivial software installation requests and technical failures rare enough not to have been documented in the ever-expanding global online archive of technical minutia. The perspective is that information technology hasn’t specialized in the past 30 years–nothing is too trivial to undertake or too specialized and technical to require extensive study and practice.

I don’t have a family or children–I didn’t want them. I wanted to work in an environment where I could be paid for research. The compensation is $25K less than the administrative position I previously held. It is self-defeating for me to continue supporting professors, postdoctoral, postgraduate and undergraduate students. But since my work as a mental technician is valued, I might as well seek better compensated employment where I would not have the indignity of supporting persons whose career opportunities are foreclosed to me.