Academia is a cult?
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Otherwise my advisors were always incredibly proud of their students, passing on their knowledge, and actively pushing them to succeed like proud parents. A lot of my colleagues went on to join other labs or even open labs of their own as PIs.
A job from which you can’t be fired? That’s worth something. Stellar benefits? That’s worth something as well.
This is like saying that it's OK that a job is paid poorly because the jobs are part-time. Or that it's OK to pay someone less for a second job because it is a second job. Or one group less than another group because obviously they don't need the money.
Underpaid is underpaid. It doesn't matter what the reasoning is. Especially if you are getting paid less than the "full time" or "permanent" person simply because you aren't "full time". I'll also argue in the case of tenured professors: Job security isn't everything, nor is a sabbatical - and IIRC, fewer places are even offering tenure as often. The adjunct professors have little hope.
Moreover, universities are not companies and could not possibly be run like companies, and foundational research usually does not produce any consumable products. The effects of foundational research on economy are soften only noticeable years or decades later, sometimes (like in mathematics) centuries later. Regarding publications in foundational research as "products" is highly misleading, they contribute to a net effect in science that can hardly be quantified.
Comparative literature (or “critical theory” or “dept of rhetoric” or whatever fanciful name they’re using) is indeed the cultiest field of academia. It’s why they’re so easy to punk. (See: Sokal affairs.)
Nobody was "fooled" by the Bogdanovs -- they were French TV personalities who managed to get a couple of bogus papers published in extremely low impact journals that hardly anyone read. Similarly with "Who's Afraid of Peer Review" -- there are thousands of minor journals out there and some aren't very picky about what they publish. In science, it is important to take note of where something is published as opposed to the mere fact that it is.
Social Text was in fact a pretty niche venue and it was not even peer reviewed. Yes, its contents were risible and easy to lampoon, but Sokal’s feat wasn’t the crushing blow on the modern humanities that it is often presented as.
Fish's response to Sokal is also exemplary:
What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed -- fashioned by human beings -- which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.
Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature -- for if they were, there would be no work to be done. Consequently, the history of science is a record of controversies about what counts as evidence and how facts are to be established.
Those who concern themselves with this history neither dispute the accomplishments of science nor deny the existence or power of scientific procedure. They just maintain and demonstrate that the nature of scientific procedure is a question continually debated in its own precincts. What results is an incredibly complex and rich story, full of honor for scientists, and this is the story sociologists of science are trying to tell and get right.
Most academic fields are nothing like that. As a rule of thumb, cultism ~ 1 / (external demand).
For us in the Earth sciences: mining, oil/gas, environmental remediation/consulting, and the national labs are all big employers for us.
Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of knowledge. They had self rules, titles, apprenticeship systems, and to some degree the backing and protection of the state. Plus like a true medieval guild, they were run by the masters of the guild itself. Sure, they did not call themselves guilds, but in form and function they behaved like one.
The reason why this arrangement was allowed to stay from ancient days is that the universities performed a useful function for local and federal governments, unlike craft guilds. Governments need a lot of trained clerks, always have. Universities however only need professors to replace the dying batch, as the production of knowledge really wasn't tied to markets or social whims per-se. So a large part of the educated students were turned towards government jobs, a useful arrangement for both parties.
This setup appears to have broken down pretty recently, although exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.
Two things.
First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government.
Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general.
Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.
Which probably explains why most public services are FUBAR and stuffed full of incompetent idiots.
Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.
But then you say that the same era was kinda crazy and academics in particular (absolutely not a bastion of the right) came out looking extreme.
I'm not sure where you're based in the world, but that description seems accurate for the UK, perhaps the USA but my knowledge of 1970s era America is not so hot.
Rather than "the right" winning some sort of struggle, perhaps the population came to be suspicious of government naturally as a result of observing the craziness of those times. After all it would be strange if times could be crazy and government employees (as all academics are) could look kinda extreme, and that not affect people's views on a large scale.
> Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along.
To be fair, “the right” is a fairly large section of the population. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that in general Americans are much more skeptical of the utility of government than they were 50 years ago.
I think your last paragraph is plausible, but it’s not my favored explanation.
For me, I think the decline in public opinion towards government programs started with racial integration. Around that time a surprisingly large chunk of white people appear to have willingly degraded their public institutions to avoid having to share with black people, sometimes going as far as literally filling recently integrated pools with concrete rather than share. You also see private Christian schools pop up with the explicit goal of being segregated.
Fun fact, organized evangelical involvement in right wing politics began with segregation. It’s only after the association with segregation became toxic did they pivot to abortion and homosexuality as their bête noire. They’ve tried their best to downplay this though, because it’s kind of an ugly truth.
Within this framework, the anti-government anti-public institution movement got rolling in the 1960s, and started to get a large political head by the 1970s and 1980s. The political turmoil within that period on the left in universities was a response and symptom of that anti-government swing, not a cause of it.
It is for certain possible that certain antics by academia during that time period came across as unpalatable to moderates, undermining their position. I just don’t think it was the cause.
I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts.
> I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts.
Longer lifespan only indirectly implies higher retirement age.
Because for a long time politicians in all western countries have been pushing the idea that attending university shouldn't be a rare or elite thing, that instead nearly everyone should go to university and get a degree. Scaling up changes things fundamentally. Numbers of students graduating with degrees has been showing a clear exponential growth curve over the last 100 years, see page 14 here for the UK:
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN042...
The explosion in size and funding levels of the university system that accompanied this growth has radically changed society in many subtle ways I suspect we're still struggling to understand.
Why did politicians do this? We must speculate. The explanations given at the time were somewhat dubious and tended to revolve around "the knowledge economy" (at least in the UK). Tony Blair was big into this around the turn of the millennium - the idea that the rise of China meant western countries couldn't compete anymore in traditional labour intensive industries and would have to move on to "knowledge work", which they then assumed meant needing a degree. Quite why China would be unable to educate its workforce to the same level, or why labour costs would not eventually rise in China to western levels, was left unexplored.
I personally suspect there was another agenda at work. From the mid 1990s to early 2000s, the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). People who spend more time in the university system tend to get more socialist in general. The correlation between increasing student populations and increasing future left wing voters would be hard for any political strategist to ignore.
That leaves the question of why university tends to make people more left wing. Leftist academics themselves tend to explain it as "smart people agree with left-wing policies" and leave it at that. But there are lots of smart people who don't, so that explanation seems lacking. However that's a topic for another time.
Not by European standards. France has a centrist leader. UK, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain and others have right wing parties in power.
Education has been under constant evolution since its earlierst forms, though the change over the 20th century (in North America and Western Europe especially) has been profound, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I'm going to wind back a bit further.
With the founding of the first European universities (1088, University of Bologna), education focused on the seven liberal arts, with degrees generally in administration, law, medicine, and divinity. Early on there was a divide between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts -- what we'd now call "technology" or "engineering", as well as various applied fields -- also known as the vulgar arts. The term doesn't carry the full derogatory sense of today, though these were considered far less honorable and privileged than the liberal arts. Most practical arts were taught within guilds, not at universities.
The liberal arts were divided amongst the trivium (from which: trivial): grammer, logic, and rhetoric, or roughly, input, processing, and output; and the quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy, or numbers, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in time and space.
Roll forward to about 1800 and Alexander von Humboldt was reforming the German university system with changes that largely reflect the modern system. The field of "philosophy" had long since been divided into its "natural" and "moral" fields, those were now starting to break out into the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) and social sciences (over the course of the 19th century): sociology, political science, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. The modern sense of majors was established by the 1880s or so, though it expanded much since then. In the last decades of the 19th century, areas such as English and Literature started becoming formalised as scholarly research rather than technical practice.
Technology was creating demands for specialised technical skills, while the university as a basis for cultural indoctrination was also recognised (John Stuart Mill writes on this at length, Jens Hanson has a good treatment of this).
By 1900, the high school graduation rate in the United States was about 5%. It helped greatly to be white, male, and not working-class. The high-school curriculum itself was comparable to at least the first year or two of a liberal arts college, with math, Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and other coursework. The PhD attainment level today is over twice that of high-school graduates in 1900.
Technical schools, of which M.I.T. was not the first but among the most significant, date to roughly 1860. Its course catalogue, to this day, is numbered in the order in which programmes were added to the curriculum, up through the first 12-15 entries, making for an interesting bit of anthropological evidence itself. By the 1920s, the term "publish or perish" was appearing in the context of academic publishing.
World wars 1 & 2 both proved the significance of science and technology, and Vannevar Bush in particular pushed for a vast expansion of higher education and research following his war work, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred this on. The GI bill accelerated this, and initiatives such as the California Master Plan for Higher Education and others elsewhere (the UK has a similar programme) in the late 1950s and early 1960s lead to a tremendous expansion of universities, along with the Baby Boom and (in the US) draft deferments for the Vietnam War. College enrollments and degree awards boomed. Disciplines within the letters and sciences (modern-day liberal arts) developed increasing degrees of specialisation and in the eyes of many, were increasingly divorced from practical realities. Government funding drove much research, especially in engineering and the sciences, but also in nontechnical fields.
The tide started to roll back in the 1970s with the oil shocks, economic malaise (far more severe in Britain than the US), and other factors, though tuition hikes were fairly modest until the late 1980s / early 1990s. Industry funding replaced some government monies. The glut of 1970s and later PhDs were hitting first slowed growth, then stasis, and finally decline in available academic positions. At the same time, advanced degrees in many areas proved of limited interest in themselves outside academia.
TL;DR: there were significant changes through the 1970s and 1980s, but they are better seen as part of a very large arc of development of higher education.
Also that's not the only "measure" by which one can claim existence of cults within academia but it's still something you don't want in the research community. Numerous times I have heard statements like "this paper will never get past XYZ because XYZ doesn't like Thaler/Kahneman/[any behavioral researcher here]". That should never be acceptable in research that's claimed to be scientific. Yet, it's common in academia.
However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.
The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.
But at least one time a nonsense mathematical paper, written by a computer, was accepted for publication. So clearly mathematics is a flawed, worthless field worthy only of derision, right? And a few nonsense computer science papers have also been accepted, so clearly also a worthless field.
The "Sokal Text" affair tends to overwhelm Sokal's bigger accomplishment, the book "Fashionable Nonsense" (with Jean Bricmont). There he shows how famous scholars like Lacan and Deleuze threw random scientific terms into their works in contexts where nothing scientific is being said as a way to sound "deep".
The reproducibility problem in science is real, but oftentimes people confuse reproducibility (i.e. I give concentration X of compound Y to mice of strain Z, and 50% develop cancer within a month and you do the same and get a similar result) with failure of generalization (You change the concentration or mouse strain and get a different result and write a paper saying I'm wrong).
Ok, let me see
- peddling in private homes (friends and family)? check!
- using social connections as marketing channel (classmates, friends and family)? check!
- promising benefits, while customers have to pay upfront and wait years for see their investment (never) pay off? check!
- turning customers to promoters (work environments turn away applicants without XYZ degree)? check!
- kick-back/ROI is distributed in ways that are "opaque" at best for customers? check!
Much like how successful MLM sellers are incentivized to bring more and more sellers into the program under them ("look at me! I achieved the dream!"), even though the chance of any of those new sellers actually becoming successful are slim to none, and in fact the only way to be successful is by pulling more people into the pyramid below you to stand on.
The difference between a cult and a religion: a cult wants it all, a religion just wants its cut.
I think it doesn't matter, because this saying is just a threatrical way of saying that we define a cult as an organization in the religious world that we find to be uncooperative, asocial, greedy, mean, yada yada, -- something we don't like.
Further, religion just wants its cut? There's an implicit entitlement there. Why?
I started out saying this saying is amusing, but, man, am I finishing on the opposite note.
The difference between a cult and religion is the same as the difference between a molehill and a hill. It's hard to say exactly when a molehill turns into a hill, but you'll know it when it does.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181102171858/https://www.washi...
You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something.
I'm not so certain about STEM however. While cults can pop up anywhere there is a leader with a non trivial power dynamic, I'd say that a fair portion of professors in STEM will happily explain to you the harsh reality of academia and discourage you from getting a PhD. Furthermore, there are jobs outside of academia for PhDs, so there's a lot less lock in.
The concept of "idea laundering" is fascinating. It seems that, as of today, the incentives of the academics are simply misaligned with the those of the public.
I have a physics degree, and while I'm not employed as a programmer per se, programming is my main problem solving tool. It wouldn't be a quantum leap for me to move into a programming job if I wanted to do it.
On the other hand, I also have two friends whose college degrees were in philosophy and music performance, and both became programmers.
Sociology curricula are getting quite quantitative these days — the jump from sociology student to data scientist isn’t that far. I used to live with a bunch of sociologists back in grad school, and they lived and breathed R, Python, and SAS.
Do employers in some parts really salivate over green math/phys grads with not so much as a github profile? Or do these anecdata leave off some key arc to the story where the grad does something substantial to bridge the gap between said major and software dev?
I find it a lot easier to develop a Math/Physics graduate's coding skills than a CS graduate's underlying understanding of the physical world and formulaic thinking.
But genetic research is more of a CS-dominated field than it is a purely "scientific" field these days. nVidia pays technical geneticists mid-six figures to work on their projects.
Science is becoming more democratized and breaking out of the academic, federally-funded, very slow process model, and plenty of people are working in private science that have nothing to do with making drugs, but rather in brand new fields and exploding existing niche ones.
Some of this isn't great, I'll be the first to admit with a lot of experience on both sides of the aisle. But overall it's a massive net positive. For everyone.
The value of a classical education is that the student learns critical thinking and problem solving in a diverse set of frameworks, which allows them to adapt to the requirements of the job.
https://www.music.wisc.edu/areas/jazz-studies/
Note that it drops a pretty strong hint that you should not major in music exclusively.
Or, this is the normal way traditional arts and crafts of all sorts are transmitted through the generations? It's not a Ponzi scheme unless it promises supranormal exponential growth.
I learned a classical instrument and it taught me many lessons that I don't I would've learned elsewhere (or at least not until much, much later in life):
- rote repetition and practice isn't sexy, but it works and will lead to steady improvement, no matter how bad you are initially
- there is an effective technique to rote practice, and you can put it to use for any skill that you wish to acquire
- failing many times is part of the road to success
These are all skills that are very applicable to software developers as well.
I'm sure there are people who tried very hard to become classical musicians and now regret that choice, and perhaps some resent those who encouraged them along that path, but I never expected to become a professional and continue to happily play in my free time. Same goes for many of my music acquaintances.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/07/17/hip-hop...
[2] https://news.jazzline.com/news/jazz-least-popular-music-genr...
Copyright makes that idea rough anyway. Classical music is far easier to get. Sousa marches and the national anthem are also easy to get.
I mostly don't see how any of this relates to a career path. We teach kids music because they enjoy the teamwork and accomplishment.
Music is frequently taught at schools but not pushed as a career choice, so I'm not sure that the original complaint holds (at least not everywhere). Almost all children where I grew up studied music in some form at school and virtually none took it as a career, those who did were amply warned about the risks. This was considered unremarkable.
Also, the way that music is taught in band rooms, is based almost entirely on sheet music and nothing on actually creating music. In fact most of the people I know who were very good classical band players had very underdeveloped ears and sucked at music creation. If you program in C, you will become a better python/js/etc. programmer, the same can not be said for classical music.
Plus, most computer science programs have switched from starting with C to starting kids off on Java or Python, so that argument does not make any sense. Most public schools do not even teach anything other than jazz or classical music.
Be careful what you wish for!
I no longer hold delusions and overly romantic notions of what academic science is. If I have one advantage, it is that I have no doubts as to my career path. I am a very indecisive person, and leaving academia is one thing in my life I am sure was a good choice.
no it does not because even among the loyal not all are guaranteed tenure, whereas cults induct anyone who pays and is loyal, with no cap.
I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
I jest. That's another one of those concepts that came out of the humanities academia recently, which is relevant to the article: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10774
No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.
You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
I'm confused here. You want society to treat you as an individual (a reasonable ask), but you also feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon you?
Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question. The racial characteristics are only a reminder that these things don't happen in a vacuum, a truism that most people don't have an issue with (including you, insofar as you recognize that historical injustices really do exist). Talking frankly about how bad behavior connects directly to privilege does not a racist attack make.
I don't feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon me. I feel like it has become acceptable to judge me based on my non-individual characteristics, based on the language in the article, and your defense of that language. There is no contradiction here.
>Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question.
Yes, let's be clear: the negative language is "no surprise," which is being directly applied to those immutable physical characteristics of being white and a man (and one mutable characteristic of being an Ivy League alumnus). Please don't tell me what the author really meant, when their language is quite clear.
Accurate observations don't get a pass, unless you're generally smearing the white race. Today, you cannot have a conversation about racial differences in crime rates, IQ, etc. You also cannot make any negative generalized statements towards non-white or non-cisgender groups. However, you can hysterically smear white men as much as you want, without significant repercussions, if any at all [1][2][3][4]
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/06/the-soullessne...
[2] https://globalnews.ca/video/4622886/cnn-host-don-lemon-calls...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/08/can-americ...
[4] https://pjmedia.com/election/former-tv-ceo-says-u-s-should-b...
But it is exceptionally lazy. Rather than making the case they wish to directly, they’re offloading that work onto their audience, many of whom will obviously defer to popular generalizations. The majority of the time I see “privileged white male” shorthand, what the author is talking about is character and behavior, both of which can be warped by one’s environment or social status. But hiding that entire analysis in three words does wrong by the reader and makes it easy to view poor behavior as some kind of essential trait rather than a failure of socialization.
If we’re looking to shift patterns of misbehavior or help people understand them better, that’s a bad way to start.
note that a PhD in a computer science department is going to be much less bad than the humanities PhDs described in the article.
- they are fully funded, stipends are somewhat higher (at least not total starvation level), and there is the opportunity for lucrative industry internships
- students in general have leverage, because it's possible to leave and go get a high paying engineering job
- there's a bias towards continuing in academia but it's not taboo to go to industry; you don't have to lie about this.
- for a combination of these and other reasons, i don't think an abusive culture has set in: professors don't feel like they need to haze their students.
i don't mean to imply that everything is beautiful and perfect but it is way less culty.
While I don't do academic research, I spend a non-trivial amount of time reading papers and keeping abreast of new research that is relevant to my job. If the research seems relevant enough, I'll dig deeper and implement the research into a workable model. The software engineering portion really kicks in when I productionize this model and make it a usable product.
So in regards to your question, if you want to do fundamental, academic research then go for your PhD. For the kind of work I do currently, then it's more about the group you work with in industry.
And that's what a PhD is: it's a vocational degree coupled with an apprenticeship. It's not like a BS or MS: it's ultimately not about courses or grades. Rather, you are attaching yourself, like a barnacle, to a researcher -- the professor -- so that you can learn how to be a researcher yourself. Eventually you step out from under her wing and do some research on your own, and that forms your thesis work.
You could learn to do research in a specialized field without going through this process -- and I know several who have -- but you'll probably discover along the way that science or engineering research is an apprenticeship field for a very good reason.
Now I’m not trying to say that the story writer isn’t also writing sensational stories, with their own agendas, only that you would do well not to judge a story by its headline. Otherwise, I agree sensational headlines turn me off as well.