Hacker News Reader

Comment by thorwasdfasdf | Hacker News Reader

At least she had the opportunity. Some people through academia their entire lives without ever getting tenure:

"The gig was ideal: It was tenure-track, it was in her field"

She actually had a tenure track position (that's pretty rare and not something to be thrown away). But she felt insulted because a few people had mistaken her for the janitor (and a few parents called the school to complain about her), so she quit.

View on HN

We don't really know any of the details to judge that decision. I would imagine it was more than "a few people mistaking her for a janitor." But who knows. We all leave jobs that are burning us out sometimes (hopefully). We also all make mistakes. I don't feel any need to judge her life by one decision we don't know much about.

It's not about judging her life. It's about the fact that her life story, as presented by the article, does not support the article's premise.

I don't think anyone that is, has been, or knows someone who got a PhD in the past decade+ and tried for an academic career -- finds her story at all unusual, or thinks from what we've been told that it would likely have been different if _she_ had done something different.

Almost anyone familiar with how it works will find her story familiar and familiarly awful. Almost nobody familiar with how it works will think "if I had been in her place it would have ended up differently." This is how it is.

Agreed. Her story is tragic but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who threw away a tenure track position, didn't want to leave NYC, didn't want to leave academia for the sake of her health. All of her self-imposed requirements were ridiculous, and lack of insight is no excuse.

Adjunct professorships are a real problem but this article is below the Atlantic's usual standard.

Actually getting tenure can be pretty tough and very political. Presumably she estimated that her political circumstances were bad and it that it would be better to start fresh than try turning things around, which is a rational decision that many assistant professors should make but do not.

The article certainly doesn't make it look that way. She joined in 2004 and left in 2006. Way too short even for a five year tenure clock, especially when she very much needed the health insurance.

It's pretty easy to figure out who's on your tenure committee, who the competition is, and which bridges have been burned

Sure, but leaving without securing another tenure-track position? You can't reset the clock, still, leaving early is Not A Good Sign you know how to play the game.

I would be a little bit careful Monday Morning quarterbacking this: the story is a reflection a her narrative told to a friend, not the reasons for the decisions as she made them. There's can be a lot lost in translation when communicating the decision process around major life events, and tendency to fit everything into a retrospective narrative: i.e. I'm 'here now', and the last thing didn't work out, because i wanted to be 'here now'

The academic job market was very different in 2006 than even a couple of years later. With the downturn came a flood of people staying on for grad school instead of looking for jobs - and with them came a flood of free labor for the universities.

She probably assumed with her Columbia degree she'd have no trouble landing something quickly, even with her artificial constraints.

“Some”?

Try 90% or more!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com