There’s No Winter Break from ‘Publish or Perish’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A typical tenure is far more secure than an industry position, yet many of my colleagues work just as hard, if not harder, than the assistant profs hoping to obtain tenure. To date, I haven’t heard a good reason for why they keep working so hard. It’s never mother dying or bills to pay. Rather they are always wishy-washy reasons that hide the real truth: They like it. They enjoy it. It gives them meaning and purpose. Not to mention sabbaticals: I see senior faculty frequently delaying sabbaticals too, for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves and none of them ring true. I often ask, “Do you really think committee A or initiative B would not survive without you?” They hem and haw, but have no concrete statements to back up their reasoning. And don’t get me started on academics who continue to practice into the 70s and 80s, well past their best before date. Most can’t even remember the names of their grad students. It’s pure hubris. The norm should be retiring to teaching-only roles, and hand the mantle of research over to the younger faculty or stepping away from the lab they created by selecting a successor. Rather, it’s the exception.
If all the senior faculty across academia collectively took a break in the same timeframe, say one or two months every year, it would create opportunities for the younger members to step in and shine in their own way across the stratum of activities. Publications receiving fewer (and invited!) papers from senior academics would accept more research from the juniors, there would be more openings on committees. There would be greater career growth at the early stages.
In short, the inmates are at least partly responsible for the rules of the asylum.
The biggest criticism in the comment is that... professors enjoy doing the work they are paid to do?
At the moment, a faculty job is pretty much the only stable job in academic research, so if you want one....that’s what you’re doing.
The problem is that training students (and post docs) is part of a faculty job, and some of those will also want faculty jobs, and so on. Increasing the number of professorships just kicks the exponential-growth can a bit down the road.
However, it doesn’t have to be like this. We could make more staff scientist positions that have a bit more responsibility for doing and managing research (and the job security to match), but aren’t expected to train students. I think this would be a win for everyone: it would reduce churn in the lab, enable harder research projects (since these people would have experience), and there’s even data suggesting trainees fare better in labs with more senior-but-not-PI staff. The NCI is now funding a few of these, as is the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, so hopefully it’ll catch on in other fields too.
The first thing that jumps out to me is that the publish-or-perish phase selects for workaholics. People who are just pretending to be a workaholic, the type who are just trying to survive until tenure, are much more likely to get burned out and drop out of the running. Thus, those who have an uncanny ability to work ridiculously hard over long periods of time are the ones who survive the selection process and get tenured.
Perhaps some of these people genuinely enjoy the work. It would make sense, then, that they are the ones who survive without getting burned out.
I've been led to believe that even after tenure one still needs to be active and that means to publish. There is a lot of variation on salaries within a given department even at the full professor level. The more active/prestigious you are the more salary you make. Those who are active in research and with graduate students don't have to teach as many low level courses or be on as many committees. At least this is true of mathematics departments at large research institutions that I'm familiar with. I'm not a member of a large research institution but this is what I've been told by members of such institutions. My sample size is too small for me to generalize but it sufficiently large for me to hypothesize.
First, tenured faculty in lab-science departments are often expected to cover most (~75%) of their own salary via grants. While tenure means you can't be outright fired for not doing this, there are still consequences. Some places will actually reduce your salary (so you have a job, but are now making $25k/year!); others won't do that, but your office can be moved to sub-basement 4 and your assigned classes will be held Monday 8-9am and Friday 4-6pm.
Tenure also only covers your own job. If you run a large lab, students, postdocs, and technicians depend on you for advice and funding. There is—or should be—a decent amount of pressure to be responsible for them, many of whom you've worked closely with for years. To do so, you need to write grants that fund their day-to-day work, revise their papers, and train them.
Finally, even if you don't care about your salary or your people, you probably do care about your own research program. These don't do well with lapses in funding. Preliminary data is essential for grant applications, but it's expensive and time-consuming to collect. Normally, some "falls out" of other, on-going projects: the project looking at how Xs become Ys sometimes detects Zs instead, so here you propose to look at the X->Z pathway. If your funding dries up, you won't have that data source. Without money, you can't get the preliminary data you need to...get money. Since the consequences of running out of money are dire and funding rates are terrible (~15% of grants get funded), the solution is to submit lots of things, which requires lots of work.
These factors explain a lot more, IMO, than personality/egoism. (And the age thing is about more than egoism. If you don't get a "real" job until 40, it's only natural to hang onto it for a while. And age is a terrible proxy for performance: some older profs do awesome work; some younger ones chase the trends du jour).
I do not believe that my work comes at someone else's expense. My position does -- there are only so many slots for tenured professors -- but not my actual work.
Research is not a zero-sum game. There will always be open problems to investigate.
I went to two math conferences this year, and plan to work on an unfinished paper next year - and hopefully start something new. The only thing stopping me is the lack of time away from the day job (and attention span that it allots). Switching between a software job and mathematics turns out to be hard.
So on that note: why did you use to be a mathematician? What would it take to continue research for fun in any amount?
What else would incentive a person to search employment as an academic?
Yes, they like it. All of them.
Holidays is when I take care of my side business.
The main difference was that it was not possible to take any work home as everything was under secrecy, i.e. there was a clear boundary between work time and free time. Thus after going home there was no option but enjoying something without feeling guilty.
Very liberal worktimes have their advantages though for night owls who sometimes only get their brain running with an afternoon walk.
Research: Everyday is like Saturday, but you work on Saturdays. (c PhD comics)
Sure there are outliers who can work all the time, 12 hours every weekday, throughout the whole year, but those are very rare.
In practice, I think a lot of what such "hard working" people do is busywork or procrastination for a significant number of hours.
I've known successful PhD students who are very deliberate about their time. In the lab they only work, and put away time for regular exercise, social life and trips to interesting places to refresh the mind.
And many places do shut down-or at least slow down-between Christmas and New Year’s....
I only got a BS and MS and yet during my BS I was always stressed about school, even if not working, and during my MS, you bet I was working through "breaks". I'm overjoyed to be able to totally check out mentally.
I'm in Europe so YMMV but still I'm currently working for a US startup and will be gone for good starting now
On the plus side, my work as PhD is self directed and I can most often come in whenever I like, and work whenever I like. Also, of course, my work is very rewarding most of the time.
The downside is: I feel pressure to work always, also on weekends. I will not be taking vacations, I will not visit family over holidays, I will be at university.
I earn the equivalent of minimum wage for someone working full-time. I work more.
But why ? Nothing prevents you from going on vacation, and it’s not like it’s going to influence your PhD results anyway.
I got out early and made it home for dinner, but my mentor/supervisor spent the night at lab running experiments and monitoring a protein purification protocol. I don't regret leaving lab-bench science and academia.
I got my degree and got out, so excuse my ignorance on academia as a profession, but I'm just wondering what the cause behind this spike is?
Is it as a result of researchers being off during the summer months and then making up for the time during the opening half of the academic year, pushing to get to a certain deadline (and getting there last minute, as many in education will)?
Or is there an incentive to submit at a time where reviewers are distracted with non-work activities, such as here during the holidays? i.e. is one more likely to be pass peer review and be published at these points in time?
Not that it's implausible that there is a spike -- just that I've never seen actual evidence of one.
(Disclaimer: haven't read article thanks to paywall.)
>At my institution, "holidays" are nearly 1/10th of the year already!
That would indeed go quite some distance in explaining it in itself.
Although I'm sure the idea of hitting an already bogged-down reviewer at peak season in the name of getting something perhaps hastily put together to publish, in avoiding perish, has crossed the minds of a few. Indeed, if it can cross the mind of a decidedly average non-academic such as myself, I'm almost certain it has for my intellectual and academic betters.
It can be hard to get stuff that requires extended concentration during the business-as-usual part of the year. An uninterrupted morning is vastly more useful than six scattered half-hour blocks between meetings and seminars and helping students. The summer is actually fairly productive for most people for the same reason; very few people are actually off (as in at the beach); they're just not teaching.
There's a brief period of calm between the end of the academic year (which is chaotic with exams, end-of-year stuff, and holiday parties too) and the beginning of the "personal holidays." If you've been mulling something over, now is a great time to finish it off.
Finally, it's nice to start the year with less stuff on your to-do list. I don't think anyone expects more favorable peer review over the holidays; in fact, our lab lore suggests reviewers are grumpier now. In any case, stuff submitted in mid December probably won't even go out for review until next year.
I’m early stage academic and my mother in law is late stage. My MIL missed a lot of my wife’s childhood and if she could go back in time she’d prioritize differently which is why I’m taking next week off to spend with my kid.
The problem is that academics at many institutions have two jobs. During the school year, they are teaching, doing service work, and generally have so many distractions that it's hard to do research. During breaks, the job turns into a full-time research position. Of course you're going to want to work over break - especially if you're aiming for a promotion that depends on research. The current system requires you to do forty hours a week of routine stuff that won't get you promoted or get you an outside offer, and once you've done that you can work on your promotion and/or outside offer.
Not true for everybody but I’ve spent my entire career at ultra-elite tier places and the divorce rates are far in excess of average. Pretty sure 50% of tenured faculty at my grad institution were still unmarried well past 40 or divorced. I’m not suggesting one must be married with kids to have a perfect life, but the current system is weeding out anybody who wants that.
@:'Reviewing is the center of the mission'