“The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research or merit.”

What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce.

Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior.

I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.

Ah, the eternal post-doc. That surely will shake things up for the better.

Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.

These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there.

Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.

Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job.

I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult.

At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.

You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common.

As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat!

Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed.

What's today's hot topic?

I want to address the meta-problem:

Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration.

To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model.

Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds.

The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department.

Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.

"From what I understand (second-hand info), personality not productivity drove this decision. He ran an unhappy lab, and he was arrogant even for MIT. I can definitely see that in the way he presents himself, so I can give credence to that explanation. Don’t know personally so he could be a great guy and I’m wrong, but there are valid reasons someone can be denied tenure even with research that goes above and beyond, and it isn’t hard to imagine that being the case here."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/sv34ez/tenure_d...

Well, let me tell you that the day I got a somewhat prestigious fellowship, one which comes with years of extra funding on the condition that the department gives you tenure, the secretary of the faculty came over and said "congratulations, but there won't be tenure for you". Next year, someone down the hall got the same fellowship, and they did promise her tenure immediately. It's terribly political, at least over here, and I've heard the same from other countries.

This is a topic very close to me and I could have responded to any one of a number of comments. I'm a little dismayed by some of the responses here; I think the comments speak as much in some ways to problems with academics and our vocational culture as much as anything.

I don't know the details of this case, and I'll acknowledge that there are slivers of the storytelling that strike me as odd. But what I can definitely say is that reading it, it seems very realistic to me in a way where it can be taken at face value.

In my former department, there were many cases like this, only with gender, and the department was sued. The university settled out of court for large sums of money, and faculty won tenure on appeal. Their cases sounded exactly like his.

Years afterward there were other problems that sounded very similar to this individual's situation, not involving gender. I've been on many promotion and tenure committees, and some outcomes were reasonable and some were absurdly biased and hypocritical. More problematic was the way people were treated after tenure. Over 1/3 of the faculty left, and 90% of the people in my area left. Another area basically vanished completely because they all chose to leave.

All of the people who were denied tenure and/or who left were very good, conscientious, socially skilled, cooperative people. In fact, as a whole, they were more reasonable, cooperative, and so forth than the department they left. That was the problem.

One of the things that's bothered me the most is in that time there have basically been zero consequences to the department. The university just chalks it up to internal squabbling, and wants to see the department do well, and assumes however they define that will be best. Hires are certainly not an issue because there's such an oversupply of very talented people that they can pick and choose, and people will go just because it's a tenure-track position finally. There's almost certainly a group outside the university who sees it as becoming a better department, because they are similar to those left behind.

What bothers me about some of the comments is this weird assumption many still have -- and I'm aware of this because it's how I used to see the world -- that it must be this person denied tenure who's the problem. That they're not cooperative, that they didn't do good enough research, and so forth and so on. And that might be the case. But sometimes departments are just ridiculously dysfunctional, so much so that basic assumptions you have about how workplaces should work just don't apply anymore. A lot of the responses here strike me as this typical case of "my life experiences have been that departments on the whole have been reasonable, so therefore everywhere is like this, and if anything suggests the contrary, it's a threat to my worldview so I'll just choose to reject it."

Maybe this happens everywhere, but I still feel like we haven't absorbed it into our vocational culture, that institutional environment matters. With academics in particular, I think the problem is amplified 100-fold, that the whole structure is based on these completely incorrect assumptions about what's going on, based on what was happening in the 1990s or something, and everyone has their heads in the sand about everything.

I'm not even sure where to go with my comments, because there's so many directions. Academics is so completely broken and dysfunctional I don't even know where to start.

You could certainly argue that the giant bureaucracy model hasn't worked very well for science.

Even if you think it has worked well, I think you could see why some people may not like being an ever smaller cog in an ever-growing soul-crushing machine.

When I was doing my PhD I found departments varied wildly, even within the same university.

One of my colleagues, a PhD student in the biological sciences, was expected to come in 7 days a week, including christmas day, and regularly worked 10+ hours a day. His professor did have papers in science and nature though.

Another colleague, a PhD student in the math department, estimated he got about 3 hours of useful math done in a day, spent the rest of his time in recreation, and completed his PhD a year ahead of schedule.

An academic who took the norms of one department and tried to apply them in the other might find themselves unpopular in their new department, no matter which direction they went.

The author is a bit naive though in this view of the world that either a place is either a pure meritocracy or the absolute opposite. Props to the president for being so candid with them and sharing what's what.

Academia's biggest problem is a severe lack of people willing to say, "that is wrong and you aren't doing real science". When you read the academic literature what you see is endless oceans of pseudo-scientific garbage, whole fields that evaporate when carefully examined by outsiders. This is correctly destroying people's confidence in science, and all the institutions that have implicitly hitched their own authority to that of "science" (e.g. public health, governments, legacy media).

It shows just how far academia has decayed that tenure is now being restricted to people who others like to have around when the whole point of ideas like tenure and academic freedom was to empower people who are not good team members, and who can thus advance science in big ways by challenging the orthodoxy of the day. That sort of distinction is the justification for academia's existence. If they're only going to recruit people pleasing yes-men a.k.a. team players who they like to be around, why bother with academia at all? The results from corporate science labs are more relevant and don't need subsidies, after all.

A minority individual trying to gain the approval of the majority is in a bad Nash equilibrium spot and cannot openly confront latent racist attitudes without triggering an imediate community defense.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

I found inside a given university job, lets say a PhD or postdoc, it is easy to just do your thing and ignore politics. There is almost no consequences for anything, as opposed to in industy. The kicker is only when you switch jobs. You need to have connections, and goodwill.

So, once you have a permanent position and are the king of the island, you can basically do whatever you want. You only have to play politics with the university leadership and funding agencies, but otherwise you can just do your thing. Of course, for the less priviliged people under you, this feels like politicking.

The problem I have seen is that a huge percent of the average thinks they are that brilliant person when they simply are not. I know I surely am not.

Academia though is a completely different animal. The whole system is completely broken beyond repair. Like trying to keep a 1992 Ford Taurus on the road in 2022. We are just setting money on fire to drive a piece of shit instead of investing in a new car.

Any good starting points?

Different faculty have different areas of expertise and research. Let's say you've got a handful of professors in the economics department. Each one has a thing (or two) that they're currently all about. One might be about international fraud, another about comparative economics, maybe another is into the whole basic income thing, so on and so forth. Each vies to attract other talent to the university that is complimentary or congruent to their own. They tend to want to see that grown into a larger "program" at the university, a sort of cabal. Academic merit is valuable as a second tier priority. You won't people that further your area of passionate research, and you want the people that do it best. And so those climbing the ladder, have to choose research that appeals to the people they want to retain them.

Human limits (communication, understanding, trust) cause politics everywhere.

I don't see how this would serve as a counter-example to the claim "merit doesn't matter as much as <being in the in-group>" or whatever he claims supplants merit.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

They have no obligation to tell you why, but society agrees that they owe you an explanation. Apparently you don't?