Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

By senior I mean "senior or associate professors and lecturers" like myself, and by middle I mean postdoc full lecturers with at least 5-10 years. I don't know what to say about the word "tenured" because it's meaning seems very different in the UK than it is used in USA. In the US I get the idea people think "tenure" makes you impossible fire. Yet here I know of two full professors with over 20 years service, scores of publications and teaching awards in their pockets who were "let go" (forced quit). I know many more who are planning to quit, and there seems a dearth of replacements to step into their shoes.

View on HN

I had the training and a reasonable chance at an acceptable offer if I went on the academic job market, but I bailed out and went into industry instead of trying my hand on it. To my mind, it doesn't make sense to try to break into and establish yourself in such a competitive field with all of the problems of academia.

I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the field, which didn't encourage me to backfill it. Strangely enough, whatever difficulty there may be in the more senior ranks, entry sure seems like a grind.

Interesting. Are you in STEM or some other field? As an outsider I'm curious if this is specific to some fields or the same across academia

CS/EE, so yeah, the blight affects all areas, even the ones you'd imagine were "safer".

I was CS

Where are you based?

Institutions? I'm actually really lucky in that I teach internationally at multiple institutions, university and non-university. What's useful and interesting is it gives me a broad taste of politics (as well as a way to stay out of the melee).

That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some private and state entities are thriving. What is killing the universities, in my opinion, is they're caught in a no-mans-land, as neither fully state entities, nor private concerns.

Ah, interesting. Yes, our current position is deeply unhelpful. State enough that VCs will jump to follow some arbitrary after-dinner speech by the Minister, but private enough that we're competing in a 'market' with each other and carry a bunch of financial risks directly.

Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com