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The highlighted sentence is a metaphor and it’s the right one.

You are selling in your academic career. You are selling results, papers, conference presentations, whatever counts among your peers in your field.

You will not have a career as an academic in your field unless you can sell your work to your peers in the field.

No one cares about your teaching, certainly not of undergrads (exceptions exist at some liberal arts colleges). Your department and your dean care about your research. That’s it.

You have to sell it both to get it published and to get it cited. Do that and you’ll be fine. Don’t and you won’t have a career in a university.

What you say is true... but that's also why American academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive, ridden with fraudulent con artists, and falling into the same kind of failure mode seen in, for example, Soviet science under the regime of Lysenko.

Now if you wanted to rise to a position of academic power under the likes of Lysenko, you'd want to follow this careerist path, you'd want to observe Lysenko, sing the song that Lysenko wanted to hear, and you'd be rewarded appropriately.

That's the way of authoritarian bureaucratic institutionalism, not the way of high-quality science. It also doesn't really matter whether the structure is 'capitalist' or 'socialist', it's all about who sits at the top of the hierarchy in such systems. Crushing independent thought is what they have in common.

> What you say is true... but that's also why American academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive, ridden with fraudulent con artists, and falling into the same kind of failure mode seen in, for example, Soviet science under the regime of Lysenko.

Citation needed. I'm a former academic, and seldom a defender, and I entirely dispute this statement. American academia is widely considered the international leader by any ranking I'm aware of.

For some data, consider the rankings of international universities: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...

Or, by largest concentration of highly cited researchers: https://clarivate.com/blog/highly-cited-researchers-2021-how...

Bottom line: the American academy isn't perfect, but it's far from fraudulent, as the parent alleged.

The reluctance of the American academic bureaucracy to admit to the prevalence of fraud in academic research is understandable, but there are many examples. Some of the recent notables are the serotonin hypothesis of depression, and aspects of the amyloid theory of Alzheimer's. Data falsification is not uncommon, and it's often done for obvious reasons - a graduate student may want that positive result that finishes off their PhD work and gets them a needed publication, a professor may want to support their past work with new data and results, an academic startup may want to prop up their latest drug development results to draw in investors and big corporations, etc.

The reason academic institutions don't want to talk about it is the same reason that religious institutions don't want to talk about child abuse - it makes a mockery of their whole enterprise. With the former, it's the search for truth via the scientific process, and with the later it's upholding moral standards and guiding society. Both institutions cover up such things in order to preserve their public image - which, of course, allows such behaviors to persist.

Note also that the corporatization of research, i.e. the focus on generating lucrative patents and the resulting emphasis on keeping raw data secret, tends to amplify opportunities for fraud.

Citing a few highly damaging cases of fraud isn't enough to make your point. You have to show that it's more prevalent and damaging in the US system than in other systems.

That seems an extraordinarily unlikely bar to meet based on my cursory knowledge of where large scale fraud is happening. But perhaps you know more and would like to enlighten me.

In the last 15 years academic institutions have definitely started talking about it, especially in new mandatory classes on ethics for their students.

> The reason academic institutions don't want to talk about it is the same reason that religious institutions don't want to talk about child abuse - it makes a mockery of their whole enterprise.

This is why in science, replication of past work is essential. Every new Ph.D. student should replicate a paper's results in their area of interest as a warm-up exercise.

In Information Retrieval (the part of Computer Science concerned with search for information - search engines etc.), conferences like ECIR have regular reproduceability tracks, where such works of scrutiny get published, and are highly regarded.

There needs to be a cultural change to the effect that genuine errors and fraud can happen, but we can weed it out to an extent by independently repeating past work.

I wasn't aware that the serotonin hypothesis was "fraudulent," nor can I find credible evidence of this on Google. Instead, it seems that the scientific process worked as intended. A reasonable hypothesis was initially proposed, then opposing evidence accumulated over time.

This seems moreso an issue with the pharmaceutical industry. For example: "In 2005, two academics published a piece of research in which they compared the information on pharmaceutical websites with the pronouncements of certain researchers, and found a ‘disconnect’ between the marketing and the experts’ views." - https://joannamoncrieff.com/2022/07/24/how-to-take-the-news-...

You may be accurate (or not) in your assertions but I would be wary of citing "usnews.com", when using it as proof that US universities are the "best".

I think Americans are generally very biased when looking objectively and rationally at their own country. E.g. Looking at Iran as a barbaric backwards country, when the US just banned abortion and has spent the last 50 years killing more people in international wars than any other country.

> that's also why American academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive, ridden with fraudulent con artists

.... according to who exactly? This is total hearsay.

That’s horrible.

If what you claim is true true, public funding of universities should end. Universities should serve the public interest, and teaching is an essential part of that.

The public spends untold billions funding universities and we should at least get a well educated workforce out of it.

The thousand year old college system’s time is over if what you say is true. There’s no point to it.

You can only do teaching but it’s a different career path entirely. Some people don’t like it because you lose out on power and tenure.

The bomb. The hydrogen bomb. It's about the bomb!

Due to the bomb, US academics got a big dose of money aimed at:

Making sure the US is never behind in anything in math, science, or even medicine in any way that could hurt US national security or even the US economy or US health care. Or "Never again will US academics be permitted to operate independent of the US military" -- or some such, and I do recall the thought but just now don't recall the source.

So, the departments of math, physical science, and engineering get grants from the US NSF, DARPA, DoE, NIH, etc.

The university takes 60% or so for overhead and, thus, pays for the nice campus landscaping, the limo for the President, the glass walled coffee shop, the theater group and the string quartet concerts, the social science departments, the humanities departments, the art departments, the artist in residence program, the library, etc.

But the US stays up in number theory, mathematical and theoretical physics, computer science, ....

"Education"? There, sure, the first requirement is that the prof knows what the leading edge results are and understands them well enough to teach them and, more important, direct research in them.

How to make sure the profs are not just wasting time? Use competition, have all the profs in competition with all the other profs in the world and insist that the US profs getting funded look like the best profs in the world.

How to evaluate a prof? Count published papers. Weight the counts by the prestige of the journals. Count citations. Count prizes. See what job offers the profs are getting.

If the US starts to fall behind, then Congress can vote more money. Congress can vote lots of money, plenty to be sufficient to keep the US ahead.

Uh, Congress has lots of money because, net, the US is rich. E.g., the last time I added the retail cost of the ingredients for one of my pizzas for one, the cost was $0.39, that is, 39 cents. When a lot of US people are getting paid $30+ an hour, the 39 cents represents some astoundingly high economic productivity -- for the flour, cheese, sausage, trucks, railroads, farm machinery, wheat, corn, soy bean seeds, etc. involved.

Education for good jobs in the economy for the students? Naw, .... Instead, the main issue is the bomb, the hydrogen bomb!!!! Did I mention the bomb?

As it stands, more and more college level teaching is being done by non tenure track employees. Also, the non-tenure-track teaching jobs are a miserable grind. The thousand year old college system has evolved continuously from decade to decade, and is not the same thing that it was, even 50 years ago.

You misinterpret the spirit of the quote. What it means is the following.

> Having very good research is a necessary condition to succeed in academia, but it is not sufficient.

The reason why this is emphasized to starting academics is that many naively believe the system is purely meritocratic and that their work will speak for itself. This is borne out of an ignorance of how fundamentally important it is to communicate the importance of your work to others.

The reality is that there is a total glut of research. Even the best do not have time to sift through all recent results in their broader field. Even if they scan abstracts, understanding the true value of results is a hard process that takes time. The most effective way to understand value of research is to interrogate the researcher directly (e.g., in a seminar talk). Thus, self-advertisement through seminar talks and other modes is crucial to getting your message out. Otherwise you will wilt into obscurity.

I can assure you, the space for some sort of corporate style huckster selling poor research with flashy branding in pure math is very small. This stuff is not easy to fake.

> The adoption of corporate entrepreneur model of academic research is one of the worst, if not the worst, things about the current American academic system. Why?

That's not how I read the paragraph you quoted.

I think the point is that you're basically working for yourself when you do a PhD, not for your boss. You're given carte blanche for a few years, and it's your responsibility to produce value out of this time. The value here isn't measured in money but in publications.

> Well, how about producing highly skilled teachers, that seems important in a technological society, where mathematical skills are in general critically important. Hence, a critical part of the PhD student's job (and the professor's) is the instruction of the undergraduate population. This article doesn't even mention the importance of that role.

That makes zero sense. If you want to make teachers and lecturers, why not create the path of a pedagogy bootcamp or a MSc if you like fancy titles and wasting time? Why would you push people through PhDs? PhDs spend 3-5 years mastering a single narrow domain area, it has absolutely zero utility wrt teaching unless we are talking about graduate-level courses that PhD students take…

> Well, how about producing highly skilled teachers, that seems important in a technological society, where mathematical skills are in general critically important. Hence, a critical part of the PhD student's job (and the professor's) is the instruction of the undergraduate population. This article doesn't even mention the importance of that role.

They don't mention it because it's unimportant. Your thesis committee cares about your research and that's it. If your advisor is well funded, you can easily finish a stem PhD and never teach a single class. If you do have to teach, getting perfect feedback or terrible feedback from student evaluations has zero bearing on whether you earn a PhD.

It can, at the same time, be correct as an (individual-level) descriptive statement but counterproductive as a (system-level) normative statement.

As in, it's probably realistically good advice to a PhD student, because it reflects the state of affairs, but it's possibly unfortunate that that is the case.

If an adviser is a free consultant what is his incentive to provide this consultation?