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Why I Left Academia

quillette.com

87 pointstomohawk41 comments

> But what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism. It was the sense that all of this—all the posturing, all the position-taking—was nothing more than a professional game. The goal was advancement, not truth.

I've seen this pattern throughout educational & science systems, & seems I'm not alone.

The system (at least with regards to the sciences) worked well during the cold war because we had some higher goal to focus on, now with that gone, it's just a bunch of hacks looking to line their pockets. Speaking as someone with a PhD the whole system needs to be razed to the ground and reconstructed in another way. Its disappointing also private industry doesn't step in and fund more greenfield work (i.e. where is the 21st century's bell labs?)

razing and reconstruction applies to more than just academia...the entire system is a sham... all we can do now is hope for some sort of peaceful collapse similar to what happened to the Soviet union 3 decades ago

That collapse certainly wasn't peaceful within the nations of the former Soviet Union. There was no military uprising but thre was utter chaos among the civilian population.

MS Research? Google’s many moonshot companies?

MS research is an interesting case. From my memory they did support some theoretical research in non-linear stat mech a few years back (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oded_Schramm worked there and he was certainly doing pure research), they also let https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Freedman spend time doing his topology research even though it probably aint going to lead to a quantum computer :) Google however seems mainly to support research in ML/DL with applications the end result, yes it's research, but I wouldn't call it greenfield research like what occurred at Bell Labs (i.e. discovery of microwave background radiation).

Google is also paying for things like Calico which are pretty speculative and unconnected with AI/ML.

Bell labs was funded by Bell's monopoly position at the time right?

Yes. It seems only monopolies or near-monopolies engage in substantial amounts of greenfield research. Everyone else is too busy competing to spend a dime on anything that won’t help next quarter or next year if we’re lucky.

> I've seen this pattern throughout educational & science systems, & seems I'm not alone.

This pattern is pervasive in any professional setting. A while ago there was a newspice on how Google had too many people for too few projects, and most of the people working at Google were scrambling to create redundant services with the explicit goal of furthering their career.

It's no surprise that people who desperately want to land a prestigious and coveted job try everything at their reach to get a foothold and pull ladders behind them.

Where is there not careerism? Seems like moving from academia to private industry, it just gets more blatant. Heck, it’s not even a vice anymore, simply a consequence of good career development.

I read the OP slightly differently. I think there's an expectation that science is about a pure-ish pursuit of knowledge. In that context, careerism works against the philosophy and goals of the effort. In growing commerce/industry, the expectations might look different (competition, plus ingenuity or high EQ, or both). In large companies (Google, MS, Ford, JPM) and government, expectations collect around careerism, managing perceptions, and stability/predictability.

working as a freelancer or for small companies.

It is a universal law: any organization is overrun by people who use it for their own purposes sooner or later (academic institutions, corporations, churches, states -- nothing is immune).

It is a sort of Salarial Flynn Effect. §

People learn how to get promoted, and the hierarchy is rife with cronyism.

§_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Realizing this could also mean (at least it means to me): To stay. If everyone with a 'better' mindset leaves academia, where will this lead?

This is what keeps me from pursuing a Ph.D. No patience or acumen for that kind of nonsense.

> I wanted the rules to change; I played by the ones that I thought we should have. I insisted on behaving as if I existed in an environment that valued teaching as much as scholarship and intellectualism as much as specialization.

It seems that the author labored for many years with the full knowledge that what he was doing wasn't optimal in light of his objective, which seems to have been tenure at a college or university.

However, after he states:

> Besides, there were things I did believe in, things I thought more worthy of my time. Above all, teaching.

One wonders: why does he need tenure to do the thing he wants to do? Surely he could teach without tenure, at a college or some other school.

Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't tenure something that's given to a professor, who, essentially, is a person that teaches? I should think that loving one's profession can only go so far when the profession doesn't love you back.

Professors at research universities (which are for better or worse usually the most prestigious universities) are generally expected to perform novel research, with teaching as a secondary duty (which is usually given much less weight than research output for tenure consideration). Hence tenure is mainly given in furtherance of protecting a professor's ability to perform novel research, not teaching.

The article itself points this out.

> Academics are rewarded for one thing and one thing only: research.... I knew this, of course, and it tormented me. But, to quote a phrase, I could do no other.

I'm inclined to agree with djoldman here. It's one thing to claim that research universities perform research poorly (and there are a lot of reasons why this is the case), but it's another to be disappointed that research universities mainly value, well, research. That's what they say they do on the tin!

There's a bitter lesson in realizing just because someone likes doing an activity A doesn't mean that same person will enjoy doing research about activity A (and vice versa!).

> with teaching as a secondary duty

Usually the top priorities at a research university are:

1. Fundraising. 2. Research (in support of 1)

In the humanities, tenure track positions usually only open up when someone dies or retires, assuming the slot is not also retired, and there will be hundreds of applicants for each position.

The academic pyramid is unsustainable since faculty usually supervise (and graduate) multiple Ph.D. students before dying or retiring.

But it is disappointing to hear that Yale's "tenure track" has a high failure rate. It seems like an incredible waste of people's lives.

> I had majored in science, not English ...

Reminded here of an observation by another frustrated academic that cross-disciplinary influence is praised with words but punished in deeds, because ideas from without the local power structure are intrinsically a challenge to its authority.

> Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature—still more, of art—has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are “texts,” no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments

This seems an off attitude to have. Loving to read doesn’t make you an academic anymore than loving to go on walks in a park makes you a landscape architect. No one is scoffing at you for loving to read, but if you think that love on its own makes you anything other than a consumer then you are obviously wrong.

So the most interesting thing to study about literary texts and pieces of art is... their ideological alignment? That makes no sense IMHO. Never mind that ideological alignment is often deliberately obscured for Straussian reasons (and even Leo Strauss was researching this as a politologist, not as a literary scholar!) so any such inquiry is quite liable to reaching very misleading conclusions anyway.

That's not what GP said.

Studying art means contextualising the art, understanding how it came about, what kind of discourse it was part of, what role it used to play and continues to play, by which means certain effects are achieved, what it tells us about the time it was written in, what it tells us about the artist, how art was and is consumed, and so on.

All of this goes way beyond "loving to read".

> Studying art means contextualising the art, understanding how it came about, what kind of discourse it was part of, what role it used to play and continues to play, by which means certain effects are achieved, what it tells us about the time it was written in, what it tells us about the artist, how art was and is consumed, and so on.

By that standard, OP's lived experience thereby implies that academics of English Literature no longer care about "studying art", having replaced that sort of valuable scholarship with meaningless ideological posturing and politicking.

That may be the case in certain institutions at certain points in time. We certainly can't generalise from a single anecdote. I have had different experiences.

But why is picking an ideology to critique such texts from the professional way to do it? Sounds like the kind of pseudo intellectual bullshit you see on certain subreddits. How are you engaging with the text if you have to force it through the lens of Marxism, feminism, or whatever chosen ism?

Even in the field of English Literature? Seems like it should be necessary, though not sufficient.

I can only imagine the immense frustration encountered when trying to get an academic job after years of effort getting your phd and working in a university with an expiring job. I was lucky to be interested in being an engineer and finding mostly fulfillment in industry after finishing my phd. But most of my friends from cs grad school who went on to academia had an extremely frustrating experience looking for tenure as CS profs. 25-30 years ago there was not yet the same infinite demand for phd devs in industry that soaked up so many of the potential professors; today the much smaller supply of potential profs makes it a different situation. It was hard to get a tenured job in cs (and probably still is). And pretty much all of my friends encountered several attempts to get tenure, with one person notably having to sue the university twice to avoid getting fired on false pretenses and then eventually to be considered for tenure. One person went through 3-4 schools before he got tenure. It's just a terrible meat grinder in academia. I have a friend who also got stuck into the "multiple jobs paying nothing at different community colleges" world. And they were not facing the question of are you a marxist or not.

I was wondering why that article was at quillette. Then I got a couple of pages in and saw the grousing at not fitting into the categories of marxist or ideological. Your piece would have been stronger without the dog whistles related to conservative-focused concerns. Almost every young prof could have written an early career jeremiad related to the idea that old profs didn't care about teaching - it was my experience too! I loved teaching, and hated trying to publish small incremental ideas.

Good luck and I wish you said what you were doing now.

if it’s a true reflection of his experience, is it still a “dog-whistle”? Or does it being a “dog-whistle” invalidate that truth? I’m curious to learn how this thing works…

I had exactly the same thought.

My guess is a dog-whistle is expressing an opinion the user of the word "dog-whistle" doesn't like.

There doesn't seem to be much more to it than that.

Which begs the question, why people pursue such low paid difficult path?

Just in case you're being serious: Because you believe in it, that you're working for something higher than yourself, contributing something positive to society and to science in general. Maximising your own personal gain without any regards to society is often not the main goal here.

Made me smile! I wish that was the motivation in real life!

It’s a different world now, populated mostly by power and status hungry folks.

I think there was a period, perhaps until 2000, where it wasn’t a game yet.

Except evidence shows that it’s harmful to society at large.

We’re losing bright minds to the churn of tenure and prestige.

>low paid difficult path

Are you from google?

Dollar per effort, one makes more in most other jobs with less stress (even though with potentially less job stability if we are considering a tenured faculty).

Maybe money and "less stress" is not the main motivator?

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