Trapped in the Ivory Basement (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Trapped in the Ivory Basement (2021)

thelocal.to

58 pointsluu52 comments

Why do these teachers take on such a life? You could say that the long-timers were fooled, they are now in too deep, and can't start a new career, but those deciding whether to do a PhD must know what they are facing, no? This sort of article has been going around for many years.

Academia is one of the very few places where you can do research of your choice. If your theory is like a bug in your brain then you have few other options.

One doesn't need a professorship to do research, or go to conferences, or publish papers.

There are plenty of folks that do private research on their own time. This is the right choice for the vast majority of folks that have the "bug".

As someone who was very into photography as an undergrad and observing the reality of the profession for almost all photographers, I basically made the almost certainly wise decision to get a "real" job and do my photography as a hobby.

This is true, but what makes academia attractive is the idea of being paid to do research. One doesn’t have to be in the NBA to play basketball, but there’s a world of difference between playing at the local park versus being on the Golden State Warriors.

Of course, the reality of research careers is quite different from the pursuit of research itself. They’re quite competitive, especially in fields that lack a lucrative industry, and there are many restrictions on freedom that many people aren’t aware of until they actually become researchers. I learned these realities the hard way, and I’m in the process of restructuring my life to where I can pursue research as a hobby rather than as a paid profession.

Of course, the hardest part about pursuing research as a hobby is making a living outside of it. If a person who wants to be a researcher is aware of this reality, then he or she could prepare by developing some marketable skill, product, or service and use that to make a living while devoting time outside of money-making to research. However, for those deep in research or academia who feel trapped in postdocs, adjunct positions, or other unfulfilling positions but who spent their who careers preparing for an elusive permanent research job without developing other skills, it can be a very painful transition, even if in the long run stubbornness results in an even more painful outcome.

> One doesn’t have to be in the NBA to play basketball, but there’s a world of difference between playing at the local park versus being on the Golden State Warriors.

Depends on the research field. For example, Einstein did some of his best work without any university affiliation.

This is true; one doesn't need a university affiliation to do research in many fields. In Einstein's case, he famously worked as a patent clerk during his day job while working on his research during his spare time. However, there is a difference between pursuing research as a unpaid side activity versus being paid to do research; that is the sentiment I wanted to express with my local park vs. NBA analogy. While arguably pursuing research as a hobby provides a great deal of freedom (e.g., no publishing or "impact" demands from management because there are no managers), the problem is making a living that is sufficient for paying for shelter, food, and other necessities typically requires 40 or more hours per week of work, which relegates research to nights and weekends, which I don't believe is enough time to engage in deep work, though it's not impossible and there are many people who have done this, Einstein included (https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/mileston... and https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi/einste...). It just requires a job that is not too intellectually demanding. On the flipside, working as a paid researcher means you don't have to worry about trying to carve out free time to do your research. However, "he who pays the piper calls the tune" has become the mantra of research institutions these days; the days of pure curiosity-driven research, whether in academia or in industry (pre-divestiture Bell Labs and Bob Taylor-era Xerox PARC), are long past. These are the tradeoffs of being a researcher these days, and I've come to know this the hard way.

He also did that more than a century ago.

This only holds true for research that doesn't require a lab.

You can’t do that either. You are dependent on grant funding which means you can’t just research what you want, you need to tailor it to what the grant writer wants. If you want to truly research what you want you need your own huge pile of money.

Couple issues:

The article itself is basically a direct description of how people are lured into academia with exactly that expectation, and then end up in the gig economy. Not "choosing" much of anything. The market says you're the academic equivalent of a taxi driver.

There are other locations to consider theory if theory's your thing.

Museums: support of archaeology, art analysis, sociology, geography, history. Ex: The British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/projects

Aquariums/Zoos: Earth science, plants, genetics, ecology, animal science, zoology, microbiology, nutrition, pathology, physiology, medicine, conservation. Ex: Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, https://www.columbuszoo.org/science

NGOs and Foundations: Earth science, plants, genetics, ecology, astronomy, education, data science, sampling/measurements, foreign affairs, international politics, finance, economics, public outreach. Ex: The Carnegie Foundation and Sub-Foundations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...

Gov: support of aeronautics, engineering, data science, computer science, forestry, agriculture, architecture, almost every hard science, economics, finance, law, even recreational specilists. [1] Feds have ~3M employees. States have ~5M employees. Local govs have ~14M employees. [2]

A lot of the jobs are workaday jobs, yet there's still a bunch out of ~22M that are somewhat "research". Formerly a contractor at NASA, and even for a contractor (not civil servant), seven publications. Mostly, minor citations, maybe 10-15, yet still, seven publications on research topics.

[1] https://www.usajobs.gov/help/working-in-government/unique-hi...

[1] http://www.truthfulpolitics.com/images/u-s-government-employ...

Even in academia the freedom of inquiry is circumscribed by performance expectations by peers and administrators, especially pre-tenure. While tenure-track professors do not have managers telling them what to research and how to go about doing it like many industry researchers do, they are often expected to publish regularly (preferably in top venues, and at top universities this is required), do “impactful” work (where “impact” is often measured by citation counts, awards, examples of adoption by industry, etc.), and raise money for the university by acquiring grants. Grant agencies such as the National Science Foundation have their own requirements that have a way of circumscribing a professor’s research direction, and they are very competitive to earn.

So, it is more accurate to say that academia gives professors the freedom to run their own research organization, but if that professor wants a good shot at getting tenure and staying in the good graces of the university, the professor needs to be mindful of the expectations that the university has placed and the requirements of funding agencies. Even if a professor is mindful of these things, research is inherently risky, and a professor runs the risk of not getting tenure due to research results and grant-earning efforts not meeting expectations.

This is distinct from the idea that a professor can do whatever research he or she wants. Theoretically this is true in the sense that there will be no manager watching over the professor’s shoulder, but if the professor isn’t meeting the university’s performance expectations for publications and grants, the professor won’t make tenure, and even post-tenure the university could find ways to make life difficult for the “unproductive” professor.

I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I personally believe that a professor actually has more freedom in predominantly teaching environments. At teaching-oriented universities, the publication and grant-earning requirements are typically lower than that of research universities. At all-undergraduate colleges, sometimes there are no expectations for research. Of course, reduced research requirements mean increased teaching requirements, which could be challenging for researchers who don’t have an interest or talent for teaching. But for those who love teaching and who want reduced or even non-existent “publish or perish” pressure, then a teaching-oriented institution is a great alternative. Even if one’s research is restricted to winter and summer breaks due to the workload of teaching, this certainly beats trying to do research as a hobby on nights and weekends while juggling a 9-5 job and only getting 2-4 weeks PTO per year.

I entered grad school at 22, thinking I would become a CS prof. I loved CS research I did as an undergrad in a prof's lab. That prof was my role model for my still not fully formed brain. I wasn't told all these things by him or the program, but I did my research and found stats about how so few PhDs become profs. Side note: all the profs are those who made it, so their advice about how to make it is like taking financial advice from lottery winners.

I read lots of these kinds of "grad school isn't worth it" confessionals. But many were about humanities PhDs, not STEM. And I thought I was special, above average, even maybe a genius. And I was special, but apparently not special enough. I dropped out to work in tech and have a better salary and life than my few ex classmates in my program who did make it in academia.

But one of my housemates was a humanities PhD who also started at 22, and was smarter and a harder worker than any of us STEM PhD students. We all thought that if any of us deserved to make it in academia, it was him. But the humanities are shrinking in the academy. What the article describes is his current life. An PhD from an R1 university who can only find a patchwork of adjunct positions at different 2 year community colleges. He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage? He got some work doing freelance writing and editing, mostly helping college applicants with their essays, but ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market.

We all made these decisions at age 22, after spending 4 very formative years in college. I made the same stupid decision he did and mine worked out, but the intellectual bug that bit me just so happened to be infinitely more valuable to industry than the one that bit him.

> Side note: all the profs are those who made it, so their advice about how to make it is like taking financial advice from lottery winners.

Or taking business advice from successful entrepreneurs. Everyone is looking for the magical advice—The Formula. But there is none. You can execute perfectly and still lose. You can also bumble through without trying and succeed. You can grow up in the wrong country. You can have the right parents. So much is out of our control. We almost always underestimate the outsized role luck and chance play in our endeavors.

> He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage?

I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.

I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.

My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.

But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.

The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."

Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.

> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market

Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.

Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.

Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.

As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The market doesn't dictate reality - it is part of reality.

If a skill isn't needed, there won't be a demand for it, and it won't pay well, no matter how many years of learning and personal growth are required to acquire the skill.

The big bad market refusing to pay historians a good wage is just society's built-in mechanism for trying to guide people into doing things that are most needed.

A lot of the humanities were historically aimed at rich kids who don't need to engage with the labour market; we really shouldn't be encouraging middle-class kids to take on a mountain of student debt when they should be focusing on maximizing their earnings.

the problem is that having a healthy community of scholars doing good historical research using sophisticated methods, produces a lot of positive externalities. most people never engage with it but having such people around does limit historical bullshit. this has been good for society. but it's now falling apart.

I agree it’s a positive, but each one of us has to sell our value-add to the rest of society. This is actually a wonderful constraint to have because it keeps each of us in touch with the rest of humanity

Except for all the people that are born rich, they don't have to do anything.

But becoming a historian is a good option for them.

Is it really falling apart? The US universities hire many, probably thousans or even tens of thosands, of excellent history professors. What's the problem with it?

Your explanation is an exemplar of constrained thinking. Thinking inside the box, or having limited horizons [0].

You start off correctly; markets are "part of reality". That rightly implies some other "rest of reality", does it not?

You then define all value only within the limited logic of markets. And wish to a universalise it as "society's built-in mechanism".

Mathematics is a "humanity". Reading some, you'll gain understanding of Gödel, Whitehead and Russell who would alert you to the logic that a system can't deal with what's outside itself.

Markets are a system. A very simplified one.

Humanities are precisely that project that transcends simple models like markets. Humanities attempt to cover a bigger, meta-reality. It has nothing to do with "rich kids". Some of the greatest philosophers, writers and scientists (what we call 'STEM' now was once "natural philosophy") were dirt poor.

To be more frank, to think only about markets and "maximising earnings" is stubborn, insular and self-limiting. It's a great way to stay cloistered and never contribute anything of value to the world.

Sure we have professional economists. But not everyone should reduce them-self to the level of economics.

[0] EDIT: these are not words meant to insult or belittle - they are to mean exactly what they mean on face value. There is no 'shame' in thinking with limited horizons, or seeing in an involuted way if you've been exposed to nothing else but are open minded to imagine there is more to the world.

> You then define all value only within the limited logic of markets.

Not all value, just monetary one. There's plenty of valueable activities that do not pay much or even a dime. However, the discussion revolved about making a living, not what's valueable in the abstract. And, regarding making a living, it's true that plenty more people want to be paid as historians that other people have a need for.

I respectfully acknowledge that you aren't the parent to whom I was responding and that you're jumping in with your own contribution.

But I do not think the "discussion revolved about making a living" Indeed, it's something of an irritating HN trope/style to try steering the narrative by telling other people what the "discussion is actually all about"

As I see it the main theme here was the low social status of academic work in general.

I realise, and sympathise, that a lot of HN posters are deeply anxious about "making a living".

My disagreement with the parent is the claim that "the market" is:

  "" just society's built-in mechanism for trying to guide people into
     doing things that are most needed. ""

Markets are awful at determining what is "needed". They're great at figuring out how to satisfy people's superficial desires and great at making money. Look around you. Millions of people doing pointless make-work jobs in advertising and "the financial industry". Meanwhile, we keep failing to solve the most elementary challenges of a sustainable, healthy environment, which is surely a fundamental need.

For me, this where Neo-liberalism falls flat. Markets cannot tell society anything about what is needed. Society must tell markets what is needed... however we achieve that. And so to see things only from within the frame of "market think" is to remain blind to most of reality.

Markets aren’t telling society what is needed.

Markets are society telling itself what is needed.

People want lots of plumbers, so they pay for it. Not many people want to be plumbers, so they get paid a lot.

People want one or two historians, so they vote and pay tax for it. Lots and lots of students would rather be historians than plumbers, so they don’t get paid a lot.

If you want people to want a sustainable economy, be less smug and judgemental and convince them to vote and pay for it.

I'd be very curious to know how old you are, where you were educated and how you got these ideas.

The idea that markets literally are society seems not only wrong to me, but an extremist and quite dangerous idea.

Instead of spending time convincing random people to vote for plumbers of historians, I'd rather convince one person to take a wider look at the world and question the views they've been raised on.

Is there even the slightest possibility that you're wrong? That maybe society is more than just "markets"?

Wow!

I don't agree with your political positions so clearly the problem is with me. I'm too old, too young, uneducated, or educated in the wrong place.

First of all, I'm surprised you can't see the simple truth that markets are an emergent property of any community. You yourself are part of various markets - every time you choose from an array of options, even if they're all free; every time you produce anything at all, you're in a market. That this isn't obvious to you makes me question why I bother talking to you.

Second of all, your attitude is absolutely smug and insufferable. You're convincing a negative number of people to see things your way. It's so wild to me that an entire half of the political spectrum in the West adopts this attitude, and when they lose there's an immense wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the other side is brainwashed. Meanwhile, the answer to their problems is in the mirror.

You're right Fred, we just don't see the world the same way

I personally don't think the idea of "markets" has much to offer the world now, it's an outdated and immature way of trying to see complex things in a simple way.

Sorry we can't seem to have a more grown up conversation about it, but not only are you inflexible you've crossed the line into making personal remarks which is unacceptable.

Anyway, enjoy your belief system.

Appreciate this post, and will add my voice to it. Current senior manager in technology whose only academic credentials are undergrad and grad degrees in history and (non-quantitative minor) economics.

I do think my career stalled a bit as a result of studying these things, but that's a consequence of the same market thinking you're challenging. The people who hired me are happy they gave me the chance, and presumably like OP said, we aren't that special and there are tons of other talented people who can do this work being ignored because of an excess concern for credentialism.

I'm a math PhD, was a tenured professor and then transitioned to industry. We've got two humanities PhDs that work as QA testers on our team. They're both fantastic, especially in thinking about either big picture questions or nuanced takes that others missed out on.

Considering the length of the road they took to become QA testers, they had better be. This is more evidence that humanities studies are a substantial stumbling block, in terms of career growth.

There were a number of careers that undergraduate me was somewhat enamored of. But undergraduate me, surprisingly, was also aware that the odds of my attaining them at the levels I would find satisfying and at least reasonably lucrative were vanishingly small. So I should just stick with a job from my good engineering school.

>ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market.

As someone very close to this area, I seriously question this. Yes, there are very low-rent content mills with material being cranked out by people who are being paid pennies per word. But serious freelance writing being commissioned by many corporations (where the pay is more in line with $1/word) are not going to be replaced by ChatGPT anytime soon. The writers may use ChatGPT as an assistant and perhaps rates will decline further over time but this basically falls in the same category as we won't need programmers any longer.

Maybe? But now you're in the category of AI will take all the jobs.

I'm also close to this area, and executives see the writing on the wall.

ChatGPT doesn't even need to be nearly as good as the writers it replaces for those writers to lose their jobs. It just has to be good enough that the people who write the cheques can't tell the difference, and such people don't all have a good eye for quality writing.

This kind of talk was bubbling around STEM phds, too at top institutions in the 2005-2015 era, so even if you're in your early 40s, you should have at least been able to make an informed decision.

Status and autonomy. Even an adjunct professor still gets addressed with a honorific. You rarely have anyone yell at you or look over your shoulder as you work. And, as a friend who has a TT job at a Canadian University recently observed, it is generally the adjuncts who most adopt the professorial look: sweaters, jackets with elbow patches, horn-rimmed glasses.

So long as these things are enticing to enough people, supply will outstrip demand and wages will fall.

I think this is an underrated point in these discussions. There are three components to every job: how much value other people get out of you doing it, how much value you get out of doing it, and how many other people want to do it. Whether it's game development or adjunct prof'ing, employers know when the job their offering has benefits beyond pure salary, and they adjust that salary accordingly. The humanities grad students I knew weren't stupid. They could see the statistics in front of them. But staying the university world for a bit longer, and seeing other people do the same, tempted them down that path, and continues to tempt a surprising number of them.

"This sort of article has been going around for many years." Exactly, this article could've been written any time in the last couple decades.

In 2016 I put up "Universities treat adjuncts like they do because they can" in response to one of them. https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... Supply and demand.

Many reasons, but here's one from the same site: https://thelocal.to/one-year-fifty-cover-letters-three-inter... (the URL kind of gives the point away already)

getting rejected from a master’s program is like dodging a bullet

I worked as a lawyer from 2007-2014. Most of the partners I worked for had PhDs and had taught at least briefly in the 80s-90s. They went back to school to get JDs (their PhDs were in unrelated fields) and now make very good money as biglaw partners. One is married to a professor at an R1, but that's the extent of their connection to higher ed.

The lack of jobs for PhDs has been a trend for several decades. These guys are smart and are successful. They came from all different fields. And if they hadn't detoured into academia they would have had an extra 10-15 years of legal earnings (or the ability to retire that much sooner).

This kind of thing is arguably the real injustice in higher education - or "structural oppression" if you prefer. At least half the other college diversity initiatives are at best smokescreens to hide any discussion of how non-tenured faculty are treated.

I had discussions with my children about this issue before they even went to college. The one that went on to an advanced degree decided she'd rather be an MD than a PhD. It's much more rewarding, and even if you want to do medical research (she didn't) a dual degree is better than just a PhD.

At the same time tuitions are not cheap at all - money burned on administrative and questionable activities.

That's the flip side of academic freedom. Once you trust a group of people with self-governance, they would invariably use it to enrich the insiders at the expense of outsiders. Just look up how a Greek democratic poleis worked.

That's probably a compromise you would willing to make for a many centuries out, internationally ranked universities. But petty colleges should be ran more like service sector.

Having said that, it's quite possible that a single mother of two, working in service sector, is simply untenable without extra help coming from the outside.

Except it's not self-governance, the changes have happened when academics have been replaced by administrators. If instead education providers were required to stop abusing the use of casuals (which new rules in AU are starting to introduce), we'd get better outcomes for everyone (students and teachers alike).

article from 2021. I suppose it is still relevant but could get some date in the title.

Community colleges do a great job. I went to one before the 4 year university for electrical engineering and gave me a much better foundation than those that went straight to the 4 year uni.

The elephant in the room is the modern collectivist initiative of college/higher education for the common man. I don't how people don't see it, especially the HN crowd..

This article is shows only one of the smaller downstream consequences, it gets much worse. We are talking an entire generation indebted by trillions, entire areas of the economy with staff shortages, "highly credentialed" people working unrelated jobs etc etc

Colleges we always meant to a niche entity. Huge inequalities were not just optional downsides, rather they were structurally essential. Most people shouldn't go to college, most phds and professorhips shouldn't exist and most colleges shouldnt..

This is not a luddite take, i think these things actually should 100x but not like the way it is right now. The issue is socialism.

Government/non-profit funded high education should only be afforded to a very small subset of the population. The gifted.

Everything else should be private and amongst them most should be treated like trades/apprenticeship.

These ideas seem radical/ridiculous but most of what we think of high education these days are a consequences of extremely silly post WWII socialist policies.

I don't even have a massive problem with government funding either, this can be effective but not socalism, nothing like what we have now. More like military research during the WWWII and the early period of the cold war.

I don't think what uou are describing is socialism. You are talking about a market economy where organisations take risks in giving people loans for education.

Your alternative (restricting the supply of higher education) based on central planning sounds remarkably like the Soviet model.

Thats the thing, there is no risk. No free market entity is going to write off tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on pretty much most 18 year olds.

Its almost entirely backed by the government in most western nations aka socialism.

In my alternative, we will eliminate government assistance for higher education almost entirely with the exception of highly gifted. Yes this is central planning but it is almost nothing compared to the monstrocity we have today.

I guess the point is not some libertarian utopia, but rather to eliminate any and all institutions and mechanisms that fulfil this post WWII socialist idea of corrective redistribution.

We don't need to get into why this concept is deeply flawed both morally and structurally but if the following truths are reasonable:

- Not everybody is equal in terms of value output, importance to society and value deserved.

- The most important civilisation sustaining things exist at the tail end of distributions.

- As such these things should be held extremely high in society relative to everything else.

Then we can take these truths to make claims like "the CEO wallmart is worth more than thousands of employees combined" because the difference between a good CEO vs exceptional CEO is billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs (throughout the economy).. let alone a bad CEO.

In the same way, we can say the difference between a gifted person going deep into english literature vs the average person is massive. Does it really make sense for society to back the average person on this venture? Does it make sense for the person?

Without societies backing, it would've been nearly impossible for the average person to go into this world.

The key is average here, I'm incorrectly using the word. The lady in the article is clearly not average but is she exceptional? NOPE.

Why does her role exist, why are the such courses in such third their colleges? what happens to the students..

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