The PhD Paradox: A Journey into Academia's Upside-Down World
lemire.me
lemire.me
In what sense are an academics accomplishments not "real world achievements?" excepting cases of fraud, etc.
To get tenure you need to publish a lot of papers in good journals as the lead PI. Co-authorship means you were supervising people, e.g. effectively running a team doing novel research, even if you didn't do all of the work yourself.
You can't really publish papers in the "hard sciences" without actually doing valuable real world stuff. Running a life sciences wet lab for example means you are actually operating a biotech lab and doing real physical experiments, basically the same type of stuff one would do in industry. Computational labs nowadays are typically maintaining and releasing software along with their papers, and will often employ a team of professional software engineers (I do so in my lab). To do these experiments you need to win grant proposals which fund doing them, which means you are working on something deemed important by a well funded granting organization or agency, and you have a track record of delivering results when you've won grants in the past. For example, the NIH only funds research with clear human health implications, under priorities set by congress.
At my institution the majority of my colleagues have spun off multiple startups, and have a huge number of patents that are licensed by industry. They are in general making the same type of discoveries and research that industry is doing- but at an earlier stage, they can do things that won't pay off in VC timelines.
From my perspective, the author's basic thesis which is that a) there is a glut of PhDs b) getting tenure is political and c) publication quality is generally low is true. That doesn't mean that people who are successful in the system aren't smart or don't have meaningful real world successes. But my decade in higher ed through a postdoc made it very clear that even at top institutions, many, if not most, faculty are not doing work with significant real world implications.
a) There are more PhDs than PI positions, but most of the hard science PhDs are in high demand, in industry jobs that generally pay much better than academic PI positions. At my institution we lose more of the postdocs we would like to recruit as PIs to industry offers than other academic positions. b) You do need a lot of political skill to get tenure, which is unfortunate and pushes out a lot of the smartest scientists. In this sense politics means social and emotional skills- which are required for doing anything involving other, and isn’t unique to academia. Still, sure it would be nice if academia could better accommodate people with technical skill but lacking in political skill. c) Not in my field or experience at least. To publish in a high impact journal nowadays the work usually has to be pretty solid. Obviously not everyone will agree on which work is good or not. Sometimes people do skimp on making it easy to access or use, e.g. publishing good code, making biological samples available, etc. but usually this is because they could not fund that part of the work.
I cannot think of anyone I know in any science or engineering department at research focused university whose work lacks significant real world implications. In fact, I find this annoying- as I think there would be a lot of value in more abstract and risky work, but the big funding agencies only fund things with obvious practical value based on their official priorities.
There’s always a disconnect between a romanticized ideal and what is practically possible. And reading the comments what some departments do to secure funding seem like a far cry from the ivory towers universities were known for.
Personally I embarked on a PhD because i wanted the credentials to become a university lecturer.
"Brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough."
-- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
But for every smart observation there are exceptions: Fields medal recipient (well, he won it but rejected to take it) G. Perelman (born 1966 and jobless last time I checked) has almost no publications or citations to show. But he will be remembered forever for proving the Poincaré conjecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman ).
Not accurate, he published relatively few papers (less than 20), but several in top journals like Journal of the AMS. His papers also have been cited plenty
While it is certainly possible that the role falls on people who want it enough, there simply aren't a lot of people financially able to do 5-7 additional years of school on a meager research stipend, esp. if they are graduating their bachelor's program with debt. You can buoy yourself with side work or internships, but what if the thing you're passionate about isn't something that excites industry?
G. Perelman is a recluse. He sees the point of mathematicians is to advance math, not mathematicians. He's so much the opposite of what this blog post seems to shoot for.
A few other incidents and I had to jump ship to industry. Kind of embarrassing that the university couldn’t even protect an employees from what amounts to corporate espionage and bullying.
Doctors break up their day into 15 minute patient visits. Policemen spend a lot of time on domestic disputes. Software engineers spend more time understanding someone else's code than writing their own.
wonder how many jobs actually track expectations?
The mistake is to think that someone's world is more "real" than their neighbor's. That may be arguably true if we talk about farmers or fishermen, but it's much less clear that an entrepreneur's world is more "real" than a university professor's.
But as an academic, I feel like there is more risk of e.g. a project failing and ultimately not being useful, but also a lot more potential. An experiment could uncover the clue leading to curing a major disease, and then you've saved a lot more lives than people you would have fed fishing. There is more risk, but the expected real world value is actually quite high... if it were not grant agencies would not fund it.
I'm pretty sure my elderly dad, who recently had a difficult fight with covid, is only alive because of academic mRNA research.