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Comment by coderatlarge | Hacker News Reader

as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…

The viscous politics is often carried out by those who already have tenure, probably even more so because they have that protection.

Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.

I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.

i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.

Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.

the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.

There are so many more ways than that to starve and sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never take root.

Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.

sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.

You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too, funnily. Username checks out.

I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!

fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about how to remove others’ tenure; which is their most prized and valuable possession.

Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.

The "real world" is far from meritorious.

Yes, but it functionally allows a different kind of meritlessness.

Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.

I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.

Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.

Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.

many academics also seem willing to invite industry people to guest lecture in their classes

Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.

Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.

in my experience, teaching quality does benefit from repetition (it is also harmed by it!).

The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.

>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.

Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.

No, even ignoring tuition and fees a huge chunk of the endowment comes from alumni donations. Mostly former undergrads.

There are pure grad institutions, such as UCSF and Baylor College of Medicine

That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.

Tenure should be more widespread.

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