Academia.
Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.
Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
You said "your".
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.