Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Tenure Is a Total Scam (2023)

betonit.ai

15 pointsbarry-cotter12 comments

Ok, so basically, the author is saying that you can spend the prime working years of your life living on a small stipend, in exchange for a 20% chance of a middle class salary when you're 40. Let's assume the worst, that tenured professors work like retirees. This amounts to getting five people to work for one-fourth pay in exchange for allowing one of them - just one - to retire 25 years early. Who's being scammed, again? ;-)

(In reality, everyone is motivated by the pursuit of knowledge, and maybe a little by the pursuit of fame, including underpaid grad students, and tenured professors, and even the actual retirees (emeritus professors) who often keep working.)

Hi, tenured professor here! "Professor at GMU" is definitely a scam, but the rest of us work pretty hard.

Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fundraising job aside from teaching (and if he or she stops getting grants the university and the department chair will not be happy).

This site does not whine when someone like Maciej Ceglowski creates a "lifestyle business" that only takes 10 hours or so a week, but it whines when people unionize or climb the academic ladder to get good working condition.

I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Linguistics does not!

None of them earns as much as a billionaire's child earns just by having parents who gave them a trust fund.

I worked at 5 universities, two of them in the top 50, and I do not know of one tenured professor that "does nothing" and "publishes next to nothing". Some of them teach very little, and that may have been for the best, but all tenured professors I was aware of needed to do research, bring in money (or you were, yes that's right, fired), and teach.

Granted, I worked in STEM fields. Maybe this author does not realize what it is like in the physical sciences or engineering?

This isn't true right? You really can bring in zero dollars in grants and phone it in in the classroom. (Now, literally on Zoom!) I don't think it helps to pretend that everyone keeps pushing hard post tenure.

But, I think most people do. The system is deliberately designed to push an assistant professor so hard, that when they get a permanent contract, they're conditioned to keep pushing. It typically succeeds.

Yes; you can phone it in post-tenure. But just because it is possible doesn't mean (in my experience) it is common; and I don't think it's helpful (as TFA claims) to equate this possibility with "a total scam." To get tenure anywhere doesn't just require a huge amount of work as an Assistant Professor; it also requires a huge amount of work as a PhD student and potentially multiple rounds of post-doc'ing or other non-tenure-line work. In my experience, tenured professors have spent nearly two decades distorting their work-life balance beyond all recognition to the point that grinding insanely hard in pursuit of publications just feels normal.

Logically, this article seems entirely right, but I feel like there must be something missing.

Most professors I've known more closely seem to be workaholics with bad work-life balance and this is actually the main reason I don't want to go into academia.

Hypotheses: 1) the distribution is long-tailed and my samples are only from "good" universities, or 2) the tenure-track process selects for hard workers anyway

Maybe it's just that

> For tenure-track professors at top-twenty schools, step five is hard. Their tenured professors jealously guard their status, so rejection is the default. However, as school ranking goes down, runaway nepotism swiftly supplants professorial pride. At schools ranked worse than fifty, acceptance is the default.

Like everyone else, I have always had the pleasure of being at a top-20 school (in some list or the other!). Fortunately, I think this article is only attacking tenure at schools rated lower. (Let me know if I misinterpreted the article.)

We could eliminate tenure at lower-ranked schools. I'm not sure who will teach there if we do. The 90th percentile salary for a new tenure-track professor is 145K (https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2023-CRA-Taulbee-... page 49). Nobody competent is going to take that salary without the possibility of tenure.

No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA, think roughly doubling pay for those workers and adding health insurance). I thought GMU economists liked gambling-based mechanisms?

Are most US grad students not getting health insurance? I would find that surprising.

The place where it is certainly a scam is K-12. There is no good reason for this.

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