“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays
slate.com
slate.com
If so many people are quitting and/or warning others off the path, there may be a good reason why.
This especially stands out from the article:
Academe is a profession full of erudite free-thinkers who feel disillusioned by a toxic labor system in which criticism is not tolerated—so those who leave often relish the newfound ability to say anything they want (talking about “a friend” here). In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess.
"A fundamentalist religion:" if so, each heretic who saves someone else is doing important work. If enough people do so, the message might get out; it certainly has for law schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/business/for-lsat-sharp-dr....
Anyway, it does seem like academia has grown increasingly exploitative along many measures, especially for workers and grad students. The more people who know before they start, the better.
Another possibility is that she had a partner willing to support her if things went south. Obviously this situation isn't unique to women, but I do think it's slightly more probable for a woman to have such a partner. If this is the case, PaulHoule's point becomes that the decision to enter grad school only made sense for her because of the artificially reduced consequences of p(failure).
Even if affirmative action did play a role (a recent paper found very damning, well-controlled evidence of systematic bias against women in the evaluation process, so I wouldn't assume this with any degree of certainty), PaulHoule could have simply been observing that she saw a better p(success) and was therefore the only one willing to take the leap.
Or maybe PaulHoule is a misogynist. But I'd be willing to bet against you if you still thought that.
No need to project your insecurities onto others.
A woman who wants to take two years off (about the time it takes to do a master's degree) to take care of their kids at home might need to jump off the corporate ladder a bit but they can hop back on.
A key principle of academic life is "you never get a second chance" and this just isn't an option.
I don't know how the woman involves feels about the matter, but I know of a male professor who put off having kids until his wife was infertile and he regrets that very much.
That's hysterical. Imagine graduating hundreds of students who won't be employed, face a massive amount of debt, and who not only have the skills necessary, but all the time in the world, to sue you for it.
If academia is hoarding too many erudite free-thinkers, cut them loose elsewhere to solve the world's problem. If the best 20% of teachers can be leveraged via online resources over 80% of the students, it's ok to have some smart researchers go to the private sector.
Automation combined with cost pressure forces re-allocation of resources, and that's fine.
But due to the difficulty of monetizing indirect future advances that basic science enables, it's difficult to do it profitably in industry. A scientific discovery that at some point in the future turns out to be useful in developing technology is valuable for humanity, but you cannot easily capture that value, as it simply diffuses to the general benefit. Knowledge advances, but anyone can use it, and you don't get to own it; you can get some kind of satisfaction in old age in looking at how this physics discovery you came up with in your 30s is being used to improve chip fabrication processes 40 years later, but you don't get royalties on the chips. Patents try to change that within a 20-year timespan, but they are not supposed to apply to scientific or mathematical discoveries, 20 years is too short for some advances, and they have a whole host of problems anyway.
1) Pie in the sky research that is beyond the 20 year time horizon of long-view companies and 10 year time horizon of VCs.
2) Research that is amenable to teaching people how to research.
3) Research to advance one's career.
4) Research that is relatively close to Development.
There are overlaps, and it can be hard to differentiate between the types until after the fact, but let's go with this model.
#1 has to be funded federally (i.e. NSF), via philanthropy (i.e. Gates Foundation) or as a monopoly concession (i.e. Bell Labs). This can belong in the University or elsewhere, and may or may not be tied to teaching.
#2 belongs in Universities, as it helps generate the next generation of scholars.
#3 should not be financed by taxpayers. It's also hard to justify this in aggregate coming from tuition. Do we really need more papers on Ancient History, or should we invest the same money in better teaching? I understand you need to be an expert to teach, but it seems like a lot of publishing is purely to generate citations.
#4 If these people can get real world jobs, why not send them to the real world where rather than stay in a profession with very scarce jobs?
This seems to me like a pretty dim view of the humanities in general. Research in the humanities is not in the same category as research in Computer Science, for example; there is often little to no free-market value. People who enter the humanities tend to do so (at least in my experience) because knowledge for the sake of knowledge is something worth pursuing. Your next company might not make a fortune knowing more about agricultural practices of the ancient Macedonians, or the concept of fatherhood in the music of Robert Schumann, but people doing that research aren't doing it simply "to advance their career," and not necessarily just to teach new people how to research either.
It has traditionally been the function of universities to foster this sort of research, as a general goal of "making the world a better, more knowledgeable place." It's a societal goal that goes way back: people say that humanity was set back something like 1000 years when the library at Alexandria burned down. This type of research doesn't fit neatly into any of your categories, and it is (I think) a more trenchant problem. Disillusioned humanities PhD's often have problems finding work in the "real world," since companies aren't keen on hiring someone who knows everything there is to know about Macedonian agriculture.
-- a fairly disillusioned Ph.D. student in Music Theory
In my mind, much of engineering, computer science, math, and non-lab science can be efficiently taught online. Probably a lot of business school coursework too. For at least the intro and intermediate courses, it's about having a body of material that can be mastered. Discussion isn't as important if you can learn the material on your own.
Comparative literature, history, philosophy and similar subjects are very important, and are more likely to require live in-person teachers. Discussions are important. Subjective grading and coaching of individual papers is important. Multiple choice exams are less likely to work.
I'm also a strong believer that humanities degrees complement professional degrees. An accounting major can do my taxes. An accounting and English major can break arcane financial reports into plain English for investors. A math major is ince. A math major who studies French literature may also be able to read French proofs in their original language.
What I question is the relative value of the teacher's research. What's the right break-up of teaching to research time for humanities? Is it the same as the sciences? Is the current ratio correct?
I believe that the current ratio is not correct. One needs only to look at how expensive small liberal arts colleges are. If their teachers spent more time in the classroom and less doing arcane research, the costs would come down. Perhaps if you're a top 10 school it's ok, but not as a lower tier school.
I have a right to complain as a parent, as well as a taxpayer whose government is subsidizing student loans and paying for schools.
Now disillusioned Phds is another problem... Systemically everyone is incented to produce more Phds than required. It's definitely a situation of letting the buyer beware early on.
But small liberal arts colleges are the places that already do primarily prioritize teaching, and expect professors to do relatively little research. Professors typically teach more courses per semester than at research universities, and are hired and promoted primarily based on teaching ability rather than research portfolio. This was the case at the Claremont Colleges, at least, where I went for undergrad; most professors just did a little research on the side, maybe one paper a year, and spent nearly full-time teaching. They're expensive mainly because they have very small class sizes (big emphasis on small discussion seminars), and typically much smaller endowments and fewer donations than the famous research universities do. Plus, since none of the salaries or lab facilities are paid for by research-grant money, those have to come out of tuition, too. And, since there are no grad students, professors typically do most of the teaching work themselves, rather than offloading a significant proportion to a TA, as is done at research universities: sections, tutorials, grading, office hours, etc. are all the professor's responsibility.
Big research universities, like MIT or Stanford or University of Texas or UCLA, are the ones that primarily emphasize research track record.
My particular field (music) tends to be much more expensive per student since private lessons must be taught one-on-one. One physics professor could teach 15 students for three hours a week, but a piano professor needs essentially needs 15 hours to teach each of those students for one hour a week. Some of this work can be done in small groups/classes, but higher music education is much more individual.
Some of my colleagues who have graduated now teach at liberal arts schools where their tenure requirement is essentially one presentation at a regional conference or one publication, with a strong record of teaching. Compare this to a large institution, where the expectation has traditionally been that you need a book deal in order to obtain tenure, whether or not you're much good as a teacher of undergraduates.
So here's a secondary question... Could the overall cost of the education be reduced if the intro classes were taught online? Or the non-humanities intro classes taught online?
Teaching heavy departments (the humanities) have one source of income: student fees
Research heavy departments (science, engineering, medicine) have both student fees and grants - not only to pay salary, but also to cover things like keeping the lights on, computing power, administrative support, etc. This is often a substantial amount of the total cost of a grant.
Going to pure teaching means everything has to be carried by either student fees or tax payers (for public institutions).
Let's do a very back of the envelope oversimplified calculation...
Let's say assume the following: - Semester system - Each teacher teaches 5 classes per year (2 one semester, 3 the other) - Each student takes 10 classes per year - Each class is 20 students (assume very low - liberal arts college) - Each teacher earns 100K in total comp - Each teacher requires an assistant making 40K in total comp - Each teacher and assistant pair carries an admin making 100K in total comp - Each course costs $5K
The math I get says: - 50K total tuition per student - 20 students = $1mm revenue - 20 students = 200 course-students = (20 teachers/class * 5 classes * 2 teachers) = 2 teachers + 2 assistants + 2 admins - Staffing cost = 200K + 80K + 200K = 480K
In this oversimplified model of small classes, tuition covers the teachers, their graders and admin overhead 4 times over. Are buildings really that expensive in rural America?
Even if all the classes are 10 people each the #s don't add up. Are people really getting 50% discounts? Are football stadiums for these colleges so expensive?
The astounding ratio I follow is tuition divided by fully loaded faculty salary. If it's 1/2, that tells me something is wrong in how the faculty are spending their time.
Universities, even small ones, are fairly large, complex organizations that are extremely capital intensive. This is complicated by the fact that many of the institutions we're talking about are private, so we don't have many numbers.
But to the major point of moving toward teaching, and away from research, we can look at the balance sheet of a large state university system:
For 2012, the UNC system took in $320,535,000 in student fees and $725,846,000 in grants and contracts. While UNC is a fairly good deal for it's students (if you're in-state) its hardly free, and grant income outpaces student fees by a healthy margin.
To prior points, it is hard to get to the bottom of financials. If like to know where all the money goes if bit to teaching.
Would a patronage system work better for these types of degrees?
The benefit of studying the humanities is one of personal edification. Students who study art or music in school are likely to be more disciplined and score better on standardized tests than their non-musician/artist colleagues. Not to mention, young students who have a strong background in the humanities are often happier with their quality of life (I know that music was the highlight of my day/week when I was in school).
A patronage program would be great for this type of degree...if any VCs out there want a personal music theorist I'd be happy to apply! My argument is that it is traditionally universities which have been the patrons of these degrees. This goes back at least to the earliest universities in Europe, where students learned the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The idea of the university was not to churn out good economic workers (as it tends to be today) but to produce well-rounded human beings. We in the humanities still think this is a worthy goal (and consequently, tend to make much less than our STEM counterparts).
These are the people doing research and peer-reviewing? No wonder the quality of research is so bad. Criticism should be encouraged, not suppressed.
(Actually, at APS meetings and sectional meetings, almost everyone gets a chance to speak. However, not everyone attends the "new perspectives in physics" sub-meeting when there's a talk on another topic in the adjoining room.)
This sort of groupthink rejection sees more light when an issue is closer to public policy. In the nascent field of climate science, for example, I wouldn't be surprised to see papers claiming global cooling or stasis rejected almost immediately. Almost everyone in the field these days would appear to believe that global warming is occurring.
Coming back to my original thesis; the peer-review process is full of criticism. Search around for web pages aimed exclusively at coaxing young graduate students out of peer-review induced depression. Peer review can be brutal, and the anonymity can double its impact.
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Though one should keep in mind the loopholes for non-academic jobs and self-motivation. At my Amazon interview one of the head software bozos actually taught himself everything you'd cover in CS, including all the high-level math. I couldn't hack it, but he did.
(edit: the guy I replied to was trying to explain why you need to go)
In CS, the typical tradeoff is that you get more resources but somewhat less direct freedom at companies. In academia you have fewer resources and have to bring in your own grants, but the resource constraint is the main constraint, a sort of indirect restriction on your research freedom (how strong of one depends on your resource needs). Lots of other differences depending on your preferences. Easier to publish papers in academia (no approval needed and it's valued); easier to do software development in industry (resources/coordination exists, and it's valued). Academic schedules tend to be more flexible; work-from-home and non-9/5 schedules are common and don't typically require approval. Teaching is typically required, which can be a pro or a con. Etc.
There are lots of problems inherent with academia that most people thinking about this field are not really thinking about. The biggest problem, I think, is that for most 99% of all professors, once they are tenured, they are LOCKED down geographically. And, that sucks. My wife and I have one foot out the door all the time. We go where the jobs are. But, now that she's on the tenure track, we wonder if this is where we'll lay down and die. It's pretty sad, when I think about it. You hear about it time and time again from so much of these guys. One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii and how his wife divorced him because of it. He had a page up here:
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/
But, apparently, after some time he decided to take down the more controversial stuff. The index.html page to his ramblings are down. Anyways, that's a huge problem for academics. And, I thought about it, and I think the biggest problem is the whole tenure thing. I think it should be abolished. Professors should be able to move to new institutions without worrying about that entire process, and they should be paid a better wage because of it. It should be like any other free market enterprise we have nowadays. And, Universities should also be able to get rid of dead weight. I've had some professors in the past who just gave up on research and life. For example, said professor mentioned above. He gave up on math research because the University kept screwing them over on pay. He retired with only 17 publications under his name. My other friend who is now a tenured math professor at a 4 year college has 17 publications at just 37 years of age. My other friend who has been teaching for about 10 years now has only 2 publications: his math Ph.D. dissertation, and a one page paper that probably isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Anyways, I think it's high time tenure is made obsolete. It gives professors more latitude to move, probably better pay, and more incentive to do research or teach better. It also gives schools and students the opportunity to get better teachers and lose the dead weight.
He was told no because, "It would make the rest of us look bad." And so he spent many years working a half-time job and feeling bad about it.
(He was also one of the best teachers in the department. In large part, possibly, because his attention was on teaching, not research. And face it, most of the material that is presented in first and second year math courses has not been a subject of research since the 1800s.)
Wow. No offense, but I can't imagine this guy with a real job. The self-entitlement is insane. I really think there's a forest for the tree problem with a lot of academics. The few I know get massive entitlements, days off, benefits, etc. I work in IT, worry about layoffs, get minimal holidays, have on-call, and generally get treated like an idiot savant because no one likes techies and techies go against the corporate 'sales guy' culture that dominates so many companies.
I wish my biggest problem was being forced to stay in Hawaii. On top of it, I went to some pretty good schools and honestly half my professors were loathesome misanthropes. I can't imagine where they would fit elsewhere. They'd be destroyed in corporate culture in a new york minute.
Perhaps I am suffering from a 'grass is greener' mentality, but sometimes it helps, i think, to remember where you came from and what you have. Some problems are real and others just aren't.
I really wonder if the real issue is the ease that someone can enter many phd programs. With massive private/public loans and universities hungry for money, we might have long ago hit a tipping point of being too generous and letting a lot of people in who otherwise would have been unacceptable for phd programs, especially in the humanities. Of the academics I know, maybe one is a stellar thinker, the rest are just upper-middle class milquetoasts who wanted an easy life.
I don't think Hawaii is as great to live in as it is to visit. Cost of living sucks, traffic sucks, traveling anywhere to visit relatives or another state/country requires flying. All of Hawaii only has a population of 1.4M. The metro population of Honolulu is 953,207. The state itself is just a little bit larger than New Jersey if you add the area of all the islands. Sure, the weather is great, but living in Hawaii for the rest of my life is not something I want to do.
Now imagine being trapped there until you die because you're on a tenure track.
I absolutely love living in Honolulu, though there are plenty of people that move here and are disillusioned or miss the mainland very quickly.
And, that's the perspective, I think, you're missing out on. You are seeing things from your own perspective. I know that perspective well, too. I lived it for 10 years. I was a techie; I was always wary of being laid off; I had crap for vacations; I was ALWAYS learning new stuff; and as techies, we're always crapped on. I had business envy and thought of going to business school. So, I see your perspective. But, I also see his.
Being in Hawaii, or any other small town/city, can get very old and tiresome. Several of the Hawaii math professors eventually gave up tenure and moved away to do other things. It makes one wonder about why these guys would be willing to give up a highly sought after thing in academia, tenure, to move away and start a new life. I think my old professor provides a good explanation, at least for some people, about why that happens. At least, it did for me.
Now I live in the Northwest which has become my favorite part of the country by far. At first I was fiercely unwilling to ever consider moving away, because I loved it here so much, but the longer I am here, the more I see that falling away. I don't want to always have one foot out the door. We moved around several times when I was a kid and I've always envied people who have roots in one place. But I suspect it will always be this way for me.
At the same time, I don't have the desire to get out of the US that some of my friends have. I suspect that though the US has its problems, other places do too, and the grass is always greener as you say.
And it's a pretty shitty place when your spouse leaves you because you can't go with them.
In wealthy countries like the US, the quality of life improves every decade, and it only improves when people seek to change the system where faults remain. Professors are supposed to be thought leaders, not automatically and uncritically deferential to established thought or power structures. Perhaps his specialty is mathematics rather than the structure of academia, yet even still nothing is gained by subservience.
Furthermore, how does it matter when a professor is a loathsome misanthrope or not? Most important is the quality of their original research, and second to that, the quality of instruction they provide, and both of those in relation to their cost. If their misanthropy affects their job choose people who are less misanthropic. If the institutions aren't getting enough A-level talent for research and instruction to choose from, then they should look at how they are attracting talent. Surely, the compensation is an entire basket comprised not only of money and tangible benefits, but such forms of autonomy as the ability to move without giving up progress in your career, the freedom to pursue research regardless of unpopular outcomes, and the ability to speak freely.*
How best would you characterize "the problem with academia"? You seem to be saying (1)that there is too little talent in academia—an a outcome signify the combination of working conditions or salaries discourage talent from trying to enter academia. But then seem to say that (2)they are over compensated with days off and benefits. The only way to get such a juxtaposition of overcompensated and under-talented, though is if the positions are filled through some political manner such as personal PR, nepotism, graft etc, and yet that runs counter to your third complaint, that (3)academics aren't political enough to bow and scrape and show deference to everyone else.
At least one of these complaints must have a flaw.
Finally, how do you know you can't get a job in Hawaii? These days it takes remarkably little effort to browse job offerings and send out a few resumes. Maybe you'd end up with a lot of the same concerns anywhere you live, but maybe you'd also end up liking the climate a lot more.
* Though tenure can make moving difficult, it does help enable intellectual and academic freedom, since it effectively limits the equivalent of having a boss who tells you to suppress an unpopular conclusion.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130120215549/http://www2.hawaii...
I wouldn't say I am learning exactly, but it's interesting to read from his point of view. Thought I'd post the link.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120201172033/http://www.math.ha...
But, he rambles a lot on there and weighs the pros and cons of being a professor in Hawaii. Basically, though, his final sentence says it all: "I've got to get out of this place."
Some more about his salary he keeps talking about, " Unfortunately, though, the one thing at the University of Hawaii that was not under my control, nor under the Math Department's either, whether by ``shibai'' or otherwise, was my salary. I had known when I accepted the position here that I was being offered a salary that was too low, but what I had not realized was that, unlike Kansas, faculty salaries at the University of Hawaii are controlled by a rigid civil-service structure, so that the salary one is hired at determines one's salary for the rest of one's life. But added to that, the nation soon entered an extremely drastic phase of Reaganomics inflation, and the State of Hawaii responded by giving only minimal salary raises (0% one year and 2% the following), and the entire faculty here at UH was becoming financially desperate.
One of the reasons I dropped out of active mathematical research was a realization (even before Reagan came into office in 1981) that it would soon no longer be financially feasible for me to continue working here. And as I stopped letting my life be taken over by doing research, and after being promoted to full professor had finally jumped through all the hoops that young academics (although I was no longer exactly young) are require to jump through, more and more I was asking myself exactly what it was that I want out of life, and to what extent my career as a mathematician was providing it. "
He also mentioned before about thinking about becoming an actuary; and, how another math professor started taking electrical engineering courses at the university and later left for California to become an engineer in the aerospace industry (which turned out to be poor timing since the aerospace industry went under major turmoil in California during the late 80's).
Then he talks about how he has a strong distaste for living in Hawaii here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120218124307/http://www2.hawaii...
It gives a very intimate perspective from a man who has lived the life of being an academic, and what that entails. I don't recommend reading his entire web site, since he writes quite a lot. But, for anyone interested in academia, I think a perusal is in order. He does talk a lot about what life being an "institutionalized" academic is like. It's pretty sad, and it made me realized I would never want to get into that field.
1970 5.7
71 4.4 - Nixon's wage and price controls in August
72 3.2
73 6.2
74 11.0 - Ford becomes president
75 9.1
76 5.8
77 6.5 - Carter becomes president
78 7.6
79 11.3
80 13.5
81 10.3 - Reagan becomes president
82 6.2
83 3.2
84 4.3
85 3.6
86 1.9
87 3.6
88 4.1
89 4.8 - G. H. W. Bush becomes president
90 5.4
Why do people, who like I lived through these periods, believe the opposite of the truth? Not even sure if this is this guy's revolutionary truth (didn't bother to read much of his essay) vs. the boring bourgeois I fancy myself living in.
The Volcker Fed stopped the inflation of the US and Volcker was hired by... Carter. Also as you can see inflation was already 11 percent two years before Carter. The main person who is responsible for mismanaging inflation was Fed Chairman Burns (1970-1978).
I don't claim to have a good understanding of macroeconomics (not sure anyone really does), but I'm pretty sure fiscal policy has some effect. But since we're discussing a sequence of numbers, that hardly matters. What does is that Carter did indeed "find religion" on a number of fronts (including defense after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), and in the case of the Fed, replaced Burns with Volcker in August 1979, albeit way too late to save his presidency. What's critical with Reagan is that he recognized Volcker was the right guy for the job and fully supported him when things got ugly, e.g. big hikes in interest rates (to a prime rate > 20%!!!) that along with the delayed phase in of the supply side tax rate cuts gave us a nasty, sharp recession.
That's when Reagan's economic policies were labeled Reaganomics, a term which our betters dropped like a hot potato when they had their desired effect and Reagan ran a "It's morning in America" 1984 reelection campaign. He deserves more than a little credit for the moral courage to persevere in the face of near G. W. Bush opprobrium while he let that harsh medicine work.
And the bottom line is seen in those numbers. Whatever Reaganomics was, it manifestly wasn't an increase in inflation.
Once a Fed Chairman is selected by the president he cannot be removed during his term. This is the principle of central bank independence. When the board decides that they will hike rates there isn't anything to stop them. They can be dismissed only after each their terms end (7 years, 4 years for the chairman and vice-chairman).
That inflation is mostly a monetary matter is a key lesson from the 70s and there is very convincing evidence especially from that period. Germany was restrained monetarily and performed much better than France, Britain or the US. (Highest inflation was 8%).
There are of course cases where fiscal policy has an indirect effect on inflation through monetary policy:
* Countries sometimes pressure CBs to lower rates to finance government deficits. This is a big problem in developing countries. * Fixed exchange rate regimes. * Intervening in the supply or demand of some significantly weighted component of the CPI () * The liquidity trap (not really known, this is really recent and not much data on it)
This is a good resource for basic (short run) theory, Short-Run Fluctuations by David Romer: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/ISMP%20Text%20Graphs...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the entire point of tenure was so that professors who have proven their worth have the freedom to do the (perhaps controversial) research that they want to without fear of retribution from their employer.
Edit: And now that I think about it, the point is also to prevent "dead weight" from being fired. Because it'd be easy to classify a professor as dead weight who is simply working on something unpopular, or contrary to consensus.
Today research costs money, and often a substantial part of a professor's salary comes from external funding. I feel that tenure has become something of an anachronism, and when you see tenured professors who haven't had a grant in ten years sit in a circle, each one giving an easy job to the person on their right, and dropping the rest of the work on the untenured faculty it becomes very difficult to defend the practice.
I understand that tenure positions are hard to reach, but if you are providing value (whether that's through skill in research or education or pure 'prestige') - other universities should still want to employ you?
The only sense in which you are locked down is that you have a nice guaranteed job and a lifestyle that is no longer competitive with other opportunities - this is not something reasonable to complain about.
For example, I'm pretty sure Terry Tao, math professor extraordinaire, would have NO problems moving around to any university and gaining tenure. However, the average Joe schmoe Ph.D. may not have the desired qualities to do that so easily.
http://ucpay.globl.org/index.php?campus=&name=Terence+Tao&ti...
All the faculty getting paid more than him tend to be physicians and surgeons.
For comparison, the average pay of a tenured professor at Harvard (highest paying university on average) is "only" $198k: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/10/harvard_salaries... Tao isn't even at Harvard and he's paid over double the average for tenured faculty there. I can only assume UCLA is forced to match what he could get if he left to a place like Harvard.
He is brilliant mathematician, eloquent educator (from introductory to proffesional topics), and a thought leader (with Gowers) in the mathematical research community on meta topics like research style.
That Terence Tao is being paid twice the average tenured salary at Harvard while he's at UCLA speaks to both our points. Unlike most professors, Terence Tao is paid by UCLA what he could hypothetically get if he went to Harvard (speculatively, of course). Other professors would face much more friction in packing up their bags and hopping into tenured positions at peer institutions or higher.
This is also a common strategy for people angling for promotion or a big pay increase -- get an offer elsewhere, and then use that offer to get a promotion at your current institution. I'm not recommending it, but I've certainly seen it done. Common outside academia too, of course.
How bad can it be?
To the former, I lament their opportunities outside of academia. Basic research, the research that built the foundation that makes this comment appear before your eyes and zips packets of data around to make this economy function, has been on the decline for near a decade now. And the decline in corporate, non-university basic research has been even more profound.
People who read Hacker News are probably in a better state than most when it comes to this, there are many choices of research lab to work at in computer science. For basic mathematical research, your choices outside of a university setting are a little more slim; and nearly nonexistent, if you, like most of the readers here, have ethical problems with producing classified research or working with 3 and 4 letter agencies of recent disrepute.
But to my peers in other academic programs - I wonder how much the world will lose because ethicists, geologists, and even people who are pursuing the art of pedagogy in advanced educational degrees are leaving academia.
Postscript: I don't mean any of the above to be exhaustive lists of academic fields affected or not affected. It's not just computer science that has ample opportunity for postgraduate research outside of a university, and it's not only the philosophers, geologists, and educators who are finding difficulty. To wit, I don't even know if that's the case for geologists, but I have heard of the woes of finding even graduate study programs in philosophy and education.
Post-postscript: I forgot to cite sources, and one summary, though five years dated, is here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsb0803/start.htm?CFID=1237996... - there the NSF documents declining basic research from industry and declining funding from government.
If you spend much time with the literature it's pretty obvious that U.S. agencies regularly blackball particular research areas.
For instance, the tap got turned off suddenly on work on quasicrystals, MPI-style parallel computing, and on work related to the semantic web.
In the meantime, huge amounts of research money goes down the drain in areas such as internet QoS.
Once the DoD got the state of the art up to the point where they could get enough workers for Los Alamos and Sandia labs they didn't want to subsidize educating people from India and China in the techniques used to simulate nuclear weapons.
As for other fields I think it's an issue of fashion and a zero sum game.
Edit: Never mind. Upon re-reading, I see that you chalked those up to fashion.
Thanks to the government shutdown some of them weren't very busy and they made me a nice little piece of software...
The article calls out a third case, those who don't produce research because they aren't being paid enough. If you are being paid a teacher's salary, they can't really complain when you put forth a teacher's work (well they can, but not justifiably).
Once you leave academia, you pay for all of your thinking time & how have to confront that humans decisions collectively by what looks and feels good in the short term. These days I am hoping to pay for my own "academic freedom" through service -- by working.
Then people go to the opposite utilitarian extreme. Not everything I do has to buy me a car or impress girls.
Actually, that could be very persuasive...
Learn algebraic number theory, get a car, impress girls!™The previous two years, like a lot of junior academics, I become extremely disillusioned with academia: long hours, low pay, and no job security.
I was about to quit my fixed-term assistant professor position (Maths) until I became curious: what would happen if I didn't care about being fired?
So Dec 2012, I made the decision to only focus on high-quality research that I care about (quality over volume), to do a decent (but not amazing) job teaching, and to secretly do consulting/contract work on the side.
It's been really interesting. Suddenly, when I didn't care anymore, they gave me tenure and bumped my salary. Over the year, I've also spent roughly 2 days a week sneaking around and doing contract work which has been amazing financially...
Would anyone be interested in my story?
I see the "I quit" genre more from CS/engineering professors, but that's probably because I'm on HN a lot. It would be somewhat interesting to compare the humanities subgenre and the STEM subgenre.
Also yesterday I had a long conversation with my neighbor at work (former math professor) about everything that's wrong with academia. He mentioned the phrase "loan farming".
And because it's quite easy to find an industry job if you're a good CS/engineering professor.
This seems especially true in biotech, though part of their concerns seem to be about how the new students will compete with them for grant dollars... see http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/01/28/shut-off-t... for an example.
1) Tenure is a different beast at some medical institutions where your funding comes almost entirely from your own grant support. There are tenured professors and it's fair to argue that tenure is important as a promotion, but if a tenured professors loses his/her grant funding, they can lose their office just like their un-tenured associates (I've heard of it but have not seen it personally).
2) The bigger problem is that tenured professors leave and head for prestigious jobs in the private industry. I always wondered why this was the case; I was enlightened talking to a spouse of a prestigious professor who said that in general the academic system treats even the tenured professor terribly. The big, big opportunities (and accompanying explosion in salary) are only in the private sector.
1. There is more money in being an engineering professor
2. Lots of PhD students in engineering never bother being professors of any kind (even non-tenure track) and just find an industry position with a big salary.
Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge anymore.
They are also usually not on the latest developments (some schools are better than that).
Not to mention the money-grabbing aspect of it.
Unfortunately, a "certificate by an upholding institution" has a certain value.
What "monopoly on knowledge" brings to my mind is academic journals. Have you ever tried to search them online? On the cheap end, it's like $40 a pop, before you even know how useful it is. Some cost a fortune, such that many people in certain industries can't justify keeping up with all the developments in their still-very-academia-centric field (where one's singular goal in life is to be published in as many expensive journals as possible).
I love papers and studies, and my husband worked in industry as a mathematician, so this is something that I've come upon a lot. It really baffles me.
Please tell me the last new theory in basic science to come out of some place other than academia.
But yeah, there have been discoveries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave_b...
See how many schools can offer a Machine Learning course. See how many professors know what's Map-Reduce.
It's just that every respectable CS department I've seen has some course in machine learning, and most of them also have some kind of course in "Programming Language Paradigms" or something where functional programming, including the map and reduce functions, will be taught.
Though admittedly, the number where functional programming and its related disciplines are taught or researched, or even acknowledged, at any real level is pathetically small. Yet, FP and programming language theory in general are still far more advanced in academia than in industry.
1) Scientist jobs are high-status, you're right, and permanent positions usually come with a comfortable (though rarely really flush) salary and other upper-middle class perks.
However:
2) The number of available permanent jobs as a scientist has been trending down for reasons that have nothing to do with the number of people willing to do those jobs. Basically, research funding has been dropping like a rock.
3) The "professor -> undergrads -> grad-students -> post-docs -> new professor" career model is structurally senseless. There's nothing wrong with having a severe filter on the number of undergrads who become grad-students (in the sense that there have traditionally been many fields where most of the undergrads can get a job that applies their undergrad-level education), but you simply can't set up the entire science career on the basis of an exponential increase in workers without an exponential increase in jobs. The system only even works for computer-scientist types because most of our PhD grads leave academia by default to get applied research or high-level development jobs in industry.
Now, I'm not going to be a pure-academia wanker and say, "Nobody should get a job in industry EVAR!", but neither is it all right to say, "Everyone should just get a job in industry after grad-school!". Companies simply don't want that many PhDs in most fields.
Also, the oversupply of PhD labor and overspecialization thereof in most fields has enabled many universities to shift to a teaching model in which 2/3 of teaching staff are adjuncts without livable salaries, fringe benefits, or any contract for permanent employment.
As much as I really, really like what academia and research are supposed to stand for (and I say this as I current graduate student), I can't give any kind of endorsement to the career model involved. Not while I'm earning approximately $1400/month after taxes as an "entry-level academic" (ie: grad-student) and a friend of mine (whom I decline to name here) with a fairly close skill-level to me earns something like five times that (again, after taxes) working for a major Silicon Valley company.
Hell, I earned three times that much money interning at a Silicon Valley company over the summer! I wasn't even entry-level in industry, and yet I made more than I do in academia and had a clearer, more secure career path in front of me.
The thing I'm thankful for is that we're a bit less "ideological" about the industry-versus-academia split here in Israel. Professorial jobs have never been very well-paid here, so alternating between industry and academia throughout one's career is just considered normal. Oh, and of course the fact that my health insurance and pension funds aren't tied to just one job :-p.
http://blog.coffeestrap.com/2013/05/06/something-meaningful/
Didn't know was something that common. Would love to hear from somebody else with similar experience.
ps> almost 1 year into CS, 10/10 wouldn't go back! :-)
The exception for this particular case is that i have met Zac and had some interesting conversations, because i also work on the University of Missouri campus.
So when the author of the slate post writes "And finally, in a rare coup for humanists, Ernst is departing for a lucrative job in the private sector."
I can say categorically this should not surprise people. Zac is the brand of humanist who is in the humanities not because they are not technically proficient, but because they are of a technical proficiency that allows them to pursue whatever they want.