An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia (2013)
crypto.junod.info
crypto.junod.info
Academia is crap. Most jobs are crap. Most people do not make any dents in the universe. Most relationships end.
One should learn to recognize situations where irrationality is the norm. The easy one to spot is music. Way more people want to be musicians than the market for their output can bear. These market realities will dominate your life if you decide to become a musician. Doesn't mean you can't make it, just means that if you want a semblance of control over whether you'll make it or not, you have to create that control yourself and you'll have nobody to help you that can really help you because they have to deal with the market realities too. Even if you do make it you'll be similarly powerless to change the realities.
Once you understand the dynamic you will immediately see the pattern everywhere. Film. Academia. Comedy. The Apple App Store. The dating market for very attractive women. People who want me to work on their websites or otherwise hire me. Silicon Valley. You have to deal with all the other assholes in the world who want the same thing you want, and there's only so much of it to go around. The ones that succeed learn how to increase the demand for the services they want to provide. The ones that don't bitch about how unfair everything is.
I think it's useful to ask whether science is actually different in this respect, or whether this is merely an aspect of a universal problem.
So the point is that - even if people in academia are producing brilliant, applicable, great research, the truth is that academia produces more supply,than the market can bear. In such a case, it's like great musicians - most will have to be overlooked and only a tiny few will make a difference, either through brilliance, dumb luck or evil plotting.
That's because the "value they create for science" is far too diffuse for anyone to care. They need to bring in grant money, something people do care about, or find something else to do.
That is exactly why a lot of academics chose the academic career in the first place. There was a lot more freedom to pick your own problem and work on it than you'd enjoy in the average corporate job. There still is, for the most part. But if that advantage is eroding, it's worth talking about.
If you looked at the numbers and decided to try it anyway, you only have yourself to blame if you fail after throwing away years of your life. You didn't blaze a path, you didn't do things substantially different than your forebears.
If you naively didn't look at the numbers and kept going out of blind faith, then sorry, you wasted your twenties and got only hard experience to show for it. Don't feel too bad, 90% of your academic peers are doing the same thing. I wasted my twenties too doing stupid things. Probably most of us did. Just don't pass your thirties the same way and you should be fine.
A pyramid scheme works well when the pyramid is expanding. It doesn't work so well when the tip of the pyramid is shrinking.
If EACH tenured professor has 1 graduate student per 3-5 years, that's nowhere close to the rate at which new tenure track jobs open up. There are some private sector jobs for Math PhDs, but even those have an oversupply.
Eh, given the oversupply in academia, it really isn't fair to compare your situation to it. We're talking about orders of magnitude in the disparity between supply and demand in academe vs. the usual competition like in SV, I'd say.
Of course they'll face it elsewhere, the sociopaths who will control their lives. As someone said below, the disappointment is that academia is just like the rest of the world.Still, I think they need to be told it by articles like the linked so more fresh college grads won't go down that path.
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It was not a statement of personal belief, but rather a tongue-in-cheek description of how we often view people who we perceive are getting in our way for some reason. Not intended to be taken seriously.
> You also have to be primed in order to see a pattern.
If you do something out of naivete and get burned, and you can't use that experience to recognize the pattern and avoid it in the future, you'll never earn any success in life because no one is born knowing everything one needs to know in order to earn success. You will eventually define yourself as someone who the world hates, who the world couldn't be bothered to tell how to get the things they want.
"(4) Academia: Where Originality Will Hurt You "The good, healthy mentality would naturally be to work on research that we believe is important. Unfortunately, most such research is challenging and difficult to publish, and the current publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on the table while working on problems that require at least ten years of labor before you can report even the most preliminary results. [...] "Ideally, the academic system would encourage those people who are already well established and trusted to pursue these challenges, and I’m sure that some already do. However, I cannot help but get the impression that the majority of us are avoiding the real issues and pursuing minor, easy problems that we know can be solved and published. The result is a gigantic literature full of marginal/repetitive contributions. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing if it’s a good CV that you’re after."
I came away with the impression that there are a few people given extremely wide latitude to work (or not) on problems of real significance, who had generally been granted 'rock star' status by the math community in one way or another. It's a 1% whose academic freedoms serves as a motivation for the other 99%, who will try to write a bulk of irrelevant papers while dealing with a massive teaching load. A job in industry ultimately felt like it might provide more freedom in the long run than the academic track, with less danger of ending up in a adjunct teaching gig in Wichita.
Does having a full-time industry job allow you to seriously pursue your own research interests on the side?
For mathematics research especially, why don't more research-oriented mathematicians pursue this dual path? I understand part-time research necessarily implies a slower publication rate, but since you're already eschewing this anyway, are there any other drawbacks? Two that spring to mind are a restriction to travel to mathematics conferences and socializing with mathematicians during the day -- are these big show stoppers?
I think there are two non exclusive ways of doing research successfully. Intense work and collaboration (in particular supervision of students).
PhD students and postdoc fall in the first category. They work full time on their research and do little else.
On the other hand, most successful experienced researchers are busy writing grant proposals, teaching, attending various committees. There's not enough time left to do meaningful research by themselves (plus getting older doesn't help to stay sharp and passionate), so they end up supervising students that to the bulk of the research.
I think someone that would try to do research on its spare time won't have enough time to devote to it (unlike a phd student), and won't be able to supervise students (unlike a professor).
As most on this site can probably attest to, one of the biggest issues with part-time/hobby/side projects is motivation and discipline. That problem seems to be already partially solved by the freedom to pick an area of mathematics one is already interested in.
Not having enough time to devote to a problem part-time doesn't seem like a large problem if somebody wants to work on problems of their own choosing as per the OP. Thus, my confusion.
I can definitely see that collaboration is a tougher nut to crack unless most participation starts shifting to evening group meetings.
The New Yorker had an interesting article about Yitang Zhang and his discovery concerning bounded primes. The discovery itself is interesting for the mathematics involved, but of wider interest is that up until this discovery, he was a relative unknown in the mathematical establishment.
If it were simply a question of motivation and discipline to have math as a hobby, we would expect discoveries from unknown individuals more frequently, but, alas, that's not true, which is what makes this story precious.
It stems from the fact, among other things, that math isn't like programming. It's not like deciding, one day, that you want to write your own operating system, and then the small matter of coding it up. Math requires* those leaps of intuition that come to you after banging your head against the same problem for months. Most employers would start to question a developer's continued employment if it took them five months to resolve a single ticket.
*http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty
Some do actually use supercomputers to do mathematics.
Most however, thrive in an actual academic environment including spending a lot of time interacting with other mathematicians and going to conferences. There's a big difference between living in an academic environment and spending your whole life thinking about math and being around people who do the same... and working a 9-5 and doing a little math on the side. Not to say it isn't possible, but most reasonable jobs don't leave much left over mental energy for doing maths.
I'm sure there is a sizable number of "amateur" mathematicians who work on problems in their free time, but it is hard to know what to work on and where to look.
The "monastery" could also be run as a business, having a for-profit section developing products based on the ideas produced inside. Something like the members of the monastery signing an agreement that they are ok with their results being published with one year delay, time that would give an edge to the monastery over any competitors that would also want to develop products based on them - think of it like a "research monastery self-financed by coupling with a sort of startup incubator" (with some really intransigent and incorruptible people working to keep the two camps of people apart and to stop the "business idea developers" from exploiting the "monks").
And for research fields that require some expensive equipment, like bio-medical research, the "monastery" may make the "monks" sign contracts giving the patents and other right to their discoveries to the monastery, in exchange for having access to a lab where they can work on anything they want. It's not that utopic since you can a pretty usable top notch molecular biology lab plus an animal experiments facility for under $1M (probably not in the US because you have too many regulations and stuff...) if you find alternative channels of buying equipment of user other "hacks" that regular research institutes can't use...
But it's the kind of idea that it's hard to convince other people it would make sense... so for now I'll keep it on my list of to-dos for after I get filthy rich so I can finance this myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study
On the other hand, Richard Hamming thinks this model won't work:
> The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
An HN comment with +20 karma was probably read more times than most research papers in journals!
Even outside academics this is true. A great essay, posted as a comment on HN or reddit, is going to be much less circulated than the same essay posted on a blog. E.g. I'll see a good essay on someone's blog and see that it's posted to 12 different subreddits and HN. If I say a great essay as a comment, even if it's of the same quality, I guarantee it will not be posted anywhere else.
www.amazon.com/Anathem-Neal-Stephenson/dp/006147410X/
You lose maybe 6-12 hours to a job--assuming you never work on research or knowledge expansion during work hours, which is unlikely--but then you don't have to have that stuff hanging over your head.
Bills are getting paid, equipment can be purchased (if you need it), and your social life is happier. So, I think that research can absolutely be pursued outside of academia.
Because it's much much harder to get published when you aren't immediately associated with a university. People just assume "crank".
"I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority
of the world’s academic research is actually being done by people
like me, who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you
would expect to truly be pushing science forward with their decades
of experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to manage the
PhD students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then put
their names on as a sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read
the document..."
It appears that the author's definition of "true science" is akin to knowledge-that-needn't-be-effectively-communicated-to-anyone, which, in my estimation, is not science at all.
How did you get that from "Advisors shouldn't treat advisees like shit and then take an unfair amount of credit for their work."?
And this speaking as someone who is one of the people doing most of the coding/writing for our projects. Senior faculty enabling me to do my job is a contribution.
What the author doesn't realise that while the lab heads might not be doing a lot of science on a day to day basis - most are overloaded with a bunch of other stuff that is forced upon them... endless committee meetings, grant writing, teaching and teaching administration etc...
I left academia--more-or-less--after doing several post-docs and taking a hard look at an employment landscape where colleagues who were at least as good as me were taking offers from second- or third-teir institutions because that was all that was available. I knew some of them were profoundly lonely and struggling in those positions, outside of the charmed circle of the top teir they had comfortably inhabited for so long.
Beyond that, there was the realization that unlike the profs who trained my generation, people my age pursuing tenure were rarely getting into the lab. They couldn't afford to. They had to stay relentlessly on the track of paper and grant generation, as well as committee work, if they wanted to succeed.
I would be a really bad fit in that job. I got into science because I love the hands-on act of "disturbing the universe", in Freeman Dyson's memorable phrase, and even in the improbable event that I landed a tenure-track job (improbable in part because as a post-doc I tended to work on problems that interested me, rather than ones that would lead to lots of publications) I would end up spending most of my time doing stuff I wasn't very good at and didn't much enjoy.
It's one thing to say that "every job has a certain amount of work involved" (there are always less appealing things you have to do in the name of the stuff you enjoy) but when a job is mostly stuff you aren't suited for, it's not a good idea to pursue it.
This is the fundamental problem of modern academia: researchers are getting shunted into managers and administrators as soon as they get on tenure track. While the age they make the transition to tenure track is going up, the length of active research careers is going down. Hands-on research scientists who are active over the full length of their career are almost always in some kind of permanent research associate position, free from the vagaries of tenure and promotion. They are the people most of us who go into the sciences want to be, but the positions available for them are few and far between.
We need serious, genuine academic reform so that there are more positions available for career scientists who do science, rather than careerists who transition to managers and administrators the moment they become assistant professors.
Honest question, if your colleagues were "top tier" researchers, and they ended up at "second tier" schools, does that not somehow imply that those "second tier" institutions are more prestigious than their presumed "second tier" status? They obviously are able to recruit quality.
I guess the real question that I'm trying to ask is why the obsession in academia (and HN) with segmenting institutions into "tiers"? It just seems odd and contradictory that academia would be so bent on self-imposing a caste system.
I'm often the only person in the room without a PhD when I go see a customer. They usually want me to either fix something 10 minutes ago, prototype something next week, or invent something next month. I do.
There are websites around that list me as having a PhD in my specialty (I just have a four year degree). Most recently, one aerospace organization flat out refused to correct their page because it looks less professional if I'm not listed with a degree I don't have.
As far as advisors taking credit instead of their students... ten years ago I saved the life of an asshole and the conscience of a friend when said friend came to recruit me to be a spotter while he attempted to kill his advisor after he'd published something my friend wrote, under the advisor's name. I talked my friend into merely destroying the prof's car.
I realize that I talk about violence a lot in my posts. It happens, it is part of life, it must be dealt with even in techie or academic circles.
De-escalation sometimes requires causing a small amount of damage in order to prevent much greater damage. It's like felling a few trees to build a firebreak.
I don't give a damn about the advisor, other than he's a human being and has the right to live his wretched life out, but I do know that my friend would've been haunted by his conscience all his life if he actually hurt someone... and haunted by his pride just as long if he didn't exact some form of revenge, because this is what our culture demanded.
I don't want to kill my advisor (he's a pretty good guy, honest, and generally not a douchebag... in all honesty I have in the past and would in the future have a beer with him ).
It just seems like everyone is a cog everywhere -- in academia, the real world, whatever -- and there is no escape.
That's what really sickens me. There's no room for original ideas unless you found a startup, and then, what, you sell your company to IBM/Google/Microsoft/whoever in a year or two and it's the same damn song and dance.
A PhD isn't a requirement to be a cog -- it doesn't even seem to make you a big cog that drives a lot of other gears and functionality in the clock, going by those I know with one. It seems (from the inside) like a lot of extra effort and stress. So, the letter hit close to home.
This has been going on for quite a while.
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/04/ep-372-the-millikan-oil...
Not really, most of these tasks require some expertise. For exemple, committee meetings could be about recruiting colleagues and assessing their work or selecting papers for a journal or a conference. Grant writing requires expertise too...
Teaching is probably the easiest one to solve. Some kinds of classes should be attributed to teachers, not researchers (those are very different kinds of expertize).
If you have someone tossing the right words at you here and there, and I literally mean like 10 words over 5 years - if those are the right 10 words, then that can mean all the difference between making sense and going crazy. Having a smart teacher point you in some direction that they have a developed intuition for is billions of times more valuable than having what essentially seems like static noise.
Which gets to a more important point about slow progress in research. If you go too fast, it's complete chaos. Languages and data doesn't translate well across large populations quickly, information gets entangled with multiple incorrect definitions and multiple ways of interpreting, entire populations can be wiped of their confidence of the integrity of information and data, left with shrugs and feelings of confusion that has zero inertia behind it.
A final word: where ever you go if you leave science you are likely to face the same fight, because it is in the nature of modern life and modern organizations.
I've thought before that much of the criticism of academia (which I've certainly engaged in) mostly reflects disappointment that it was ultimately not all that different from the rest of the world.
When I left grad school I found many of it's problems present in the corporate world; except that now, compensation is commiserate with responsibility.
You commiserate (sympathize) with the author's plight. And now your compensation is now commensurate (measurably equal) with your responsibility.
And does that include shares?
I think that is the disappointment. Reference the article:
I often wonder if many people in academia come from insecure childhoods where they were never the strongest or the most popular among their peers, and, having studied more than their peers, are now out for revenge.
This including the author, and hell, including me. I'm going to admit: I was idealistic coming into the system, thinking that it was better that the rest of the world because the point of research was supposed to be research, that I would find people who valued cool ideas and interesting science/math/literature, etc, instead of making a quick buck. So, it isn't any different, honestly, only instead of money, the currency of academe is pride[0].
But, one can't live on pride alone, as much as academics try to convince their students. If one is to sell their soul, at least sell it for real currency instead of academic funny money (citations, papers, commitee positions, pats from higher ups). As another replier mentioned, at least work for assholes who will pay you better and in a career that has better prospects than academia.
One might say that the ideal it strives for, bettering the world and/or understanding it deeply, was supposed to be what one gained in place of losing income. Without that, why should anyone participate in it?
[0] http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/10/25-academe-is-built-on-p...
Yes, a lot of research in academia ends up going nowhere, but that's not always obvious beforehand. Research is an inherently chancy endeavour with a low chance of success. But academia is still a source of important research. To name just two examples, much of the major deep learning research which everyone is jumping on these days was kept alive and done at universities. The CRISPR/Cas9 breakthrough in biology was done at universities.
It is true that there is a huge pressure to publish which leads to a lot of crap being published but that doesn't mean the academia is not valuable and it seems like a hard problem to figure out the right incentives (which we should of course work on). Maybe something that gives a weighted rank of the papers would be better able to put value on the research you've done and make purely the # of papers less of a unit of currency in the academia. Citations do that to some extent but they're still not a great solution.
Egos are a huge problem, but that's true in every sphere. Academics are humans too...
To me criticisms like this need to at least suggest paths towards solutions. If the system is already as good as it can reasonably work, how can we criticize it?
It needed at least to suggest paths for researchers outside academia: will we get more research done outside? Will it fit better those idealistic goals?
I realized that my best-case outcome was probably a tenure-track job at a #100 ranked school, and my worst/likely-case outcome was being a permanent adjunct with no other marketable skills. So I left to work at a software career.
I had the opportunity to work in a lab while an undergrad and to do a couple industry research internships, and it set my expectations on what the Ph.D really is (and why I didn't go for it).
The problem is that many do not know what to expect or have expectations that differ from the reality.
Also, it wasn't until I was in graduate school that I realized people that were comparable/smarter than me were struggling with mediocre jobs or not finding any permanent job at all. I also saw people who were really weak but picked a hot specialty doing rather well.
Also, everything is so specialized in Math that nobody really understand anyone else's work. If everything is so specialized, then how can anyone decide whose work is good and whose work is junk? If objectivity is completely out the window in Math, what hope is there in other areas of science?
So it's essentially the same as being a programmer, where the skill of promoting yourself is more valuable than the skill of doing good work. At least I get paid more, and still have spare time to read about things that interest me.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk...
This hits me really close to home. When I left graduate school, a lot of my peers were unhappy about a lot of the same things I was. The reason a majority of them stayed was because "I put so much time in already and what's another 3 years." I almost stayed for the same reason.
Sunk cost is a fallacy. Be happy now :)
The PhD is not "just for academia". It's the entry ticket for working in the biotech/pharma business. It's a 4-6 year process that demonstrates that one can do independent work in an organized fashion and write it up. Quite similar, except for scale, as how medicinal chemists (and various support disciplines) work.
One learns the jargon, often combines a complementary post-doc to round out training (such as synthetic PhD following up with natural product p-doc). This extra nudge improves the chance of being hired and can usually lead to more $$ upon hiring. PhD's usually know 1-2 things well. P-docs, maybe, push that up to 3-5. It's a basis for getting started.
Is the entry-ticket aspect of a PhD fair to BS/MS students, who tend to be the lab denizens who actually do the work? No, probably not. There's a huge status difference between "PhD" and "pair of hands"... But then, as the difference is only 2-ish years, carrying through to PhD should be the typical choice (barring real-life issues forcing termination).
Due to job/geographic stability, it's not the best career choice, but it's a useful one (as, for example, they actually DO work towards curing or alleviating disease). The pay is reasonable, the chance for personal recognition is present and there's chances for "financial renumeration" if one scores big-time. And if groups like YC get really into funding longer-horizon projects, the jobs just might reappear.
I do a ton of practical algorithmic research in the course of personal and professional software development. I love teaching and tutoring. I love definitively and completely solving hard problems with new solutions. I love devising proven partial solutions when that's not feasible, and looking forward to the rest. When I get a bug up my nose about a problem, I do not rest until it's solved, and solved properly.
It's probably around 15 years ago when I had my own realization that success in academia is driven primarily by publishing metrics. Since that's the reward mechanism, academia has optimized for that case above all else. As the article lists, only the current hot topics for publishing get any authorization or funding, so who knows what you'd actually be working on. And whatever you're working on demands _everything_ you have to avoid failure. Beyond that level of graduate indentured servant, it's all posturing and politics, still chasing the hot publishing topics.
I have been able to work on projects that map well to sub-problems of my long term interest field. Hobby and work blends nicely. I love what I do. While I'm not yet reaping significantly financially, I do what I want and do not have the stress and crunch of either academic process or a soul-sucking job, and that was my tradeoff to decide.
I still have unbounded financial potential as a business owner and curator of ground-breaking technologies. But I also know that technical merit does not equate to success in the market; that's another set of skills, and its own challenging industry.
For example, one of Newton's observations was that the spectrum cast by a prism he'd bought at a local fair was elongated. Being Newton, and therefore given to extreme of care, he had arranged the prism in a room that was about twenty feet long and was struck by sunlight coming through a pinhole in a shutter. This is not a simple thing to arrange, and because the Earth is rotating the correct geometry lasts quite a short time. But it allowed him to see the elongation of the spectrum.
The problem was that received wisdom said the spectrum should be circular, as it was cast by a circular beam. Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on the order of, "Well, I held up a prism and took a quick look and it seemed ciruclar to me! Mr Newton is a fool."
Science is always going to be like this. People are mostly idiots (I certainly am, most of the time.) But the author's point is that it is worse now, and that the institutional incentives that make it worse are pretty clear. Get a couple of beer into an older scientist and they'll often tell you that they couldn't have gotten an academic position in the current climate.
Furthermore, similar incentives are in play all over the world--althouhg a friend in the Far East tells me things are better there because universities are still trying to build reputations so they are engaged in more fundamental research rather than just grant-writing.
Given this, and given we depend on science to solve some of our biggest problems, and given we have a lot of smart, passionate, dedicated people going into the sciences to solve those problems, an institutional structure that fails to deliver on the promise of giving those people a meaningful career solving problems that matter is a serious problem for Enlightenment civilization.
Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on the order of, "Well, I held up a prism and took a quick look and it seemed ciruclar to me! Mr Newton is a fool."
OTOH Goethe (yes, that Goethe...), 200 years later, made roughly the same argument and developed some pretty amazing results from it.
It doesn't look like had it rough though. From his early years he was kinda distinguished[1] at age 27. But thanks for the heads-up and your Newton story. These stories are the ones I enjoy the most :-)
ps. You certainly don't look like an idiot to me. But I see what you mean, as Shakespeare often hinted, the wise men allows doubt into any conversation while the fool men never does. :-)
This is also known as impostor syndrome [1] vs. Dunning-Kruger effect [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IntelligenceEqual...
If you have a truly original idea, you're essentially calling out all your peers for being frauds for not noticing it themselves, so they will ridicule or censor you.
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3-ruJk...
Note that the link is from 2013.
But when are we going to put our heads together to analyze the problem into its mutable points and immutable points, the better to find alternative arrangements and solutions?
To provide a counter to the hopelessness:
As much as I love the academy, and research, I never wanted to be a professor. After my postdoc I started a research and consulting company (thanks HN for many wise words of advice about going solo). I firmly believe that, in contrast to the hierarchical and managerial state of academic (and a lot of industrial) research, there is a valuable role to be played by professional scientists. So many of the badass scientists I know have such a small fraction of their time that they can devote to actually carrying out research[1], that all of their wisdom, efficiency and so forth is somewhat wasted as they go about their managerial lives as professors or industrial scientists. I don't think it has to be this way.
I haven't been doing this forever, but so far it's been great. I have been doing some interesting, research-oriented consulting (and some not so interesting, too), which puts money in the bank. It also lets me see some of the problems that industrial scientists deal with. I'm in geoscience and the consulting so far is all in energy, and unsolved problems there are just as cool if not cooler than the question du jour in academic work--and some of the problems are exactly the same... And it's very rewarding to be brought in on some of these projects, and help hard-working people out.
I also spend a good chunk of my time, half maybe, doing my own research, collaborating with others, and writing proposals to NSF and other public agencies. I of course have more ideas than I can ever hope to see through, but I feel very free to work on whatever I see fit, even if it's a bit outside of my experience and comfort zone.
In the end, I am hoping (and betting) that my accumulating strengths as a professional researcher, combined with the falling costs of a lot of science, particularly computational science and online journal access, will allow me to be as productive or more as I would managing graduate students and post-docs, and a lot happier. I also think that by doing consulting instead of teaching (which I enjoy but not enough), I can have a bit higher maximum potential income as well, and take a month off to raft through Peru when I get the hankering.
OK, so just to summarize, this ended up more biographical than I wanted: I think there is a market for professional, non-academic scientists, both in academic-type (i.e. gov't-funded) and industrial research. It seems to be the road less traveled but if you're not into that then science might not be your thing. It might be very hard at times, and hopefully you have a good support network.
[1]: I do believe that writing proposals is actually doing a very important part of science by making you get your shit together and vet yourself. It'd be fun if it wasn't for the existential pressure.
Teaching is important for a number of reasons, but it also functions as a sales front for research. Research is important, but only educated people can see its importance. If 40% of the next generation's leaders learn calculus and 5% learn complex analysis, then they'll have an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics and an understanding of its importance. However, if they're taught by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who've lost all enthusiasm for the subject, then the rising generation will lose sight of why the work is importat.
This is, of course, bad for science but even worse for the humanities, where the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next (i.e. teaching) is almost the entire point, because commercial applications are nonexistent. I won't call most humanities research unimportant, because I don't understand most of it, but I will say that if you have a leadership class as ignorant of the humanities as the American upper and upper-middle classes are, you're going to have a hard time selling anyone on the importance of it. Most people are quick to decry what they don't understand as useless and unnecessary.
When the research rock stars started de-emphasizing teaching and offloading the work, the rest of society (including university administrators) called their bluff. If they were so ready to slough off the teaching (which is what most of the world sees as the real work) to overworked adjuncts, then why have professors at all? Of course, a few politically adept stars (grant-writing rain-makers) managed to hold on... but the quiet researchers are done.
The injustice of the tenure system is that the people to suffer for this attitude were the young-- not the entrenched tenured professors who created that culture. The jobs got taken away, but not from the people who copped that negative attitude toward teaching. It was the rising generation (from 1985-ish to today) that got fucked. At this point, you have a toxic culture of scarcity and the false poverty mentality (i.e. the "I'm 75% poorer than my friends, so I'm living a life of service and the rules don't apply to me" attitude).