5 ms·

It used to be possible to have have a successful academic career without publishing much - for example, one of my philosophy profs in college (at a top 10 schoo

• rebuilder 9y ago
  So... what the academics did wasnt very helpful, but at least they didn't do much of it?
  • marcosdumay 9y ago
    Those ones teached. Wether is was helpful or not depend on how good was the teaching and how useful is the knowledge. Not everybody in a teaching institution should be required to push humanity's knowledge forward. But then you get the problem of selecting those people without easily measured objective indicators. That's why it worked reasonably well when those were slightly low paying jobs restricted to a caste.
• adekok 9y ago
  > academia was a bastion of the male WASP elites that didn't have much pretense of serving the broader public Have things really changed? I suspect there are fewer males, but any job that demands 20 years of full-time concerted effort is likely to be dominated by men. Similarly, the western world is overwhelmingly caucasian, so again... the best predictor (now as then) is that white male professors will be represented disproportionately. > at least you didn't have the torrent of mediocre papers that you see today. That certainly is true. Stats for the humanities and social sciences are that 80% of the papers have zero citations. i.e. they have no contribution to the greater body of human work. In Physics (my background), most papers have 2-3 citations, and only a small percentage have 1 or fewer. I would say that if a discipline is dominated by uncited papers, then that discipline is probably a waste of time. And the professors who work in it are a net drain on society.
  • tnecniv 9y ago
    As a note, WASP refers to old money families with ties going back to the colonial era, not just middle-class/wealthy white dudes in America. Also, at least in STEM departments, you will see plenty of non-white names. > In Physics (my background), most papers have 2-3 citations, and only a small percentage have 1 or fewer Does that account for self-citations?
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > WASP refers to old money families with ties going back to the colonial era No, it refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, an ethno-religious group that cuts across socio-economic class divides and includes plenty of people that are neither old money nor descended from families that have been in the US since the founding (and excludes some old-money, from-the-founding families.)
      • PeterisP 9y ago
        It does exclude many large subpopulations from the many immigration waves coming after the colonial era. All the irish, italian, polish, jewish people; the vast majority of 19th and early 20th century (very large!) immigrants and their descendants aren't WASPs.
• nzjrs 9y ago
  An equally plausible interpretation is that universities have been transformed from teaching institutions into paper factories.