8 ms·

I’m leaving academia

• klyrs 6y ago
  So much of this resonates with me, and I quit for a lot of the same reasons. My immigration experience was a bit easier as an American immigrant in Canada, but for example, "universal" healthcare is a myth. You can't get public insurance in your first 6 months. You get travel insurance, except when you visit your home country "because it's presumed that your home country will cover your health needs." Guffaw.
  • petermcneeley 6y ago
    " but for example, "universal" healthcare is a myth. You can't get public insurance in your first 6 months." We also have "universal" voting rights as well that are not accessible till you become a citizen.
    • __s 6y ago
      You also have felony disenfranchisement in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
• alpineidyll3 6y ago
  Perhaps part of the reason quit lit is so common is that colleagues who remain recoil in horror when they talk with someone who quit. The quitter is left with no one to talk to but the cold vacuum of internet. For months I would get emails asking if I was "okay". When I would giddily explain that I've never made a better decision than leaving my faculty appointment-- that would be enough to never hear from him/her again. Academia in its modern, McKinseyfied, perverse form doesn't do much good for anyone/anything besides endowments. It's really hard to admit that after you've sunk a decade into it (and are supposedly lucky enough to be faculty). For my own sake, I wish there had been a faster way to look behind the curtain... C'est la vie!
  • bladewolf47 6y ago
    First time I've encountered the term McKinseyfied in the context of academia, can you elaborate on that?
    • brighton36 6y ago
      Prestige as a product. Which, is increasingly the function of the university.
    • scroot 6y ago
      I believe that the poster means that the University system (in the US at least) has been overtaken by "management theory" over the past four decades or so. This is the same theory prominent in business schools / MBA programs. As a consequence we see the vast expansion of academic bureaucracy, completely different metrics for "success," and an attitude towards students that treats them as customers rather than pupils. It's worth noting that the core aspects of academia have been either pushed out or dramatically altered. Universities might be flush with cash, but they do not pay their teachers (it's no coincidence that adjunctification of the system begins with the management theory era). Professors are left to fight for resources that are being spent elsewhere: on sustaining a much larger bureaucracy (this or that "provost"), or on ancillary services like college sports or other customer-focussed amenities.
      • alpineidyll3 6y ago
        Better than I could have said it
      • noobermin 6y ago
        I want to believe this won't be sustainable but given the demand for college increasing every year it looks like it will continue until something cracks.
    • alpineidyll3 6y ago
      University governance has been aligned by dollars to departments like the business school, which literally didn't exist just a few decades ago. Provost's plan using dollars as the metric of value. These changes have completely changed what the word university means, although these institutions have the same names. Here's an academic account: https://www.aaup.org/article/rise-and-coming-demise-corporate-university https://www.aaup.org/article/rise-and-coming-demise-corporat... For easier digestion Scott Galloway is spot on (Prof at nyu) https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0 https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0
• semi_good 6y ago
  Real world rewards brevity. I predict a learning curve.
• phkahler 6y ago
  Do these guys ever talk about how they love teaching? The primary purpose of universities is ostensibly teaching, yet these people are all about other things. That's fine, but perhaps they really are working in the wrong place.
  • smoyer 6y ago
    I'm not sure how much teaching people at this level actually do.
  • goldemerald 6y ago
    I don't think a university's primary purpose is teaching; I believe it's for research. For example, a PhD prepares you for a life of research, not one of teaching. At my institution, advisors strongly prefer their PhD students are RAs and not TAs (research assistants who do no teaching, vs teaching assistants who might be responsible for an entire class). If you look at a professor's job description, it's often 16 hours teaching duties per week, with the rest for research. Most professors I know rarely work less than 60 hours a week, so the majority of that time is on research related work.
    • mattbk1 6y ago
      It depends on the university and the department, something that is lost on a lot of undergrads picking a school. Perhaps I'm old-school, but IMHO (as someone with a PhD), the obligation to teach comes with the advanced degree/advanced knowledge. You were trained to know more about this subject than most other people in the world, therefore part of your job (whether paid or not) is to teach others in some way.
      • magicsmoke 6y ago
        That depends on who you assign the professor to teach. If they're teaching and training new PhDs and researchers that need to know the latest knowledge in the field, then that's a reasonable use of the professor's research time. It could be this professor is one of dozens of people around the world actually qualified to teach and interpret the results of ongoing research. If they're being assigned to teach undergrads Chem 101 than that's a waste of valuable time. Universities should be bifurcated into research organizations and public education organizations. Research organizations should still teach, but to an audience of trainee researchers. Public education organizations can focus their time teaching the majority of students using polished pedagogical skills and collating key results from research organizations into more accessible formats.
• supernova87a 6y ago
  Certain relatively more "pure" sciences have a very bad habit of making people feel bad about leaving -- or people who are in those fields going through a lot of "departure guilt" placed on themselves. I have learned that this is not because they have some objectively better life (or prestige) in academia, but rather because most people within the field don't know what the real world is outside and subject themselves to a hostage-like mentality. The sad thing is that everyone leaves academia at some point (practically speaking, except for the few lifelong people who get to the very top -- and that is like hitting the lottery, so why bet on it). If you're sure to leave, why contribute to giving people angst about leaving? Why feel guilt over something that is an unavoidable part of the path? These fields should more actively show students and researchers that there is life / jobs outside of the field and what you can do with your degree and education. The field I am pretty sure will only become better because of it. It will not be like you turned traitor to it and are worthy of only being talked about in hushed tones as "someone who left".
• NicolasGorden 6y ago
  I read the article in full. I love his disclaimers at the end, it avoids people using this for their own confirmation bias. It seems there must always be a balanced tension between those that cooperate and those that pressure against cancerous cooperation within any system. I think as the world becomes more complex and interconnect, as people become more specialized and interdependent, there's a trend that is skewing our reward system toward cooperation to the detriment of the balance needed between the two forces. I think this is happening at multiple social levels including the business level, but it's most visible in academia since academia lacks a clear success metric.
• ssalazar 6y ago
  Left academia shortly after finishing my PhD and haven't looked back in the slightest. Aside from the issues of personal harm touched on by the author, I felt serious ethical issues participating in a system that convinces incoming students to make financial decisions that in many cases were demonstrably not in their best interests.
  • alpineidyll3 6y ago
    Ditto and kudos!
  • stepstop 6y ago
    What about teaching at the community college leve and provide the insight there?
    • ssalazar 6y ago
      Community college is certainly a key part of the solution for students (we recommended many students pad out their non-major credits this way to save time/money), but for an academic with an R1 STEM PhD its unfortunately not a great mix of impact/compensation compared to going industry.
• whatever1 6y ago
  Welcome to the corporate world where you will have to obey to obscure requests, work on boring projects, spend all of your day in useless meetings, and suck it up. On a different note, the grass is always greener on the other side.
  • readhn 6y ago
    Time to change a job... 1 meeting a week here .. Management is super against wasting everyone's time in endless useless meetings.
    • whatever1 6y ago
      Regardless what the management’s strategy is, you have to clap.
  • JamesBarney 6y ago
    Except for the useless meetings, is this that different from academia?
    • whatever1 6y ago
      Being a professor is more like being a business owner, than an employee. You are the master of your own, you get to have people working on your ideas, but granted you have to submit a lot of proposals to achieve so. Definitely though you don’t have anybody over your neck dictating you what you should be doing day-in, day-out.
      • JamesBarney 6y ago
        Isn't that just tenured professors, a small portion of academia, which doesn't include adjunct professors, teacher assistants, or research assistants?
        • throwawaygh 6y ago
          > tenured professors It includes all tenure-track professors. > which doesn't include adjunct professors Yeah, those are called "temp teachers". Don't get distracted by the fact that they teach courses at a university instead of a high school. The job is functionally the same. > teacher assistants, research assistants That's not a job. That's a thing a student can do to receive funding for their studies. It's up to the student to make sure that they use the time they invest in their phd program wisely. Good professors will help.
• sequoia 6y ago
  > in a state which mainly grows corn and racism. He sounds like a condescending prick. He even admits as much. Why did he apply to work somewhere where he would be surrounded by people he considers so infinitely inferior to himself? One can say "I don't want to live there" without insulting everyone who does live there. His work sounds immensely valuable, it's sad he hasn't internalized the fact that working with other people & in institutions requires patience and personal compromise. Or perhaps he has and that's why he's quitting. I'm sorry to say I predict he'll have a rude awakening when he learns that most of these compromises are neccesary in the private sector as well. I understand his complaints & they seem legitimate, but buddy... "if you walk around running into assholes all day, perhaps you're the asshole." And his considering his condescending, archly superior tone towards those he considers beneath him, I'd wager you could lose the "perhaps." EDIT: If you just read the bits between "Resistance / lack of options for the work I want to do" and "Conclusion" it's quite an interesting and informative blog post!
  • NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    In academia, it's often so hard to get a job you'll take that place that offers you one, no matter where it is, so you can get started. The thing that bugs me is that article is just laid out in a painful way. It's like a fluff article that has just a few things to say but shreds the short version and fills out a much longer space.
    • sequoia 6y ago
      I totally get it, my dad moved to Tennessee for a professorship, and I followed him a few years later while in highschool. It wasn't my first choice! But after a month or two of grousing about what a shitty little 2-bit town I thought Johnson City was as a highschooler, my dad suggested I chill out on criticizing the town and the people in it all the time, and I think that was good advice. While it may not have been a great "culture fit" for me, that doesn't make me better than the people who live there. I also would not move away from where I like to live for a job.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I wonder if this is after years of being called a Mexican... that kinda tends to piss most people off.
• brofallon 6y ago
  Many folks, especially those in academia, really seem to value academic positions, but I'm not really sure where that comes from. Teaching isn't often the greatest part (though I recognize that not every professor has to teach, much), the success of much of your work is at the whimsy of a small handful of reviewers who typically aren't held accountable for the quality of their reviews, and the schedule can be very demanding pre-tenure, at least. Of course, many annoyances also exist outside academia, I'm just saying that academic jobs are no panacea, and I'm not sure why so many people value them so highly I have a PhD but ended up working in "The Industry" and it's been awesome - good salary, interesting problems, smart co-workers, real-world impact.
  • lambdatronics 6y ago
    It comes from the ideal -- the freedom to work on big ideas/problems, with an approach of your choosing. There are a lot of parallels between running a lab as a professor and launching a start-up. The whole grant & publishing review process has really gotten ridiculous -- but incoming grad students aren't informed about this, generally.
• codezero 6y ago
  It's quite a bummer that he identified two things I identified that caused me to decide to leave academia, age and pedigree. I was working in a field that wasn't super hot or trendy, but for which there was a lot of low hanging fruit that a ... lesser physicist could actually work on to move the needle. It was gratifying, but the "system" for granting PhDs, and granting funding isn't designed for "B" players, and it's a bummer. My age and experience in other fields helped me contribute to the rest of my team's goals in ways that I think wouldn't have otherwise happened if someone from a more traditional path had been on the team instead. Oh well :)
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  > I’m working out of state, but I refuse to uproot my wife, who has an excellent job where we live and doesn’t want to move for very good reasons, and my cat, who I’m afraid is now chronically ill, for an allegedly-tenured job at a university in a state which mainly grows corn and racism. I find that most people who hold these prejudices against "flyover country" have the privilege of never having their worldview tested.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Other scientists on HN: are his comments about how badly science is being done accurate? If so, why/how did it get this way? Have you had any experience of it? I'm kinda horrified that all the comments so far are about academic careers and no-one's mentioned one of the fascinating parts of the article: that science is being done badly and the task of spotting that and clearing it up is not considered valuable.