4 ms·

I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. People are strung along for years, and then you are suddenly either out or you have tenure for life. (A f

I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. People are strung along for years, and then you are suddenly either out or you have tenure for life. (A friend compared a professorship it to being the pope, which I think is fitting.) You need to have a perfect track record. You have to have worked in a couple of different places, with no gaps, you need a lot of publications and "visibility". And even then, in my experience about 50% of positions are given on merit, and 50% are given seemingly randomly. Even if you are incredibly self-confident and count yourself among the top 5%, it is still a gamble. Academia works like a guild, or maybe like the military (up or out). But it seems everybody would benefit if hiring was changed to be more like outside academia. No more temporary positions vs unfireable professors, but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts. Don't insist on an unbroken career and years of travelling journeymanship, but value broad experiences and career changers. I know a lot of people who are considered academic failures but were welcomed in industry "with kisses". I don't think the cause is just resistance from entrenched people, or ideology. There is a lot of neoliberal pressure to run universities more like companies. And I guess hiring is one of the few areas where this would not be a bad thing. Is it just shortsightedness then? Or lack of funding, and scarcity of jobs?

gus_massa 5y ago
If you can't get a tenure at MIT, you can try at a second tier university. If that fails, you can try at t third tier university. You will get a lower pay and less money for research projects and travel, and the students will be not as brilliant. Also, you may have to teach more courses and have less research time.
- NonEUCitizen 5y ago
  Or try for a university in the wealthier parts of Asia and possibly get paid more?
- balsam 5y ago
  Yeah this guy moved on to Toulouse in France it seems. He obviously had/has options, but I cant blame him for feeling betrayed.
rich_sasha 5y ago
Academia is extremely competitive (in terms of applicants per post), which probably explains most of it. Show business, or generally arts and performance, which are similar (not great working conditions but huge supply of labour relative to demand) seem similarly pathological. What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce. Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior. I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.
vintermann 5y ago
It's worth noting that other countries do things differently. Tenure for life is far from universal.
- vinay427 5y ago
  I’m sure this is true, but I’m curious if you have any experience with this in another country? The one European country in which I’ve been in a university setting seemed to have similar tenure-pressure dynamics as in the US.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    The UK doesn't have Tenure. I think it's true that the academic pressures are similar, there's still not enough secure jobs for those who want them. But it does at least mean that professors have to continue performing to a reasonable standard if they expect to keep their jobs, and this frees up space for new people if they don't.
    - pmyteh 5y ago
      Yes - formal tenure was abolished under Thatcher's government in the 80s. The academic job market here is also brutal, but it's brutal on admission to lectureships (tenure-track assistant professorships in the US). Once appointed on a 'permanent' contract there's no race for tenure: it's like an ordinary public-sector job where you can have a reasonable expectation of continuing employment but aren't immune from redundancy (==layoff) or dismissal for poor performance (which is quite rare). It's a better system for early-mid career academics than the US, IMO, and I'm glad I'm here. Other systems are better for other career stages: some European countries give PhD students actual employment protections and a salary, while life as a tenured full prof in Germany or the US is sweeter than the British equivalent. Doesn't stop the other grim employment aspects of modern academia, either: exploitation of hourly-paid PhD students for most of the teaching, far fewer posts than qualified applicants, eternal postdocry etc.
  - niek_pas 5y ago
    Most universities in The Netherlands do not have a tenure-track system (no automatic promotion). It is not uncommon for faculty to retain the rank of assistant or associate professor until retirement, without ever becoming full professor.
tgv 5y ago
> but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts Ah, the eternal post-doc. That surely will shake things up for the better.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Sure, why not. I'd rather be eternal post-doc than eternal "individual contributor" at some ad company (although the latter sure pays more). And I'd rather be eternal post-doc, than time-limited post-doc and suddenly 40 years old and having to find a new career.
sytelus 5y ago
Hiring in academia is weired because of freedom and essentially a life-time paychecks without any real commitment you have to make. So they need to make sure the person have an internal drive aka intrinsic motivation and has energy to go for long time rather than one-hit wonders. Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.
jltsiren 5y ago
Traditional universities were structured like guilds. After you completed your studies in liberal arts, you got the rank of master and the license to teach at any university. The members (masters) of the university made decisions by vote. The idea that universities should have bosses and that the faculty are employees is rather new. These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there. Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.
- AmericanBlarney 5y ago
  While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).
  - willis936 5y ago
    It depends on the grant. Most grants do not let you take ownership of the research. Nearly all publicly funded research contracts require the results to be public domain.
gwd 5y ago
> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job. I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult. At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.
- NonEUCitizen 5y ago
  Why are highly qualified folks like your friends not going into industry instead?
  - ouid 5y ago
    Well, the post was written by someone who clearly doesn't understand their friends motives, yeah? Perhaps they don't want to work in ad-tech because that would not give them satisfaction.
    - gwd 5y ago
      I specifically said that the situation in CS was better, because industry does such a good job competing for PhDs. When I was finishing my PhD in CS 15 years ago, doing a post-doc before applying for a tenure-track position was pretty rare, and only done if you felt that you'd benefit from it in some way. My friends are in the sciences, which has far fewer opportunities in industry. They're not going to end up in ad-tech either way.
jsnodlin 5y ago
jgerrish 5y ago
> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common. As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat! Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed. What's today's hot topic?
urthor 5y ago
A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems. I want to address the meta-problem: Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration. To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model. Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds. The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department. Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.
jansen555 5y ago
That is because academia have access to government loan aka free money. There isn't any real competition to their students. If we make 1. Penalizing failed students, 2. Easily retransferable any students to different college, 3. Warranty as in stuff they teach must allow the students to get relevant jobs within 4 years of graduating, all their prices are fixed and non inflationable and displayed in comparisons to other schoola like newegg, you will see them behave differently. Right now they are just a protected racket that can do what they want even racism and biasism on "corporate scale".

gus_massa 5y ago

If you can't get a tenure at MIT, you can try at a second tier university. If that fails, you can try at t third tier university. You will get a lower pay and less money for research projects and travel, and the students will be not as brilliant. Also, you may have to teach more courses and have less research time.

NonEUCitizen 5y ago
Or try for a university in the wealthier parts of Asia and possibly get paid more?
balsam 5y ago
Yeah this guy moved on to Toulouse in France it seems. He obviously had/has options, but I cant blame him for feeling betrayed.

rich_sasha 5y ago

Academia is extremely competitive (in terms of applicants per post), which probably explains most of it. Show business, or generally arts and performance, which are similar (not great working conditions but huge supply of labour relative to demand) seem similarly pathological. What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce. Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior. I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.

vintermann 5y ago

It's worth noting that other countries do things differently. Tenure for life is far from universal.

vinay427 5y ago
I’m sure this is true, but I’m curious if you have any experience with this in another country? The one European country in which I’ve been in a university setting seemed to have similar tenure-pressure dynamics as in the US.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  The UK doesn't have Tenure. I think it's true that the academic pressures are similar, there's still not enough secure jobs for those who want them. But it does at least mean that professors have to continue performing to a reasonable standard if they expect to keep their jobs, and this frees up space for new people if they don't.
  - pmyteh 5y ago
    Yes - formal tenure was abolished under Thatcher's government in the 80s. The academic job market here is also brutal, but it's brutal on admission to lectureships (tenure-track assistant professorships in the US). Once appointed on a 'permanent' contract there's no race for tenure: it's like an ordinary public-sector job where you can have a reasonable expectation of continuing employment but aren't immune from redundancy (==layoff) or dismissal for poor performance (which is quite rare). It's a better system for early-mid career academics than the US, IMO, and I'm glad I'm here. Other systems are better for other career stages: some European countries give PhD students actual employment protections and a salary, while life as a tenured full prof in Germany or the US is sweeter than the British equivalent. Doesn't stop the other grim employment aspects of modern academia, either: exploitation of hourly-paid PhD students for most of the teaching, far fewer posts than qualified applicants, eternal postdocry etc.
- niek_pas 5y ago
  Most universities in The Netherlands do not have a tenure-track system (no automatic promotion). It is not uncommon for faculty to retain the rank of assistant or associate professor until retirement, without ever becoming full professor.

tgv 5y ago

> but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts Ah, the eternal post-doc. That surely will shake things up for the better.

captainmuon 5y ago
Sure, why not. I'd rather be eternal post-doc than eternal "individual contributor" at some ad company (although the latter sure pays more). And I'd rather be eternal post-doc, than time-limited post-doc and suddenly 40 years old and having to find a new career.

sytelus 5y ago

Hiring in academia is weired because of freedom and essentially a life-time paychecks without any real commitment you have to make. So they need to make sure the person have an internal drive aka intrinsic motivation and has energy to go for long time rather than one-hit wonders. Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.

jltsiren 5y ago

Traditional universities were structured like guilds. After you completed your studies in liberal arts, you got the rank of master and the license to teach at any university. The members (masters) of the university made decisions by vote. The idea that universities should have bosses and that the faculty are employees is rather new. These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there. Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.

AmericanBlarney 5y ago
While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).
- willis936 5y ago
  It depends on the grant. Most grants do not let you take ownership of the research. Nearly all publicly funded research contracts require the results to be public domain.

gwd 5y ago

> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job. I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult. At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.

NonEUCitizen 5y ago
Why are highly qualified folks like your friends not going into industry instead?
- ouid 5y ago
  Well, the post was written by someone who clearly doesn't understand their friends motives, yeah? Perhaps they don't want to work in ad-tech because that would not give them satisfaction.
  - gwd 5y ago
    I specifically said that the situation in CS was better, because industry does such a good job competing for PhDs. When I was finishing my PhD in CS 15 years ago, doing a post-doc before applying for a tenure-track position was pretty rare, and only done if you felt that you'd benefit from it in some way. My friends are in the sciences, which has far fewer opportunities in industry. They're not going to end up in ad-tech either way.

jsnodlin 5y ago

jgerrish 5y ago

> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common. As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat! Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed. What's today's hot topic?

urthor 5y ago

A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems. I want to address the meta-problem: Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration. To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model. Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds. The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department. Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.

jansen555 5y ago

That is because academia have access to government loan aka free money. There isn't any real competition to their students. If we make 1. Penalizing failed students, 2. Easily retransferable any students to different college, 3. Warranty as in stuff they teach must allow the students to get relevant jobs within 4 years of graduating, all their prices are fixed and non inflationable and displayed in comparisons to other schoola like newegg, you will see them behave differently. Right now they are just a protected racket that can do what they want even racism and biasism on "corporate scale".