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Why William Deresiewicz Left Academia

10 points by jseliger 4y ago

jseliger 4y ago
He also wrote Excellent Sheep, a good book about the state of higher education.
ggm 4y ago
When I graduated in 82, a life in the Uni system was both possible and attractive. I went general staff, not academic. I think that at the time, the position was very strongly weighted to tenure == royalty but there were enough of them it was a bit more 'equal' -That said, if you got a continuing appointment in general staff you were doing ok (this is in the UK and Australia. in the UK in grant funded non-academic research/support roles your life is lived grant-to-grant. Its bad) Now, things have swung. Tenure is rare, and it's even more like Royalty because there are few. Most teaching staff are adjunct, insecure, unhappy. General Staff on the other hand, especially in specialist fields, get significant reward and do extremely well, because the University is now a cash printing machine and they run the machine: The underpaid, un-tenured teaching staff deliver it, the way a printer head makes the image, banging their foreheads against the papers the students write. General staff crank the handle and are renumerated. We've trashed the crown jewel of tertiary education. I also think publish-or-perish drove to a bad outcome in the paper-mill space because "peer" review is now not truth seeking, but "keep my competition out" I haven't worked in the Uni system since 2000. I don't miss it based on what I hear from family who still do. The one in general staff is doing fine. The ones retiring out from teaching/research roles say its broken. Selling tertiary degrees to overseas students generates $23b of revenue to the sector in Australia, and we're a comparative minnow in the space. It crashed during Covid, and we managed to trash our name in the space due to the lack of support for overseas students stuck in Australia. Thats going to cost us but having said that domestic students are sort-of smiling behind the mask because they have spent the last 20 years resenting the focus on sale of study to overseas students. Its a dilemma. Something to bear in mind, is that in Australia the university sector paid 17% or more of your gross income into superannuation, which meant it was near to public service levels of saved income for retirement. When you're a young gun academic this isn't a big deal but once you realise how long you might be retired, and need that money its a huge motivating factor. Add in students == cheap labour for childcare, on-campus childcare and health, parking, sports facilities, medical facilities, the package for campus life is very close to what FAANG do (and of course call a campus, for precisely that reason) without the pay of course. Its sad we don't still have a system which can accommodate retention of smart, interesting people. If he had published his book in a way which cut his Senior academics into the deal, and if he was a machine for writing in popSci to sell the Uni, rather than being interesting, he might have got what he wanted. That hard-core of independent, tenured, interesting public academic figures is shrinking back to the scale it was in the 1950s. But without independent income, it might wither and die. The university I studied in (York, UK) gave birth (academically) to interesting people. The author of "wild swans" for instance. It's where a lot of english literature academics went, after the Levisite wars of Oxbridge. Hermione Lee was there for a while. In the computer science field Wirth was in residence there, working on Modula, and pre-ADA proposals. A small university which is substantially the one which A.S. Byatt wrote about in "the virgin in the garden" and is not dissimilar to Malcolm Bradburys 'history man' -Both being the kind of literate author who would have found succour in a university then, but might struggle to do it now. It had an artist in residence. I doubt you could do that in a small red-brick university these days, where's the income coming from to do it? (she taught us printmaking, in-between doing her own works)

10 points by jseliger 4y ago

He also wrote Excellent Sheep, a good book about the state of higher education.

ggm 4y ago

When I graduated in 82, a life in the Uni system was both possible and attractive. I went general staff, not academic. I think that at the time, the position was very strongly weighted to tenure == royalty but there were enough of them it was a bit more 'equal' -That said, if you got a continuing appointment in general staff you were doing ok (this is in the UK and Australia. in the UK in grant funded non-academic research/support roles your life is lived grant-to-grant. Its bad) Now, things have swung. Tenure is rare, and it's even more like Royalty because there are few. Most teaching staff are adjunct, insecure, unhappy. General Staff on the other hand, especially in specialist fields, get significant reward and do extremely well, because the University is now a cash printing machine and they run the machine: The underpaid, un-tenured teaching staff deliver it, the way a printer head makes the image, banging their foreheads against the papers the students write. General staff crank the handle and are renumerated. We've trashed the crown jewel of tertiary education. I also think publish-or-perish drove to a bad outcome in the paper-mill space because "peer" review is now not truth seeking, but "keep my competition out" I haven't worked in the Uni system since 2000. I don't miss it based on what I hear from family who still do. The one in general staff is doing fine. The ones retiring out from teaching/research roles say its broken. Selling tertiary degrees to overseas students generates $23b of revenue to the sector in Australia, and we're a comparative minnow in the space. It crashed during Covid, and we managed to trash our name in the space due to the lack of support for overseas students stuck in Australia. Thats going to cost us but having said that domestic students are sort-of smiling behind the mask because they have spent the last 20 years resenting the focus on sale of study to overseas students. Its a dilemma. Something to bear in mind, is that in Australia the university sector paid 17% or more of your gross income into superannuation, which meant it was near to public service levels of saved income for retirement. When you're a young gun academic this isn't a big deal but once you realise how long you might be retired, and need that money its a huge motivating factor. Add in students == cheap labour for childcare, on-campus childcare and health, parking, sports facilities, medical facilities, the package for campus life is very close to what FAANG do (and of course call a campus, for precisely that reason) without the pay of course. Its sad we don't still have a system which can accommodate retention of smart, interesting people. If he had published his book in a way which cut his Senior academics into the deal, and if he was a machine for writing in popSci to sell the Uni, rather than being interesting, he might have got what he wanted. That hard-core of independent, tenured, interesting public academic figures is shrinking back to the scale it was in the 1950s. But without independent income, it might wither and die. The university I studied in (York, UK) gave birth (academically) to interesting people. The author of "wild swans" for instance. It's where a lot of english literature academics went, after the Levisite wars of Oxbridge. Hermione Lee was there for a while. In the computer science field Wirth was in residence there, working on Modula, and pre-ADA proposals. A small university which is substantially the one which A.S. Byatt wrote about in "the virgin in the garden" and is not dissimilar to Malcolm Bradburys 'history man' -Both being the kind of literate author who would have found succour in a university then, but might struggle to do it now. It had an artist in residence. I doubt you could do that in a small red-brick university these days, where's the income coming from to do it? (she taught us printmaking, in-between doing her own works)