5 ms·
It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
by mjklin 3y ago
It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI thought that was politics.
- mjklin 3y agoWhy not both?
- Fordec 3y agoDon't mistake self-congratulatory with show-y about academia. Only the home crowd know academics names, politics at least has the public eye on them.
- mjklin 3y agoI feel like this depends on the field. Newer / “hotter” fields (e.g. evo psych) tend to be dominated by rockstars while traditional / staid fields (e.g. linear algebra) have mostly solid and competent practitioners.
- Fordec 3y agoI haven't even heard of evo psych lol, never mind these "rockstars".
- psychomugs 3y agoOf the same vibe: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
- ModernMech 3y agoThis doesn't even make sense looking at national politics, which are far more vicious and the stakes are much higher.
- psychomugs 3y agoOf course national politics would be represented by the media as vicious and high-stakes: the media needs vicious and high-stakes messages to keep up viewership as its lifeline. Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline.
- ModernMech 3y agoDo you have any first-hand knowledge of academic politics, or can you offer any examples that demonstrate they are particularly "vicious"? When I think of vicious politics, I think of violence, which we see on the national stage. Would you say academic politics are violent, or no? > Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline. Can you support this statement?
- psychomugs 3y agoI have a PhD. Students are shackled to dead-end projects, uprooted from their communities by careerist mentors, and generally fucked over - in at least one case, literally - by their PIs. Scooping - having work similar to yours get published by another party - is a pervasive enough fear that reviewers can block publications to guard their own moats. Publication venues choose arbitrary selectiveness criteria, e.g. conference acceptance rates around 24.3%, to maintain an aura of high quality despite most papers being useless apart from bolstering citation metrics. Large projects that require many person-years of effort can only be done by already-established hype-leading "paper mill" labs where several grad students rotate who gets first author credit - the main measure for graduating. All of this accumulates into student depression and academic burnout that leaves academics alienated from each other, let alone other departments. As my advisor put it, academia is a pyramid scheme.