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I remember talking to one my professors about this particular research topic I found interesting, and that I’d be interested in working with prof X about this t
by Agingcoder 3y ago
I remember talking to one my professors about this particular research topic I found interesting, and that I’d be interested in working with prof X about this topic. I was told that it was a great idea, it was also important that I understand I would never get a stable job in academia if prof X was my advisor, because of political reasons.
My father ( university professor) told me that unfortunately this was all too common.
I stayed clear of academia after that.
- hgsgm 3y agoPolitically as in general society politics, or as in academic infighting politics?
- Agingcoder 3y agoAcademia infighting politics mainly - my sentence was indeed very ambiguous.
- drewcoo 3y agoProfessor X is misunderstood, even though he tries to coexist with non-mutants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_X
- hotpotamus 3y agoMy first job working for minimum wage in a theater, I was invited to go to IHOP or someplace like that after we closed. I asked what they talked about and the answer I got was, "mostly work politics", so I suppose that was a good early lesson for 15 year old me that basically wherever you get two people together, you will get politics. My suspicion for the reason that academia is seen as being so political is because they're actually not very good at it. The top of the heap of political practitioners in my experience tend to be the VP+ level leadership in publicly traded companies.
- hnfong 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law > Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
- NegativeK 3y agoSomewhat related: https://shed.bike/ https://shed.bike/
- Agingcoder 3y agoI think academia is political because it’s a very small world, and chronically underfunded, so people fight. If there were loads of open positions, with unlimited research budgets, and decent salaries, I hope they wouldn’t fight and there would be no politics. But I might be wrong on that one :-) I work on a daily basis with Vp+ level leadership of a publicly traded company and yes, they’re much better at it. But there’s just as much politics as in academia : people fight for power, money, prestige which are increasingly concentrated as you go up.
- dehrmann 3y agoIs academia actually underfunded, or does is just create a large, underpaid labor class it can motivate with a tenure carrot? I don't get a sense that there's actually that much more research that needs to be done as much as we need a lot of TAs and lecturers.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoPersonally I'm more under the impression that there's a lot of research that needs to be done, but parts of the system other than just funding make it hard to do it. "More funding" would be a necessary part of a solution, but would only work when coupled to other necessary measures to encourage genuinely productive science.