3 ms·

I finished my Ph.D. in 1991 and thought I wanted to be a professor. I applied to a few dozen openings, but it was the middle of a recession [1] and there were

by lisper 3y ago

I finished my Ph.D. in 1991 and thought I wanted to be a professor. I applied to a few dozen openings, but it was the middle of a recession [1] and there were hundreds of people applying for single openings. I was not a standout candidate so I never stood a chance. In retrospect, having now learned more about the realities of academic life, this is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think I would have been as miserable as a professor as I was as a grad student. The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. There is no more freedom in academia than there is anywhere else in the world. The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. Of course you can get yourself into a nice comfortable niche where you are The Man and all your proposals are greenlit by default, but you can do that outside of academia too by finding a patron or a big enough group of fans, but then you are beholden to them. The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks. Always be careful what you wish for. The hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_U...

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. (...) The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. (...) The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks. As a tenured professor, I can confirm all this as an accurate description. Furthermore, to add to what you said, you don't even have real freedom on things like where to publish - the typical question of "why don't you just refuse to submit articles to exploitative for-profit publishers like Elsevier?" - because you are almost always working with PhD students, postdocs, etc. And while your career may not depend on where you publish, theirs does. (A possible exception to this is mathematics, and maybe some other research fields, where many papers are single-author. But that only happens in a minority of disciplines). There is something where the freedom is more or less real, though: choosing research subjects. This year I wanted to do some fun experiments with LLMs, not very related to my usual research. I found a collaborator, did that, had fun, and it's part of the work I'm paid to do. That's a kind of freedom that most jobs don't give you. Even that is quite restricted because most of your research has to be on things that funding agencies like, but at least it's something.

by lisper 3y ago

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. (...) The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. (...) The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks. As a tenured professor, I can confirm all this as an accurate description. Furthermore, to add to what you said, you don't even have real freedom on things like where to publish - the typical question of "why don't you just refuse to submit articles to exploitative for-profit publishers like Elsevier?" - because you are almost always working with PhD students, postdocs, etc. And while your career may not depend on where you publish, theirs does. (A possible exception to this is mathematics, and maybe some other research fields, where many papers are single-author. But that only happens in a minority of disciplines). There is something where the freedom is more or less real, though: choosing research subjects. This year I wanted to do some fun experiments with LLMs, not very related to my usual research. I found a collaborator, did that, had fun, and it's part of the work I'm paid to do. That's a kind of freedom that most jobs don't give you. Even that is quite restricted because most of your research has to be on things that funding agencies like, but at least it's something.