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> This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not
by gwd 3y ago
> This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia?
The problem with academia is basic mathematics. In a system where there are a fixed number of tenured professorships, where each tenured professor has the job for life, each professor should produce only a single tenure-track PhD student in their entire career.
OK, so to deal with attrition and other unforeseen circumstances, perhaps 10 tenured professors should produce 11 tenure-track PhD students. But definitely not the situation we have now, where each professor produces dozens of PhD students in the course of their career who go on to attempt to get tenure.
The people trying to get tenure don't want to admit the system is broken, because that would be to admit they just weren't good enough to get tenure.
The people who have tenure have every incentive to keep it going, because it means they have an army of highly-skilled and highly-motivated postdocs willing to work long hours for peanuts for a decade or two.
- godelski 3y agoIt's a bit worse than that. Prestige matters a lot too. General rule of thumb is that you can only apply to a position at a university of equal or lesser ranking than the one you were previously at. (obviously can still climb the ladder, in many ways, but this is a strong pattern all throughout the process from High School to Tenure) You're exactly right about the number of positions problem too. Because clearly the result of this is that the quality and methods from higher ranking institutions diffuse into lower ranking ones. Hell, when I was at a community college I had a professor from Harvard and several from Berkeley. Prestigue doesn't make sense in a system like that because you can't maintain an edge when you are literally telling the people you trained to go work somewhere else. I think you're exactly right about the reasons people keep quiet. But this is not helpful to anyone, especially the universities. They are certainly losing a lot of money and even prestige from all of this. You don't make Nobel laureates with publish or perish. But no one wants to shake things up, which is weird because academia is __explicitly__ supposed to be the place where you can focus on things that aren't profit driven. Or at least short ROI. It is a loss for the country too, as it means a lot of academics move away from low risky TRL research and follow a model much closer to industry research (which is profit driven) Historically industry has (generally) relied on academic research doing low TRL and then they bring it to mid and high TRL. We've lost sight of what we're trying to accomplish.
- tnecniv 3y agoI just wanted to comment regarding the rule you mentioned and wanted to say that I was always told that, unofficially, you can always move up but only a tier at a time and you don’t want to move down if you can avoid it because then you likely have to move back up. The calculus does get harder though the longer you’re in the game — you might elect to move down because you’re significant other gets a promotion or you don’t want to uproot your family, etc.
- godelski 3y agoFor sure, they aren't hard rules. There is also the aspect that locations matter to some people. It's worth noting though that universities have a unique negotiating token, in that you can also negotiate for a job for your partner as well. I think universities are often forced into this because of the natural location constraints.
- chaxor 3y agoI think they may have been commenting a bit more about the incentive structure and that any "prestigious researcher" or institution typically got there via questionable ethics, etc.