11 ms·

An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia

211 points by mad 13y ago

samspenc 13y ago
Having been in grad school for a while, I can totally relate on using grants to churn out papers and egos running research. Want to slightly disagree with this though: "Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little, while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and begins to play on the other side of the table." The same thing happens in industry, except that you're paid more, and your work is directly relevant to the world you see (and not just a journal/conference where it is never read again.)
- mapcar 13y ago
  True. In an organization with enough people, it's often more efficient to specialize (e.g., into workers and managers). I would say that the quoted statement is not an entirely fair characterization of managers (PIs) in academia though. It's always easy to discount the contribution of others and to believe you did all of the work, and believe me, you do a lot of it - but it's not a trivial matter that these "managers" already thought up and won money for the general research direction, and ultimately accept responsibility for the success of your projects; not to mention having to worry about funding you for the duration of your PhD. And do recall that they do had to be extremely patient with you while you were still learning the ropes - so you can't extrapolate your productivity in your last year back to the first year when assessing your cumulative value. ("you" used here in the generic sense) I won't deny that many managers are asshats as bosses, but their job is not so simple.
rayiner 13y ago
I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  Same reasons we ignore how capitalism messes with everything else.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  Same reasons we ignore how capitalism messes with everything else.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamentally corrupting. I think that only applies to mismanaged money; it can also be seen as fundamentally enabling.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I don't have a problem with science being a business. I have a problem with it being presented to kids as some idealistic pure thing.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Oh, I didn't mean you by "we", I meant the culture at large, specifically the scientific education system which never talks about money, outside of philosophy / policy / ethics classes.
    - deleted 13y ago
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  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.
dobbsbob 13y ago
They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
- vampirechicken 13y ago
  A marxist critique of community college.
  - rhythmvs 13y ago
    Or someone speaking out of experience? I can testify[1] on the nefarious influence of MBA-like groupthink in academia: gigantic counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, obsession with pseudo-measurability of everything, from impact factors over “quality assessment” to “standardization” of examination and “competence matrices”. Top-down bogus coming from people who failed in the corporate world and met their Peter’s principle in the academia they never left. [1] http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep-uit http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep...
    - dnautics 13y ago
      while your characterization rings true for academia, I hardly believe that those attributes are the provenance of MBAs. The irony is that we are in an age of scientism (as Feynman would say) and it's precisely the popularization of science itself that has led to 'pseudo-measurability' that you speak of. I remember chuckling that my humanities classes were grading essays via mathematical rubric at a time when the math classes (which were proof-based) would just mark errors and give an 'overall grade'. Maybe they were just CYA in case someone would claim unfairness - which would not be the fault of the Business school.... Rather the fault of the law school litigious mentality.
      - rhythmvs 13y ago
        You probably hit the nail with the popularization of science as the culprit for our captains-of-society’s obsession with measurability. And even more so with the institutionalized greed of law school sycophants. I don’t know about the role of the business schools — maybe I’m to harsh for my colleagues. But I noted that at least at my alma mater and its acquisitioned satellite colleges, the managerial caste consists of civil engineers with an MBA, only, and it’s a recurring pattern. The noble idea of a res publica litterarum, or a universitas scientiarum — it’s lost since the post-war baby boom.
jostmey 13y ago
Real scientific progress does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. Sadly, modern day scientist are expected to constantly produce amazing results or face losing funding. And what do you think happens?
- skylan_q 13y ago
  Let me try a guess: They draw radical conclusions from their research which cause alarm/concern/interest to those who have no idea about the body of research but grant funding in order to get more funding?
dnautics 13y ago
I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest – first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. contrast with the article and discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957
- gioele 13y ago
  The problem with being "too honest" about your work is that you would be the only one doing it. When you read a "scientific" paper, you read it expecting it to be a sweetened account of the reality. The test have obviously been performed using only few samples; out of the the ten described features of a system, only the two described in depth are currently implemented; the source is not available because it does not work on the famous really hard cases of the class of problems it should solve. The system is so polluted that if you start being as honest as you should be, the reviewers will think that you have done even less.
gajomi 13y ago
Can someone please change `wity' to `with' in the title? This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns. EDIT: typos
- dnautics 13y ago
  the difficulty with 'basic research with seemingly no value' (a good example is the fourier transform, which at the time was seen as a mathematical curiosity) - is that it lacks accountability. How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? This problem is even worse when you take taxpayer funds, because transparency and accountability are fundamental attributes of good governance, and the claim that 'it will be useful someday' potentially pushes the accountability aspect out to t=infinity.
  - munin 13y ago
    > How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? what's the difference? would you want to fund a Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies?
    - dnautics 13y ago
pertinhower 13y ago
A hate to trivialize a thoughtful article with a typographical point, but boy do I like my paragraph breaks when I can get them.
- jenrzzz 13y ago
  http://www.readability.com/articles/ace2uwfz http://www.readability.com/articles/ace2uwfz
  - Fuzzwah 13y ago
    I'm trying to find a way to actually make a readability link open up with nice formatting but can't work it out... any tip to avoid having to have people then click on the "switch to Readability view"?
- kevincennis 13y ago
  Well, while we're there, the HN link title is currently wrong also ("wity" vs "with").
- mayanksinghal 13y ago
  Try this: javascript:{v=document.createElement('style');v.innerHTML='blockquote{font-size:14px;width:500px}blockquote div{padding-bottom:8px}';document.body.appendChild(v)};void(0);
- aaren 13y ago
  I read it in 5 minutes with spreeder: http://www.spreeder.com/app.php http://www.spreeder.com/app.php
  - lutusp 13y ago
    I used Spreeder to read "War and Peace." It's about Russia.
    - aaren 13y ago
      I see your point :) but for short pieces like this I find I can store most of it in memory. I did jump into the full text a few times to refer back to things. I probably couldn't tell you much about the article now, but I felt I got it at the time.
dnautics 13y ago
I think that the critiques of academic science are spot-on, although I am not sure that I agree with some of his causes, for example that "science is a business". A lot of the raw pettiness that happens in science would totally sink all but the largest businesses. I am not sure what the solution to the problem is, but of course, I'm launching a science nonprofit startup to try and do things without having to deal with as much of this silliness as I can get away with. I fully expect that if it should live past 30 years, my nonprofit will begin to succumb to the very things I established it to address.
auggierose 13y ago
I have worked at EPFL for a short time as as post-doc, and it really is a great school. Its Ph.D. students are excellent, and so what he says has to be taken seriously. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that much of how Academia works today is inevitable. How many people are truly excellent in any job? Always only a small percentage. Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do? They have to represent something that they are not, because people outside of Academia must believe that 100% of Academia are excellent (otherwise they would revolt where all their tax money goes). Everything bad in Academia follows from this.
- dnautics 13y ago
  what happens to that percentage when a country decides that it doesn't have enough STEM people and forces people down an educational pipeline. And compromises its educational integrity in the process?
  - youredelightful 13y ago
    Plaques in Highschool bathrooms commemorating where Linus Torvalds once went poo poo.
  - auggierose 13y ago
    I guess you know the answer to that.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do?" Collaborate with the excellent 20%? What is wrong with encouraging more collaboration between researchers? Why should the mediocre 80% be pressured into publishing low-quality, CV-padding papers when they could be working effectively with geniuses?
nickthemagicman 13y ago
It's interesting to think though, that government funding has produced nearly every single form of medicine we have, it funded einstein, it was indirectly responsible for the internet. The problem is that you have to pay a bunch of parasites to support the few who are actually advancing the human race.
- irollboozers 13y ago
  It's inefficient and creates negative externalities.
  - andreasvc 13y ago
    Inefficient as compared to what?
    - irollboozers 13y ago
      Private funding, industrial innovation, etc. Subsidized infrastructure does not practically promote risky endeavors. It's created the side effects mentioned in the original article.
      - andreasvc 13y ago
        It may be more inefficient, but it funds basic research without a short-term payoff, or even a suggestion of long-term payoff.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I am about to finish my PhD, and you clearly state the difference between my view of academia and the author's. While I agree with most of the things the author mentioned, and they are a large part of why I will not be going into academia once I graduate, I also recognize that academics acknowledge theses problems and try to mitigate them. It is useless to complain about problems without giving a solution. Maybe, as you imply, the current situation is the least bad possible. I think that there is at least room for improvement when it comes to sharing of data and reproducibility, and I plan to work on reducing the technical barriers to both of these things. However, I don't have a solution to the social problem of how to rank academics and how to prevent academics from colluding in order to artificially raise their ranking.
irollboozers 13y ago
3 out of 6 of Microryza's current team are graduate school dropouts. Technically, you could add 1.5 more (Ethan Perlstein left academia, I never started), so 4.5 out of 6. We've all been there. I think you have to either be purposely oblivious or one of the extremely lucky ones blessed with a true research environment, but it is impossible for the new generation of scientists to not see the writing on the wall. Every single student is suffering from the symptoms, yet very few are doing things to change it. One note, echoing the original author - for myself personally, the letters 'PhD' no longer carry the same meaning anymore. If anything, it's become an additional signal that you once bought into a system that is selling you short. I still respect those who have PhD's, but only for what it once meant, not for what it means now.
- dnautics 13y ago
  while a PhD doesn't carry that much cachet anymore, doesn't that make 'PhD dropout' even worse? Isn't the impression then, that 'You couldn't finish even the lowered standards for the PhD' or 'You couldn't finish what you started' or 'You had the poor judgement to bite off something you couldn't handle'? I suppose the last isn't so bad given that the age that most Americans start grad school is just over 22
  - irollboozers 13y ago
    I know this sounds like rationalization, but I think we see it more like, "If we're doomed to suffer in a system where everyone is suffering, why not work to try to improve it and fix the problem instead?" In other words, if we weren't doing this, we would all be in grad school/academia getting PhD's and doing research anyways. This is more a reflection that we're giving up that opportunity in an effort to pay it forward. I would rather 'PhD' to mean something again than to have something that is meaningless.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    Actually, I see a lot of value in people who can recognize sunk costs and quit wasting resources, no matter how much they have happened to already waste. We all make mistakes, it's whether or not we choose to continue to make mistakes that is important.
ironparlance 13y ago
There is not a lot of funding for "basic" research any more. Those dollars are now usually sucked up by the most ruthless researchers that have risen to the top of the power pyramid and sit there until they die or retire. Young researchers coming up through the ranks have very few opportunities to pursue the basic research that may take ten or more years to manifest a rich result. They must serve their mentor's interest through publishing in his/her area, then hopefully land an adjunct position where this process is repeated for the Department/School, then after 12-20 years in academia they may get tenure and have a shot at some freedom if they aren't completely used up and corrupted. At that point it is much easier to just fall back into the patterns of abuse they endured except now it is they abusing their students.
singingfish 13y ago
I agree. (source: at similar stage of PhD to original author. Trying to get to the end myself though).
- pseut 13y ago
  Try not to agree too vigorously... regardless of how valid the author's points are, the end of grad school is usually the most stressful and depressing part (possibly of your career), especially until you get a job lined up. You're almost done.
- aaren 13y ago
  I am also months away from submission, so I wasn't entirely sure on what level I was sympathising with the authors arguments! Almost there...
mturmon 13y ago
"The art world got smaller, once more a somewhat parochial little world known mostly to its initiates. You can suffocate in these little worlds if you get them confused with the real world, so the smaller they are, as far as I'm concerned, the less confusion they generate." --Gary Indiana
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chuckkir 13y ago
I have my PhD, and this is the standard angst that many aspiring students face. There's a reason we have the term "ABD" for All But Dissertation. If he got that far into grad school without realizing that a Professor is an entrepreneur - hiring employees (grad students) to produce his product (knowledge) which he sells to customers (government and industry) through sales and marketing (conferences and papers) - then he was just naïve or kept the blinders on. My solution was to graduate and go into industry.
- jaynos 13y ago
  Exactly. My brother cut short his PhD and got a M.S. when he realized the life of a professor was basically being a manager with employees that were harder to fire. If he wanted to be a manager, he'd have gotten an MBA.
  - tensor 13y ago
    I can't help but feel that the MBA is the scourge of the modern world. People in leadership positions need to be experts in the field they lead.
  - chuckkir 13y ago
    Yes; it leads to unexpected consequences. The worst students are the ones the that the professor has the most incentive to graduate. So paradoxically the better you are, the less likely you are to be done quickly.
beloch 13y ago
This student makes some excellent points, and it's a bit scary how some things reinforce each other. Some journals, Nature being the most notable, chase impact factor above all else. The only thing they truly care about is that the papers they publish get cited. This means highly original work, which frequently doesn't get cited much for a long time, is less desirable than a turn-the-crank paper from a respected name. Researchers have been taught to prize Nature publications (thanks to the same flawed metric of merit) and spend a disproportionate amount of time submitting papers to Nature. When you write a paper you choose your target journal, and writing for Nature means you need to avoid rocking the boat too much, because they receive so many submissions that one minor criticism from a referee will torpedo your paper, even if that criticism is demonstrably wrong. Sometimes invalid criticisms are made by referees who are jealous, threatened, or merely lazy, but the editor has so many other submissions to deal with that he/she won't take the time to evaluate and understand the referee recommendations. Real science invites debate, but Nature's editors run screaming from it. Why do researchers care so much about playing this game if it compromises their writing and even their research? Even a tenured prof needs to hustle for funding if he wants to do more than teach and sit in his office. PI's are salesmen even more than they're managers! The very language itself is twisted at the core when applying for grants. The average researcher or project must be superlative in every way on paper or no money is going to come. You can't say you're doing something out of pure curiosity and the chances of it spawning another silicon valley are remote. It has to be imminently commercializable with potential for massive, revolutionary impact! Honesty will destroy you. If every research proposal delivered what it promised the World would be one giant Palo Alto. We would all be better off if some better way to allocate resources were found, but that's no easy task! As for the PhD student... There is more than meets the eye here. You don't walk away from 4 years of work in the last month without reason. Perhaps his thesis is a hopeless mess. Perhaps his relationship with his supervisor is hostile. Perhaps he's mentally ill. The last few months are ridiculously stressful after all! It's also very possible he or she is a lot more than one month from finishing. Hopefully there are people who care about this person and will help him/her get back on track and finish. The game is flawed, but the best way to ensure nobody wins is to refuse to play it.
- rthomas6 13y ago
  I'm not claiming you're wrong, but why isn't it possible for the student to simply no longer place any value in getting a PhD? That is what they claim, and intelligent people often make decisions on principle that make little practical sense.
cossatot 13y ago
I sympathize a lot with the frustration here and can agree on some of the points (especially the rankings/h-index/etc mania), however... Much of what is bemoaned here is simply a consequence of the fact that science is done by humans and generally costs money, so there is a necessary component of business-type activities (networking, fundraising, marketing, management). Scientists also have human qualities such as egos, desire for money, power, respect and the rest. Why should we be different, or held to a higher standard? Additionally, it's really hard to do original research. First off, really original good ideas are hard to come by; this problem is also not restricted to science or scientists. Then when new ideas come, they are often difficult or impossible to translate into scientific output, because of other constraints, such as lacking good enough data to test hypotheses. And then they typically fail, despite being great ideas. Really good, original, CORRECT ideas are far more rare. Furthermore, science would be much worse off if researchers worked like the author would prefer. If everyone spent 10 years without publishing, working on a completely original problem, there is zero replication. Additionally, if the experiment or approach fails, as they usually do, little is left. So do you publish negative results, and then move on to the next decade's problem? Instead, it's better that the system works the way it does. People do 'bandwagon research', which really is replication. They take the same idea, and apply somewhat different methods, or different datasets, or whatever. And they publish this as often as they can get away with. Then, one can look at the aggregate body of work and evaluate the ideas and methods better. There is more redundancy in the system, and because the papers are smaller, the setbacks are much smaller in the case of failure, and there is a paper trail (so to speak) marking progress along the way. These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers, who may only be interested in a small part of the work--the methods, or some of the data, or whatever. It would slow everyone down if the only publications were these giant monographs that came out once or twice a decade. It may feel like people are only working on small, unoriginal ideas because many papers look like this, but it's really important to zoom out and see how things fit together. Science is basically a Monte Carlo simulation, and having lots and lots of small and fast iterations covers the space much more efficiently.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers" Survey papers are useful to other researchers. Minimum publishable units are a waste of research time, and the pressure to pad one's CV and get "results" (which actually means more papers) worsens the situation. It is even worse when a grad student is told that they were "scooped" because their half-finished MPU was published by someone else.
timr 13y ago
It's kind of hard to get through this, not because the points ring untrue (I agree with many), but because they seem a bit naive. I think there's a certain type of person that is particularly attracted to advanced work in science and technology -- the systems purist, who believes strongly that the world "should" work in mostly objective ways. This is a strength in that the world doesn't change very much without these idealists pushing for their vision, but it's also a horrible weakness because these sorts of people don't tend to internalize that any project among groups of humans is going to be messy and inefficient and frustratingly subjective. The successful people adapt, and learn to bend the messy ecosystem to their will. The others...don't (they do things like writing dramatic, self-important missives about how the system is failing them, and cc it to the entire department. ahem.) If you make it all the way to the end of a PhD program and you haven't realized that it's mostly about how to make steady, measurable progress in a messy, complicated, political world, you haven't yet reached the end of the process.
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- bithive123 13y ago
  I see this a lot with new programmers that come to work for us. Many of them understandably think that some of our practices are obviously wrong and should be changed, but few of them figure out how to be effective in spite of the obvious correctness of their opinions.
  - timr 13y ago
    Yep, agreed. It's a youthful affliction, and it isn't specific to PhD programs. Time either beats it out of you, or you become this very pathetic, unfortunate sort of character as you get older. There are few things sadder than adults who blame the world for being insufficient for their needs.
    - djillionsmix 13y ago
      Well that was an uninspired display of passive-aggressive ad hominem and cliche.
rhythmvs 13y ago
The author of the letter has earned at least a doctorate honoris causa. (S)he is a true civis reipublicae litterarum. Universities as we dream them, like Humboldt did, are alas a relic of the 19th century. They’re a lost romantic desire, like the inspiring anecdote (regardless of its historical truth) of a student Niels Bohr and a professor Ernest Rutherford debating over truth as equals. Universities as we know them since the 1960s evolved into cash-burning bureaucracies. Soon, academia may evolve again — open sourced learning, who knows? Until the age of enlightenment the bigger part of scientific endeavors was done by dilettanti, unpaid, un-institutionalized “hobbyists” and other philosophes. We will return to those days — perhaps, and need be, at the expense of “democratic access” to learning. But the ideal of a community of intellectuals devoted to truth and science will live on in the honest hearts of young scientists (and self-employed hackers). Kudos to the courageous heart of that young PhD-student for reminding the academic managerial caste of our ideal!
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rogerchucker 13y ago
This is how my advisor and some of my family members try to convince me that choosing academia is wiser - they tell me that as a tenured faculty, (a) I will always be my own boss and (b) I will never get fired (unless of course the department gets dissolved which is not implausible). I wouldn't be surprised if this motivation works for most PhD graduates opting for academia.
hoilogoi 13y ago
I'd be interested to get a sense of how these issues vary from country to country and field to field.
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ChristianMarks 13y ago
I would not dismiss the author's complaints out of hand with the ad hominem remark that the author is burnt out. It may even be true, but the author's points remain. Academia has become a business, in which the priorities for research institutions are grants first, publications second and teaching a distant third. But this development does not imply that the way the university conducts business is optimal or desirable. (One sees this smug attitude in the comments in the form, "academia is a business, get over it.") Graduate students, postdocs and research staff are exploited. One can legitimately ask whether the institutionalized scientific method must necessarily exploit graduate students, postdocs and research staff to maintain standards of scientific rigor. Cannot the the university act as a gatekeeper without requiring inexpensive contingent laborers to subsidize faculty and administrator salaries? Why must limiting access to networks of scholars and scholarship involve such oppressive opportunity costs?
jleyank 13y ago
In an admittedly fast read of the parent article, I don't recall seeing what field the PhD was in. FWIW, in chemistry, there is a very large difference in starting salary, job requirements and career potential between PhD and non-PhD. This is true in academia as well as industry. Non-PhD's tend to be technicians, pairs of hands, or sales. PhD's tend to be researchers and have a far better chance of going into middle management. Is it relevant? Not sure any more given the loss of jobs to Asia and when the worker crosses 40. But it's been this way for as long as I've been aware.
maxander 13y ago
If universities have simply become huge, bureaucratic, grant-obsessed sweatshops exploiting grad students whose churned-out PhDs don't promise them decent careers... why don't people hire some of those poor excess PhDs/PhD-dropouts and put together a grant-obsessed research startup? Beat research universities at their own game, and perhaps they'll go back to being true universities.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  Yes why cant research be done in start-ups? Well... maybe its the money. Research doesn't exactly bring in money. So wouldn't that be a failed start-up? But i do like the idea of telling these senior supervisors to f-off and taking away the talent to do some real work for which they get credit
- VLM 13y ago
  Belief in credentialism doesn't magically result in talent. Thought experiment. 1K have talent, another 1K are promising, and another 1K are basically non-productive. If you have a 3K student body and chop away 1K, you'd like to think that that 1K leaving are those with the least talent, so they'll never be able to compete with the superior upper 2/3. Also if you assume a constant income of R+D money, all separation really means is spending a larger fraction of that limited money on fixed costs (great, now we need two $10M/yr CEOs and two $5M/yr CFOs and two labs and two HR depts and two... etc etc) Much like a divorce usually doesn't in total result in an aggregate higher standard of living once the same total income now has to support two households instead of one.
ssivark 13y ago
I would like to point to Dijkstra's excellent article (The strengths of academic enterprise) -- http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW... The OP talks about a bunch of problems in academia, may of which stem from an attempt to run universities like corporations. In his article, Edsger Dijkstra explains why that's not a good idea. PS: If you'd like to discuss this, I just submitted this article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342
frozenport 13y ago
There is another issue: People who are studying a PhD often work alone and develop interpersonal connections. Certainly the damange to mental and physical health are irreversible.
Create 13y ago
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis. Some students would become hostages, torn between their CERN supervisor and their thesis advisor, usually located in his/her remote Institute. This is a very uncomfortable situation for students, which can even endanger his/her thesis. https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Articles/1557868 https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Arti... armies of graduate students and postdocs to do the nuts and bolts work, Asaadi says. That's fine, he says, so long as everybody understands the situation from the beginning. "When you're starting graduate school, is your advisor telling you, 'Look, you get this great skill set that will be transferable to other things outside of academic physics'?" Asaadi says. "Or are you being told, 'Just work hard and there will be something or other [in physics] in the end'? It seems like it's more of the latter." He adds, "This is where we got some pushback from advisors—it was seen as whining." http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_08_29/caredit.a1300185 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... "How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend [their prime, most productive first] 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
ballard 13y ago
It is sad to see promising (usually young) people dazzled by the myth of an ivory tower in the sky. Most of academia simply sets fire to money. The more given to one bureaucracy, the bigger the flame. Fusion research (DOE). Or in this case, not. It would be rather nice to see Skunk Works and or Polywell reach Q > 1, it would be one of the greatest engineering feats ever. Also there needs to be some support for communities of art and philosophy, where those may get by better. Finally, all profit or all conjecture makes Jane a dull girl. (Jack was out sick today.)
xerophtye 13y ago
Just a thought but aren't Hackers way better at the whole pushing the boundaries of knowledge thing? I mean Is there any community more collaborative and co-operative and down right generous as ours? Tons of amazing people around the globe make tons of amazing stuff and a lot of them just open source it. By doing so they open the floor for debate, for improvement, for guidance to others to learn from it and to advance upon it. Not to mention sites like stack-overflow where the entire community helps each other with tons of problems no matter how trivial or how complicated. The whole world really could learn alot from us
daemonk 13y ago
Academia is run like a business by people with no business or management experience.
junktest 13y ago
Sad reality-check - Genome Technology magazine March 2011 cover story page 38 "The Crowd of PhDs - ...whether they will have somewhere to go"
tsax 13y ago
Similar thoughts : http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr... CTRL+F for "computer science" and start reading from there. Till then it's filler.
tsax 13y ago
Seems to me (I'm no expert in science history) that most of the huge breakthroughs came before the age of Official Science, i.e. Science(TM) being run through bureaucratic grant administrations in publicly-funded research universities (or 'private' ones with public money). Everything from the steam engine to Tesla's heroics happened while tinkering and playing. Granted, the game may have changed due to external circumstances, but we may yet want to look at whether the huge budgets of these departments are justified JUST BECAUSE SCIENCEEE. Do we want to support a bureaucratic process called 'Science' or actual production of interesting and/or useful results about the world?
jimmhay 13y ago
High-level scientific journals, when it comes down to it, really aren't that different from gossip magazines or HuffPo. Yes, worthier subject matter for sure, but in the end their judgements on publishing come down to virality and eyeballs.
randomsearch 13y ago
I think this student misunderstood what a PhD is about. They sound disenchanted with the reality of doing a PhD. The purpose of a PhD is to provide training in how to do research; most PhD students do not change the world or even make a large contribution to a research area - that's not the point. There are standard texts about PhDs that explain this, and most supervisors recommend students read a few of those books at the beginning of their PhD. As someone who has worked in both academic and industry, I can assure you that academia has not literally become a business, that academics still have great freedom, and that almost every academic I have ever met works hard and is motivated primarily by the goal of doing great work. Contrary to the article, most significant research is not done by PhD students - hardly surprising - it is done by Research Associates and Research Fellows, under the supervision of professors and lecturers. That's in the UK at least, and job titles vary in other countries. I find the anti-academia slant in tech circles to be quite strange. Many people think academia is "out of touch", but there is a lot of collaborative work between academia and industry, involving nearly all the large tech companies. I've never heard academics in Computer Science expressing any animosity towards those working in industry. It's strange, because academia has historically been and continues to be incredibly important in the tech industry; I'd like to see more collaboration and less of a schism.
pond_lilly 13y ago
I agree with everything said in this post. In our lab for example all grad students were required to present at the conferences, yet we had to pay out of our pocket to attend,to register, travel, etc. Our lab did some fair amount of field work but to get to the site we had to use our own car and pay for gas. Our adviser got a grant for this project, yet we had to pay out of our own pocket. No one dared to say anything because few did and got kicked out of the program.

211 points by mad 13y ago

Having been in grad school for a while, I can totally relate on using grants to churn out papers and egos running research. Want to slightly disagree with this though: "Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little, while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and begins to play on the other side of the table." The same thing happens in industry, except that you're paid more, and your work is directly relevant to the world you see (and not just a journal/conference where it is never read again.)

mapcar 13y ago
True. In an organization with enough people, it's often more efficient to specialize (e.g., into workers and managers). I would say that the quoted statement is not an entirely fair characterization of managers (PIs) in academia though. It's always easy to discount the contribution of others and to believe you did all of the work, and believe me, you do a lot of it - but it's not a trivial matter that these "managers" already thought up and won money for the general research direction, and ultimately accept responsibility for the success of your projects; not to mention having to worry about funding you for the duration of your PhD. And do recall that they do had to be extremely patient with you while you were still learning the ropes - so you can't extrapolate your productivity in your last year back to the first year when assessing your cumulative value. ("you" used here in the generic sense) I won't deny that many managers are asshats as bosses, but their job is not so simple.

rayiner 13y ago

I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.

WalterSear 13y ago
Same reasons we ignore how capitalism messes with everything else.
WalterSear 13y ago
Same reasons we ignore how capitalism messes with everything else.
foobarbazqux 13y ago
The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamentally corrupting. I think that only applies to mismanaged money; it can also be seen as fundamentally enabling.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I don't have a problem with science being a business. I have a problem with it being presented to kids as some idealistic pure thing.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Oh, I didn't mean you by "we", I meant the culture at large, specifically the scientific education system which never talks about money, outside of philosophy / policy / ethics classes.
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- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.

dobbsbob 13y ago

They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.

vampirechicken 13y ago
A marxist critique of community college.
- rhythmvs 13y ago
  Or someone speaking out of experience? I can testify[1] on the nefarious influence of MBA-like groupthink in academia: gigantic counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, obsession with pseudo-measurability of everything, from impact factors over “quality assessment” to “standardization” of examination and “competence matrices”. Top-down bogus coming from people who failed in the corporate world and met their Peter’s principle in the academia they never left. [1] http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep-uit http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep...
  - dnautics 13y ago
    while your characterization rings true for academia, I hardly believe that those attributes are the provenance of MBAs. The irony is that we are in an age of scientism (as Feynman would say) and it's precisely the popularization of science itself that has led to 'pseudo-measurability' that you speak of. I remember chuckling that my humanities classes were grading essays via mathematical rubric at a time when the math classes (which were proof-based) would just mark errors and give an 'overall grade'. Maybe they were just CYA in case someone would claim unfairness - which would not be the fault of the Business school.... Rather the fault of the law school litigious mentality.
    - rhythmvs 13y ago
      You probably hit the nail with the popularization of science as the culprit for our captains-of-society’s obsession with measurability. And even more so with the institutionalized greed of law school sycophants. I don’t know about the role of the business schools — maybe I’m to harsh for my colleagues. But I noted that at least at my alma mater and its acquisitioned satellite colleges, the managerial caste consists of civil engineers with an MBA, only, and it’s a recurring pattern. The noble idea of a res publica litterarum, or a universitas scientiarum — it’s lost since the post-war baby boom.

jostmey 13y ago

Real scientific progress does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. Sadly, modern day scientist are expected to constantly produce amazing results or face losing funding. And what do you think happens?

skylan_q 13y ago
Let me try a guess: They draw radical conclusions from their research which cause alarm/concern/interest to those who have no idea about the body of research but grant funding in order to get more funding?

dnautics 13y ago

I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest – first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. contrast with the article and discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957

gioele 13y ago
The problem with being "too honest" about your work is that you would be the only one doing it. When you read a "scientific" paper, you read it expecting it to be a sweetened account of the reality. The test have obviously been performed using only few samples; out of the the ten described features of a system, only the two described in depth are currently implemented; the source is not available because it does not work on the famous really hard cases of the class of problems it should solve. The system is so polluted that if you start being as honest as you should be, the reviewers will think that you have done even less.

gajomi 13y ago

Can someone please change `wity' to `with' in the title? This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns. EDIT: typos

dnautics 13y ago
the difficulty with 'basic research with seemingly no value' (a good example is the fourier transform, which at the time was seen as a mathematical curiosity) - is that it lacks accountability. How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? This problem is even worse when you take taxpayer funds, because transparency and accountability are fundamental attributes of good governance, and the claim that 'it will be useful someday' potentially pushes the accountability aspect out to t=infinity.
- munin 13y ago
  > How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies? what's the difference? would you want to fund a Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies?
  - dnautics 13y ago

pertinhower 13y ago

A hate to trivialize a thoughtful article with a typographical point, but boy do I like my paragraph breaks when I can get them.

jenrzzz 13y ago
http://www.readability.com/articles/ace2uwfz http://www.readability.com/articles/ace2uwfz
- Fuzzwah 13y ago
  I'm trying to find a way to actually make a readability link open up with nice formatting but can't work it out... any tip to avoid having to have people then click on the "switch to Readability view"?
kevincennis 13y ago
Well, while we're there, the HN link title is currently wrong also ("wity" vs "with").
mayanksinghal 13y ago
Try this: javascript:{v=document.createElement('style');v.innerHTML='blockquote{font-size:14px;width:500px}blockquote div{padding-bottom:8px}';document.body.appendChild(v)};void(0);
aaren 13y ago
I read it in 5 minutes with spreeder: http://www.spreeder.com/app.php http://www.spreeder.com/app.php
- lutusp 13y ago
  I used Spreeder to read "War and Peace." It's about Russia.
  - aaren 13y ago
    I see your point :) but for short pieces like this I find I can store most of it in memory. I did jump into the full text a few times to refer back to things. I probably couldn't tell you much about the article now, but I felt I got it at the time.

dnautics 13y ago

I think that the critiques of academic science are spot-on, although I am not sure that I agree with some of his causes, for example that "science is a business". A lot of the raw pettiness that happens in science would totally sink all but the largest businesses. I am not sure what the solution to the problem is, but of course, I'm launching a science nonprofit startup to try and do things without having to deal with as much of this silliness as I can get away with. I fully expect that if it should live past 30 years, my nonprofit will begin to succumb to the very things I established it to address.

auggierose 13y ago

I have worked at EPFL for a short time as as post-doc, and it really is a great school. Its Ph.D. students are excellent, and so what he says has to be taken seriously. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that much of how Academia works today is inevitable. How many people are truly excellent in any job? Always only a small percentage. Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do? They have to represent something that they are not, because people outside of Academia must believe that 100% of Academia are excellent (otherwise they would revolt where all their tax money goes). Everything bad in Academia follows from this.

dnautics 13y ago
what happens to that percentage when a country decides that it doesn't have enough STEM people and forces people down an educational pipeline. And compromises its educational integrity in the process?
- youredelightful 13y ago
  Plaques in Highschool bathrooms commemorating where Linus Torvalds once went poo poo.
- auggierose 13y ago
  I guess you know the answer to that.
betterunix 13y ago
"Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do?" Collaborate with the excellent 20%? What is wrong with encouraging more collaboration between researchers? Why should the mediocre 80% be pressured into publishing low-quality, CV-padding papers when they could be working effectively with geniuses?

nickthemagicman 13y ago

It's interesting to think though, that government funding has produced nearly every single form of medicine we have, it funded einstein, it was indirectly responsible for the internet. The problem is that you have to pay a bunch of parasites to support the few who are actually advancing the human race.

irollboozers 13y ago
It's inefficient and creates negative externalities.
- andreasvc 13y ago
  Inefficient as compared to what?
  - irollboozers 13y ago
    Private funding, industrial innovation, etc. Subsidized infrastructure does not practically promote risky endeavors. It's created the side effects mentioned in the original article.
    - andreasvc 13y ago
      It may be more inefficient, but it funds basic research without a short-term payoff, or even a suggestion of long-term payoff.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I am about to finish my PhD, and you clearly state the difference between my view of academia and the author's. While I agree with most of the things the author mentioned, and they are a large part of why I will not be going into academia once I graduate, I also recognize that academics acknowledge theses problems and try to mitigate them. It is useless to complain about problems without giving a solution. Maybe, as you imply, the current situation is the least bad possible. I think that there is at least room for improvement when it comes to sharing of data and reproducibility, and I plan to work on reducing the technical barriers to both of these things. However, I don't have a solution to the social problem of how to rank academics and how to prevent academics from colluding in order to artificially raise their ranking.

irollboozers 13y ago

3 out of 6 of Microryza's current team are graduate school dropouts. Technically, you could add 1.5 more (Ethan Perlstein left academia, I never started), so 4.5 out of 6. We've all been there. I think you have to either be purposely oblivious or one of the extremely lucky ones blessed with a true research environment, but it is impossible for the new generation of scientists to not see the writing on the wall. Every single student is suffering from the symptoms, yet very few are doing things to change it. One note, echoing the original author - for myself personally, the letters 'PhD' no longer carry the same meaning anymore. If anything, it's become an additional signal that you once bought into a system that is selling you short. I still respect those who have PhD's, but only for what it once meant, not for what it means now.

dnautics 13y ago
while a PhD doesn't carry that much cachet anymore, doesn't that make 'PhD dropout' even worse? Isn't the impression then, that 'You couldn't finish even the lowered standards for the PhD' or 'You couldn't finish what you started' or 'You had the poor judgement to bite off something you couldn't handle'? I suppose the last isn't so bad given that the age that most Americans start grad school is just over 22
- irollboozers 13y ago
  I know this sounds like rationalization, but I think we see it more like, "If we're doomed to suffer in a system where everyone is suffering, why not work to try to improve it and fix the problem instead?" In other words, if we weren't doing this, we would all be in grad school/academia getting PhD's and doing research anyways. This is more a reflection that we're giving up that opportunity in an effort to pay it forward. I would rather 'PhD' to mean something again than to have something that is meaningless.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  Actually, I see a lot of value in people who can recognize sunk costs and quit wasting resources, no matter how much they have happened to already waste. We all make mistakes, it's whether or not we choose to continue to make mistakes that is important.

ironparlance 13y ago

There is not a lot of funding for "basic" research any more. Those dollars are now usually sucked up by the most ruthless researchers that have risen to the top of the power pyramid and sit there until they die or retire. Young researchers coming up through the ranks have very few opportunities to pursue the basic research that may take ten or more years to manifest a rich result. They must serve their mentor's interest through publishing in his/her area, then hopefully land an adjunct position where this process is repeated for the Department/School, then after 12-20 years in academia they may get tenure and have a shot at some freedom if they aren't completely used up and corrupted. At that point it is much easier to just fall back into the patterns of abuse they endured except now it is they abusing their students.

singingfish 13y ago

I agree. (source: at similar stage of PhD to original author. Trying to get to the end myself though).

pseut 13y ago
Try not to agree too vigorously... regardless of how valid the author's points are, the end of grad school is usually the most stressful and depressing part (possibly of your career), especially until you get a job lined up. You're almost done.
aaren 13y ago
I am also months away from submission, so I wasn't entirely sure on what level I was sympathising with the authors arguments! Almost there...

mturmon 13y ago

"The art world got smaller, once more a somewhat parochial little world known mostly to its initiates. You can suffocate in these little worlds if you get them confused with the real world, so the smaller they are, as far as I'm concerned, the less confusion they generate." --Gary Indiana

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chuckkir 13y ago

I have my PhD, and this is the standard angst that many aspiring students face. There's a reason we have the term "ABD" for All But Dissertation. If he got that far into grad school without realizing that a Professor is an entrepreneur - hiring employees (grad students) to produce his product (knowledge) which he sells to customers (government and industry) through sales and marketing (conferences and papers) - then he was just naïve or kept the blinders on. My solution was to graduate and go into industry.

jaynos 13y ago
Exactly. My brother cut short his PhD and got a M.S. when he realized the life of a professor was basically being a manager with employees that were harder to fire. If he wanted to be a manager, he'd have gotten an MBA.
- tensor 13y ago
  I can't help but feel that the MBA is the scourge of the modern world. People in leadership positions need to be experts in the field they lead.
- chuckkir 13y ago
  Yes; it leads to unexpected consequences. The worst students are the ones the that the professor has the most incentive to graduate. So paradoxically the better you are, the less likely you are to be done quickly.

beloch 13y ago

This student makes some excellent points, and it's a bit scary how some things reinforce each other. Some journals, Nature being the most notable, chase impact factor above all else. The only thing they truly care about is that the papers they publish get cited. This means highly original work, which frequently doesn't get cited much for a long time, is less desirable than a turn-the-crank paper from a respected name. Researchers have been taught to prize Nature publications (thanks to the same flawed metric of merit) and spend a disproportionate amount of time submitting papers to Nature. When you write a paper you choose your target journal, and writing for Nature means you need to avoid rocking the boat too much, because they receive so many submissions that one minor criticism from a referee will torpedo your paper, even if that criticism is demonstrably wrong. Sometimes invalid criticisms are made by referees who are jealous, threatened, or merely lazy, but the editor has so many other submissions to deal with that he/she won't take the time to evaluate and understand the referee recommendations. Real science invites debate, but Nature's editors run screaming from it. Why do researchers care so much about playing this game if it compromises their writing and even their research? Even a tenured prof needs to hustle for funding if he wants to do more than teach and sit in his office. PI's are salesmen even more than they're managers! The very language itself is twisted at the core when applying for grants. The average researcher or project must be superlative in every way on paper or no money is going to come. You can't say you're doing something out of pure curiosity and the chances of it spawning another silicon valley are remote. It has to be imminently commercializable with potential for massive, revolutionary impact! Honesty will destroy you. If every research proposal delivered what it promised the World would be one giant Palo Alto. We would all be better off if some better way to allocate resources were found, but that's no easy task! As for the PhD student... There is more than meets the eye here. You don't walk away from 4 years of work in the last month without reason. Perhaps his thesis is a hopeless mess. Perhaps his relationship with his supervisor is hostile. Perhaps he's mentally ill. The last few months are ridiculously stressful after all! It's also very possible he or she is a lot more than one month from finishing. Hopefully there are people who care about this person and will help him/her get back on track and finish. The game is flawed, but the best way to ensure nobody wins is to refuse to play it.

rthomas6 13y ago
I'm not claiming you're wrong, but why isn't it possible for the student to simply no longer place any value in getting a PhD? That is what they claim, and intelligent people often make decisions on principle that make little practical sense.

cossatot 13y ago

I sympathize a lot with the frustration here and can agree on some of the points (especially the rankings/h-index/etc mania), however... Much of what is bemoaned here is simply a consequence of the fact that science is done by humans and generally costs money, so there is a necessary component of business-type activities (networking, fundraising, marketing, management). Scientists also have human qualities such as egos, desire for money, power, respect and the rest. Why should we be different, or held to a higher standard? Additionally, it's really hard to do original research. First off, really original good ideas are hard to come by; this problem is also not restricted to science or scientists. Then when new ideas come, they are often difficult or impossible to translate into scientific output, because of other constraints, such as lacking good enough data to test hypotheses. And then they typically fail, despite being great ideas. Really good, original, CORRECT ideas are far more rare. Furthermore, science would be much worse off if researchers worked like the author would prefer. If everyone spent 10 years without publishing, working on a completely original problem, there is zero replication. Additionally, if the experiment or approach fails, as they usually do, little is left. So do you publish negative results, and then move on to the next decade's problem? Instead, it's better that the system works the way it does. People do 'bandwagon research', which really is replication. They take the same idea, and apply somewhat different methods, or different datasets, or whatever. And they publish this as often as they can get away with. Then, one can look at the aggregate body of work and evaluate the ideas and methods better. There is more redundancy in the system, and because the papers are smaller, the setbacks are much smaller in the case of failure, and there is a paper trail (so to speak) marking progress along the way. These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers, who may only be interested in a small part of the work--the methods, or some of the data, or whatever. It would slow everyone down if the only publications were these giant monographs that came out once or twice a decade. It may feel like people are only working on small, unoriginal ideas because many papers look like this, but it's really important to zoom out and see how things fit together. Science is basically a Monte Carlo simulation, and having lots and lots of small and fast iterations covers the space much more efficiently.

betterunix 13y ago
"These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers" Survey papers are useful to other researchers. Minimum publishable units are a waste of research time, and the pressure to pad one's CV and get "results" (which actually means more papers) worsens the situation. It is even worse when a grad student is told that they were "scooped" because their half-finished MPU was published by someone else.

timr 13y ago

It's kind of hard to get through this, not because the points ring untrue (I agree with many), but because they seem a bit naive. I think there's a certain type of person that is particularly attracted to advanced work in science and technology -- the systems purist, who believes strongly that the world "should" work in mostly objective ways. This is a strength in that the world doesn't change very much without these idealists pushing for their vision, but it's also a horrible weakness because these sorts of people don't tend to internalize that any project among groups of humans is going to be messy and inefficient and frustratingly subjective. The successful people adapt, and learn to bend the messy ecosystem to their will. The others...don't (they do things like writing dramatic, self-important missives about how the system is failing them, and cc it to the entire department. ahem.) If you make it all the way to the end of a PhD program and you haven't realized that it's mostly about how to make steady, measurable progress in a messy, complicated, political world, you haven't yet reached the end of the process.

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bithive123 13y ago
I see this a lot with new programmers that come to work for us. Many of them understandably think that some of our practices are obviously wrong and should be changed, but few of them figure out how to be effective in spite of the obvious correctness of their opinions.
- timr 13y ago
  Yep, agreed. It's a youthful affliction, and it isn't specific to PhD programs. Time either beats it out of you, or you become this very pathetic, unfortunate sort of character as you get older. There are few things sadder than adults who blame the world for being insufficient for their needs.
  - djillionsmix 13y ago
    Well that was an uninspired display of passive-aggressive ad hominem and cliche.

rhythmvs 13y ago

The author of the letter has earned at least a doctorate honoris causa. (S)he is a true civis reipublicae litterarum. Universities as we dream them, like Humboldt did, are alas a relic of the 19th century. They’re a lost romantic desire, like the inspiring anecdote (regardless of its historical truth) of a student Niels Bohr and a professor Ernest Rutherford debating over truth as equals. Universities as we know them since the 1960s evolved into cash-burning bureaucracies. Soon, academia may evolve again — open sourced learning, who knows? Until the age of enlightenment the bigger part of scientific endeavors was done by dilettanti, unpaid, un-institutionalized “hobbyists” and other philosophes. We will return to those days — perhaps, and need be, at the expense of “democratic access” to learning. But the ideal of a community of intellectuals devoted to truth and science will live on in the honest hearts of young scientists (and self-employed hackers). Kudos to the courageous heart of that young PhD-student for reminding the academic managerial caste of our ideal!

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rogerchucker 13y ago

This is how my advisor and some of my family members try to convince me that choosing academia is wiser - they tell me that as a tenured faculty, (a) I will always be my own boss and (b) I will never get fired (unless of course the department gets dissolved which is not implausible). I wouldn't be surprised if this motivation works for most PhD graduates opting for academia.

hoilogoi 13y ago

I'd be interested to get a sense of how these issues vary from country to country and field to field.

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ChristianMarks 13y ago

I would not dismiss the author's complaints out of hand with the ad hominem remark that the author is burnt out. It may even be true, but the author's points remain. Academia has become a business, in which the priorities for research institutions are grants first, publications second and teaching a distant third. But this development does not imply that the way the university conducts business is optimal or desirable. (One sees this smug attitude in the comments in the form, "academia is a business, get over it.") Graduate students, postdocs and research staff are exploited. One can legitimately ask whether the institutionalized scientific method must necessarily exploit graduate students, postdocs and research staff to maintain standards of scientific rigor. Cannot the the university act as a gatekeeper without requiring inexpensive contingent laborers to subsidize faculty and administrator salaries? Why must limiting access to networks of scholars and scholarship involve such oppressive opportunity costs?

jleyank 13y ago

In an admittedly fast read of the parent article, I don't recall seeing what field the PhD was in. FWIW, in chemistry, there is a very large difference in starting salary, job requirements and career potential between PhD and non-PhD. This is true in academia as well as industry. Non-PhD's tend to be technicians, pairs of hands, or sales. PhD's tend to be researchers and have a far better chance of going into middle management. Is it relevant? Not sure any more given the loss of jobs to Asia and when the worker crosses 40. But it's been this way for as long as I've been aware.

maxander 13y ago

If universities have simply become huge, bureaucratic, grant-obsessed sweatshops exploiting grad students whose churned-out PhDs don't promise them decent careers... why don't people hire some of those poor excess PhDs/PhD-dropouts and put together a grant-obsessed research startup? Beat research universities at their own game, and perhaps they'll go back to being true universities.

xerophtye 13y ago
Yes why cant research be done in start-ups? Well... maybe its the money. Research doesn't exactly bring in money. So wouldn't that be a failed start-up? But i do like the idea of telling these senior supervisors to f-off and taking away the talent to do some real work for which they get credit
VLM 13y ago
Belief in credentialism doesn't magically result in talent. Thought experiment. 1K have talent, another 1K are promising, and another 1K are basically non-productive. If you have a 3K student body and chop away 1K, you'd like to think that that 1K leaving are those with the least talent, so they'll never be able to compete with the superior upper 2/3. Also if you assume a constant income of R+D money, all separation really means is spending a larger fraction of that limited money on fixed costs (great, now we need two $10M/yr CEOs and two $5M/yr CFOs and two labs and two HR depts and two... etc etc) Much like a divorce usually doesn't in total result in an aggregate higher standard of living once the same total income now has to support two households instead of one.

ssivark 13y ago

I would like to point to Dijkstra's excellent article (The strengths of academic enterprise) -- http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EW... The OP talks about a bunch of problems in academia, may of which stem from an attempt to run universities like corporations. In his article, Edsger Dijkstra explains why that's not a good idea. PS: If you'd like to discuss this, I just submitted this article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342

frozenport 13y ago

There is another issue: People who are studying a PhD often work alone and develop interpersonal connections. Certainly the damange to mental and physical health are irreversible.

Create 13y ago

In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis. Some students would become hostages, torn between their CERN supervisor and their thesis advisor, usually located in his/her remote Institute. This is a very uncomfortable situation for students, which can even endanger his/her thesis. https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Articles/1557868 https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Arti... armies of graduate students and postdocs to do the nuts and bolts work, Asaadi says. That's fine, he says, so long as everybody understands the situation from the beginning. "When you're starting graduate school, is your advisor telling you, 'Look, you get this great skill set that will be transferable to other things outside of academic physics'?" Asaadi says. "Or are you being told, 'Just work hard and there will be something or other [in physics] in the end'? It seems like it's more of the latter." He adds, "This is where we got some pushback from advisors—it was seen as whining." http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_08_29/caredit.a1300185 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... "How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend [their prime, most productive first] 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

ballard 13y ago

It is sad to see promising (usually young) people dazzled by the myth of an ivory tower in the sky. Most of academia simply sets fire to money. The more given to one bureaucracy, the bigger the flame. Fusion research (DOE). Or in this case, not. It would be rather nice to see Skunk Works and or Polywell reach Q > 1, it would be one of the greatest engineering feats ever. Also there needs to be some support for communities of art and philosophy, where those may get by better. Finally, all profit or all conjecture makes Jane a dull girl. (Jack was out sick today.)

xerophtye 13y ago

Just a thought but aren't Hackers way better at the whole pushing the boundaries of knowledge thing? I mean Is there any community more collaborative and co-operative and down right generous as ours? Tons of amazing people around the globe make tons of amazing stuff and a lot of them just open source it. By doing so they open the floor for debate, for improvement, for guidance to others to learn from it and to advance upon it. Not to mention sites like stack-overflow where the entire community helps each other with tons of problems no matter how trivial or how complicated. The whole world really could learn alot from us

daemonk 13y ago

Academia is run like a business by people with no business or management experience.

junktest 13y ago

Sad reality-check - Genome Technology magazine March 2011 cover story page 38 "The Crowd of PhDs - ...whether they will have somewhere to go"

tsax 13y ago

Similar thoughts : http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr... CTRL+F for "computer science" and start reading from there. Till then it's filler.

tsax 13y ago

Seems to me (I'm no expert in science history) that most of the huge breakthroughs came before the age of Official Science, i.e. Science(TM) being run through bureaucratic grant administrations in publicly-funded research universities (or 'private' ones with public money). Everything from the steam engine to Tesla's heroics happened while tinkering and playing. Granted, the game may have changed due to external circumstances, but we may yet want to look at whether the huge budgets of these departments are justified JUST BECAUSE SCIENCEEE. Do we want to support a bureaucratic process called 'Science' or actual production of interesting and/or useful results about the world?

jimmhay 13y ago

High-level scientific journals, when it comes down to it, really aren't that different from gossip magazines or HuffPo. Yes, worthier subject matter for sure, but in the end their judgements on publishing come down to virality and eyeballs.

randomsearch 13y ago

I think this student misunderstood what a PhD is about. They sound disenchanted with the reality of doing a PhD. The purpose of a PhD is to provide training in how to do research; most PhD students do not change the world or even make a large contribution to a research area - that's not the point. There are standard texts about PhDs that explain this, and most supervisors recommend students read a few of those books at the beginning of their PhD. As someone who has worked in both academic and industry, I can assure you that academia has not literally become a business, that academics still have great freedom, and that almost every academic I have ever met works hard and is motivated primarily by the goal of doing great work. Contrary to the article, most significant research is not done by PhD students - hardly surprising - it is done by Research Associates and Research Fellows, under the supervision of professors and lecturers. That's in the UK at least, and job titles vary in other countries. I find the anti-academia slant in tech circles to be quite strange. Many people think academia is "out of touch", but there is a lot of collaborative work between academia and industry, involving nearly all the large tech companies. I've never heard academics in Computer Science expressing any animosity towards those working in industry. It's strange, because academia has historically been and continues to be incredibly important in the tech industry; I'd like to see more collaboration and less of a schism.

pond_lilly 13y ago

I agree with everything said in this post. In our lab for example all grad students were required to present at the conferences, yet we had to pay out of our pocket to attend,to register, travel, etc. Our lab did some fair amount of field work but to get to the site we had to use our own car and pay for gas. Our adviser got a grant for this project, yet we had to pay out of our own pocket. No one dared to say anything because few did and got kicked out of the program.