7 ms·

My wife is in academia. Although, not in the ivory towers. She's at a community college in California, and she's both on the tenured faculty track and adminis

My wife is in academia. Although, not in the ivory towers. She's at a community college in California, and she's both on the tenured faculty track and administration as a program director. So, her experiences may not speak entirely to this article. There are lots of problems inherent with academia that most people thinking about this field are not really thinking about. The biggest problem, I think, is that for most 99% of all professors, once they are tenured, they are LOCKED down geographically. And, that sucks. My wife and I have one foot out the door all the time. We go where the jobs are. But, now that she's on the tenure track, we wonder if this is where we'll lay down and die. It's pretty sad, when I think about it. You hear about it time and time again from so much of these guys. One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii and how his wife divorced him because of it. He had a page up here: http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/ http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/ But, apparently, after some time he decided to take down the more controversial stuff. The index.html page to his ramblings are down. Anyways, that's a huge problem for academics. And, I thought about it, and I think the biggest problem is the whole tenure thing. I think it should be abolished. Professors should be able to move to new institutions without worrying about that entire process, and they should be paid a better wage because of it. It should be like any other free market enterprise we have nowadays. And, Universities should also be able to get rid of dead weight. I've had some professors in the past who just gave up on research and life. For example, said professor mentioned above. He gave up on math research because the University kept screwing them over on pay. He retired with only 17 publications under his name. My other friend who is now a tenured math professor at a 4 year college has 17 publications at just 37 years of age. My other friend who has been teaching for about 10 years now has only 2 publications: his math Ph.D. dissertation, and a one page paper that probably isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Anyways, I think it's high time tenure is made obsolete. It gives professors more latitude to move, probably better pay, and more incentive to do research or teach better. It also gives schools and students the opportunity to get better teachers and lose the dead weight.

badman_ting 13y ago
I got interested in this and found the index to his ramblings on the internet archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20130120215549/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/ramblings/index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130120215549/http://www2.hawaii... I wouldn't say I am learning exactly, but it's interesting to read from his point of view. Thought I'd post the link.
- mililani 13y ago
  Ah, good ole web archive! Forgot about that. So, I went digging through, and I made a mistake. It's not on his ramblings site. More of it is located here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120201172033/http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/education/kline.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120201172033/http://www.math.ha... But, he rambles a lot on there and weighs the pros and cons of being a professor in Hawaii. Basically, though, his final sentence says it all: "I've got to get out of this place." Some more about his salary he keeps talking about, " Unfortunately, though, the one thing at the University of Hawaii that was not under my control, nor under the Math Department's either, whether by ``shibai'' or otherwise, was my salary. I had known when I accepted the position here that I was being offered a salary that was too low, but what I had not realized was that, unlike Kansas, faculty salaries at the University of Hawaii are controlled by a rigid civil-service structure, so that the salary one is hired at determines one's salary for the rest of one's life. But added to that, the nation soon entered an extremely drastic phase of Reaganomics inflation, and the State of Hawaii responded by giving only minimal salary raises (0% one year and 2% the following), and the entire faculty here at UH was becoming financially desperate. One of the reasons I dropped out of active mathematical research was a realization (even before Reagan came into office in 1981) that it would soon no longer be financially feasible for me to continue working here. And as I stopped letting my life be taken over by doing research, and after being promoted to full professor had finally jumped through all the hoops that young academics (although I was no longer exactly young) are require to jump through, more and more I was asking myself exactly what it was that I want out of life, and to what extent my career as a mathematician was providing it. " He also mentioned before about thinking about becoming an actuary; and, how another math professor started taking electrical engineering courses at the university and later left for California to become an engineer in the aerospace industry (which turned out to be poor timing since the aerospace industry went under major turmoil in California during the late 80's). Then he talks about how he has a strong distaste for living in Hawaii here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120218124307/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/faq/paradise.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120218124307/http://www2.hawaii... It gives a very intimate perspective from a man who has lived the life of being an academic, and what that entails. I don't recommend reading his entire web site, since he writes quite a lot. But, for anyone interested in academia, I think a perusal is in order. He does talk a lot about what life being an "institutionalized" academic is like. It's pretty sad, and it made me realized I would never want to get into that field.
muaddirac 13y ago
> and more incentive to do research Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the entire point of tenure was so that professors who have proven their worth have the freedom to do the (perhaps controversial) research that they want to without fear of retribution from their employer. Edit: And now that I think about it, the point is also to prevent "dead weight" from being fired. Because it'd be easy to classify a professor as dead weight who is simply working on something unpopular, or contrary to consensus.
- HarryHirsch 13y ago
  That was back then, when science was the humanities (remember: when Theodor Mommsen solicited research funding, saying "If there is big industry there must be big science" it was for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae), and professors were public intellectuals. Today research costs money, and often a substantial part of a professor's salary comes from external funding. I feel that tenure has become something of an anachronism, and when you see tenured professors who haven't had a grant in ten years sit in a circle, each one giving an easy job to the person on their right, and dropping the rest of the work on the untenured faculty it becomes very difficult to defend the practice.
- mililani 13y ago
  Yes, that was definitely the original intent of tenure. However, times have changed. I believe most professors just want good pay and benefits. I'm sure most would be willing to exchange tenure protections for this along with better job mobility and latitude. However, that's just conjecture.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
> One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii Wow. No offense, but I can't imagine this guy with a real job. The self-entitlement is insane. I really think there's a forest for the tree problem with a lot of academics. The few I know get massive entitlements, days off, benefits, etc. I work in IT, worry about layoffs, get minimal holidays, have on-call, and generally get treated like an idiot savant because no one likes techies and techies go against the corporate 'sales guy' culture that dominates so many companies. I wish my biggest problem was being forced to stay in Hawaii. On top of it, I went to some pretty good schools and honestly half my professors were loathesome misanthropes. I can't imagine where they would fit elsewhere. They'd be destroyed in corporate culture in a new york minute. Perhaps I am suffering from a 'grass is greener' mentality, but sometimes it helps, i think, to remember where you came from and what you have. Some problems are real and others just aren't. I really wonder if the real issue is the ease that someone can enter many phd programs. With massive private/public loans and universities hungry for money, we might have long ago hit a tipping point of being too generous and letting a lot of people in who otherwise would have been unacceptable for phd programs, especially in the humanities. Of the academics I know, maybe one is a stellar thinker, the rest are just upper-middle class milquetoasts who wanted an easy life.
- mililani 13y ago
  I know what you're saying, but I also feel that one needs to consider the perspectives. Like they say, grass is greener. He was just not into Hawaii, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Personally, I hated living in the SF Bay Area. It was just not for me either. I know, I know. People think I'm nuts. But, after 10 years of living there, I finally understood my math professor. I was like, "Wow, I can't imagine professor Lady going through something like what I'm going through for over 30 years!" I really felt for him. By the time I finally left the Bay Area, I was utterly burnt out by big city, fast paced life. It made me the person who I am today: one foot out the door at all times. My wife and I moved around several times in the years since, and now that we're back in California living in a smaller coastal city, I realized what I hated about being in the Bay Area: it's just too big, too much of a rat race. Although I love living where we're at now, I can eventually see myself growing tired of it. And, that's the perspective, I think, you're missing out on. You are seeing things from your own perspective. I know that perspective well, too. I lived it for 10 years. I was a techie; I was always wary of being laid off; I had crap for vacations; I was ALWAYS learning new stuff; and as techies, we're always crapped on. I had business envy and thought of going to business school. So, I see your perspective. But, I also see his. Being in Hawaii, or any other small town/city, can get very old and tiresome. Several of the Hawaii math professors eventually gave up tenure and moved away to do other things. It makes one wonder about why these guys would be willing to give up a highly sought after thing in academia, tenure, to move away and start a new life. I think my old professor provides a good explanation, at least for some people, about why that happens. At least, it did for me.
btilly 13y ago
Interesting data point. My father-in-law was a math prof who gave up research. He felt bad about it. He went to the department chair and said that since he wasn't doing research any more, could he be given more classes to free up other professors who were doing research to spend their time that way. He was told no because, "It would make the rest of us look bad." And so he spent many years working a half-time job and feeling bad about it. (He was also one of the best teachers in the department. In large part, possibly, because his attention was on teaching, not research. And face it, most of the material that is presented in first and second year math courses has not been a subject of research since the 1800s.)
- dferlemann 13y ago
  Same thing here working for government... it's ridiculous.
- judk 13y ago
  Why didn't he apply for a job at a teaching college?
  - throwaway1979 13y ago
    Presumably, he already had tenure.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Exactly right.
ronaldx 13y ago
Why does tenure lock you down? I'm not aware of this being the case in Europe. I understand that tenure positions are hard to reach, but if you are providing value (whether that's through skill in research or education or pure 'prestige') - other universities should still want to employ you? The only sense in which you are locked down is that you have a nice guaranteed job and a lifestyle that is no longer competitive with other opportunities - this is not something reasonable to complain about.
- mililani 13y ago
  The entire process is tough. Once you leave tenure at one university for another, you must go through that entire process again. And if ONE faculty member does not like you for some bizarre reason or another, you will not gain tenure. That's why most professors, or any sane person, wouldn't opt to do it all over again unless they are highly sought after. For example, I'm pretty sure Terry Tao, math professor extraordinaire, would have NO problems moving around to any university and gaining tenure. However, the average Joe schmoe Ph.D. may not have the desired qualities to do that so easily.
  - michael_nielsen 13y ago
    It's quite common to move between tenured jobs. Typically you don't have to go through the whole six-year pre-tenure odyssey again. Applying for a tenured job is still quite a process, but that's often true for positions outside academia too, especially senior professional positions.
    - Thrymr 13y ago
      "Quite common" is an overstatement. The market is nowhere near as liquid. Only a small number of tenured jobs are advertised each year compared to the number of junior tenure-track jobs. Superstars can get hired somewhere else, but for the vast majority of tenured faculty there are not many options (most universities would prefer to hire a cheaper junior faculty member, and many are very limited in how much credit they can give an applicant towards tenure).
PaulHoule 13y ago
I know a lot of people who specifically go to Hawaii to die. How bad can it be?
wyclif 13y ago
Just curious: why is living in Hawaii something a person would get divorced over (or something to complain about?)
- mililani 13y ago
  It's like being forced to live in a small town. Some people (actually, I'm betting a lot) can't deal with it.

badman_ting 13y ago

I got interested in this and found the index to his ramblings on the internet archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20130120215549/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/ramblings/index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130120215549/http://www2.hawaii... I wouldn't say I am learning exactly, but it's interesting to read from his point of view. Thought I'd post the link.

mililani 13y ago
Ah, good ole web archive! Forgot about that. So, I went digging through, and I made a mistake. It's not on his ramblings site. More of it is located here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120201172033/http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/education/kline.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120201172033/http://www.math.ha... But, he rambles a lot on there and weighs the pros and cons of being a professor in Hawaii. Basically, though, his final sentence says it all: "I've got to get out of this place." Some more about his salary he keeps talking about, " Unfortunately, though, the one thing at the University of Hawaii that was not under my control, nor under the Math Department's either, whether by ``shibai'' or otherwise, was my salary. I had known when I accepted the position here that I was being offered a salary that was too low, but what I had not realized was that, unlike Kansas, faculty salaries at the University of Hawaii are controlled by a rigid civil-service structure, so that the salary one is hired at determines one's salary for the rest of one's life. But added to that, the nation soon entered an extremely drastic phase of Reaganomics inflation, and the State of Hawaii responded by giving only minimal salary raises (0% one year and 2% the following), and the entire faculty here at UH was becoming financially desperate. One of the reasons I dropped out of active mathematical research was a realization (even before Reagan came into office in 1981) that it would soon no longer be financially feasible for me to continue working here. And as I stopped letting my life be taken over by doing research, and after being promoted to full professor had finally jumped through all the hoops that young academics (although I was no longer exactly young) are require to jump through, more and more I was asking myself exactly what it was that I want out of life, and to what extent my career as a mathematician was providing it. " He also mentioned before about thinking about becoming an actuary; and, how another math professor started taking electrical engineering courses at the university and later left for California to become an engineer in the aerospace industry (which turned out to be poor timing since the aerospace industry went under major turmoil in California during the late 80's). Then he talks about how he has a strong distaste for living in Hawaii here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120218124307/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/faq/paradise.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120218124307/http://www2.hawaii... It gives a very intimate perspective from a man who has lived the life of being an academic, and what that entails. I don't recommend reading his entire web site, since he writes quite a lot. But, for anyone interested in academia, I think a perusal is in order. He does talk a lot about what life being an "institutionalized" academic is like. It's pretty sad, and it made me realized I would never want to get into that field.

muaddirac 13y ago

> and more incentive to do research Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the entire point of tenure was so that professors who have proven their worth have the freedom to do the (perhaps controversial) research that they want to without fear of retribution from their employer. Edit: And now that I think about it, the point is also to prevent "dead weight" from being fired. Because it'd be easy to classify a professor as dead weight who is simply working on something unpopular, or contrary to consensus.

HarryHirsch 13y ago
That was back then, when science was the humanities (remember: when Theodor Mommsen solicited research funding, saying "If there is big industry there must be big science" it was for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae), and professors were public intellectuals. Today research costs money, and often a substantial part of a professor's salary comes from external funding. I feel that tenure has become something of an anachronism, and when you see tenured professors who haven't had a grant in ten years sit in a circle, each one giving an easy job to the person on their right, and dropping the rest of the work on the untenured faculty it becomes very difficult to defend the practice.
mililani 13y ago
Yes, that was definitely the original intent of tenure. However, times have changed. I believe most professors just want good pay and benefits. I'm sure most would be willing to exchange tenure protections for this along with better job mobility and latitude. However, that's just conjecture.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

> One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii Wow. No offense, but I can't imagine this guy with a real job. The self-entitlement is insane. I really think there's a forest for the tree problem with a lot of academics. The few I know get massive entitlements, days off, benefits, etc. I work in IT, worry about layoffs, get minimal holidays, have on-call, and generally get treated like an idiot savant because no one likes techies and techies go against the corporate 'sales guy' culture that dominates so many companies. I wish my biggest problem was being forced to stay in Hawaii. On top of it, I went to some pretty good schools and honestly half my professors were loathesome misanthropes. I can't imagine where they would fit elsewhere. They'd be destroyed in corporate culture in a new york minute. Perhaps I am suffering from a 'grass is greener' mentality, but sometimes it helps, i think, to remember where you came from and what you have. Some problems are real and others just aren't. I really wonder if the real issue is the ease that someone can enter many phd programs. With massive private/public loans and universities hungry for money, we might have long ago hit a tipping point of being too generous and letting a lot of people in who otherwise would have been unacceptable for phd programs, especially in the humanities. Of the academics I know, maybe one is a stellar thinker, the rest are just upper-middle class milquetoasts who wanted an easy life.

mililani 13y ago
I know what you're saying, but I also feel that one needs to consider the perspectives. Like they say, grass is greener. He was just not into Hawaii, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Personally, I hated living in the SF Bay Area. It was just not for me either. I know, I know. People think I'm nuts. But, after 10 years of living there, I finally understood my math professor. I was like, "Wow, I can't imagine professor Lady going through something like what I'm going through for over 30 years!" I really felt for him. By the time I finally left the Bay Area, I was utterly burnt out by big city, fast paced life. It made me the person who I am today: one foot out the door at all times. My wife and I moved around several times in the years since, and now that we're back in California living in a smaller coastal city, I realized what I hated about being in the Bay Area: it's just too big, too much of a rat race. Although I love living where we're at now, I can eventually see myself growing tired of it. And, that's the perspective, I think, you're missing out on. You are seeing things from your own perspective. I know that perspective well, too. I lived it for 10 years. I was a techie; I was always wary of being laid off; I had crap for vacations; I was ALWAYS learning new stuff; and as techies, we're always crapped on. I had business envy and thought of going to business school. So, I see your perspective. But, I also see his. Being in Hawaii, or any other small town/city, can get very old and tiresome. Several of the Hawaii math professors eventually gave up tenure and moved away to do other things. It makes one wonder about why these guys would be willing to give up a highly sought after thing in academia, tenure, to move away and start a new life. I think my old professor provides a good explanation, at least for some people, about why that happens. At least, it did for me.

btilly 13y ago

Interesting data point. My father-in-law was a math prof who gave up research. He felt bad about it. He went to the department chair and said that since he wasn't doing research any more, could he be given more classes to free up other professors who were doing research to spend their time that way. He was told no because, "It would make the rest of us look bad." And so he spent many years working a half-time job and feeling bad about it. (He was also one of the best teachers in the department. In large part, possibly, because his attention was on teaching, not research. And face it, most of the material that is presented in first and second year math courses has not been a subject of research since the 1800s.)

dferlemann 13y ago
Same thing here working for government... it's ridiculous.
judk 13y ago
Why didn't he apply for a job at a teaching college?
- throwaway1979 13y ago
  Presumably, he already had tenure.
  - btilly 13y ago
    Exactly right.

ronaldx 13y ago

Why does tenure lock you down? I'm not aware of this being the case in Europe. I understand that tenure positions are hard to reach, but if you are providing value (whether that's through skill in research or education or pure 'prestige') - other universities should still want to employ you? The only sense in which you are locked down is that you have a nice guaranteed job and a lifestyle that is no longer competitive with other opportunities - this is not something reasonable to complain about.

mililani 13y ago
The entire process is tough. Once you leave tenure at one university for another, you must go through that entire process again. And if ONE faculty member does not like you for some bizarre reason or another, you will not gain tenure. That's why most professors, or any sane person, wouldn't opt to do it all over again unless they are highly sought after. For example, I'm pretty sure Terry Tao, math professor extraordinaire, would have NO problems moving around to any university and gaining tenure. However, the average Joe schmoe Ph.D. may not have the desired qualities to do that so easily.
- michael_nielsen 13y ago
  It's quite common to move between tenured jobs. Typically you don't have to go through the whole six-year pre-tenure odyssey again. Applying for a tenured job is still quite a process, but that's often true for positions outside academia too, especially senior professional positions.
  - Thrymr 13y ago
    "Quite common" is an overstatement. The market is nowhere near as liquid. Only a small number of tenured jobs are advertised each year compared to the number of junior tenure-track jobs. Superstars can get hired somewhere else, but for the vast majority of tenured faculty there are not many options (most universities would prefer to hire a cheaper junior faculty member, and many are very limited in how much credit they can give an applicant towards tenure).

PaulHoule 13y ago

I know a lot of people who specifically go to Hawaii to die. How bad can it be?

wyclif 13y ago

Just curious: why is living in Hawaii something a person would get divorced over (or something to complain about?)

mililani 13y ago
It's like being forced to live in a small town. Some people (actually, I'm betting a lot) can't deal with it.