
A woman who's trying to free grad students from their delusions - jseliger
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/08/the_professor_is_in_karen_kelsky_creates_a_delusion_free_job_search_for.html
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michaelochurch
Academia is a horrible industry and it's really just CTD (circling the drain)
at this point. It's sad, because basic research is important and right now,
there's far too little of it being done. Teaching the liberal arts to the next
generation is also an important and catastrophically underappreciated job. I
think that only about 1 percent of the population (if that) is in-tune enough
to see how bad it is that academia is failing, because we rely on it for so
much and yet we've allowed it to fall into a state where (barring seismic
social changes) it seems to have no future.

All of that said, the ivory tower brought that upon itself. Or, to be more
precise, the tenure system killed it by allowing older generations to
cannibalize their young, not only by refusing to retire, but by blowing off
the work that kept academia relevant. At some point, academics began to openly
cop the attitude that research and publication were the real work and that
teaching and outreach were just grunt work. The tenured people didn't even
bother hiding this shitty attitude, knowing they couldn't get fired for it as
long as they had the connections to get their papers published in a timely
fashion. A generation later, you had state legislators who went to college but
remembered 200-student lectures and professors who obviously didn't care about
undergrads, who didn't think much of the experience for that reason, and who
cut funding for state universities and public research grants in response,
because they saw no value in higher learning or what academia studies because
it had never been really shown to them. The big crime here is that, due to the
tenure system, the people who originally copped that attitude (being
established and hard to fire) kept their jobs and it was the rising generation
(which played no part) that got stuck with an imploded job market. A tenure
system allows the established generation to put a funnel over the next
generation and shit right into it.

What I think is hilarious about academic conceits about "life of the mind" is
how opposite it is to the truth. Academics portray non-academics as
philistines concerned only with money. In fact, they think about money _all
the time_ , whether they're grad students who don't have enough of it, or
writing grant proposals, or trying to manage their careers in a collapsing
industry. On the other hand, those of us who've left academia think about
money much more rarely: it gets put in our bank accounts every couple of
weeks, and we don't have to constantly write grant proposals to make that
happen. Sure, we have to roll our eyes through meetings about "quarterly KPIs"
when the unambitious don't care and the ambitious only care about their
personal careers and visions... but that's way better than having to fret
constantly about fucking grant proposals like a high school student mashing
out a five-paragraph essay about some dead famous person and what it means to
him personally. It's hard as hell to have a true life of the mind no matter
who you are, but most modern academics are hyperspecialized and so enslaved by
the grant-money treadmill that the main difference between them and corporate
serfs is that they work 3 times harder for half the salary.

~~~
evanwarfel
+1

The state of Academia in the softer sciences is now a negative feedback loop
-- as the system gets worse, the only people who are attracted to the system
are those incapable of making it better. The people who have the capability
for self-actualized, mission/vision oriented true leadership are the ones that
will be attracted to startups over the current circus.

All the more stagnation and incrementalism for the rest of us to innovate
around and profit from.

~~~
michaelochurch
I agree with your assessment of academia, but I don't think "startups", as HN
defines the term, will improve anything.

Academia's one imploded guild system, but venture capital is just as bad. The
transition from a "what you know" to a "who you blow" culture happened a long
time ago, and I don't think there's any turning back for the Valley. It's one
of the most corrupt economic ecosystems known to humankind. VCs collude and
arrange outcomes based on prior socioeconomic value to them rather than
allowing the market to determine the actual merit of a company or product, and
most of what Silicon Valley-style venture capital is, is taking behaviors
(insider trading, market manipulation, anti-competitive collusion) that are
illegal on public markets and applying them to unregulated private equities.

The trillion-dollar question is whether it's possible for something else
(possibly outside of the U.S.) to emerge that outperforms the Silicon Valley
nonsense. Academia itself is done, as far as I can tell. It selects for a
naive lack of humility (as does the Valley, where people honestly believe that
their engineer positions on 0.02% will lead to investor contact and founder
status in their next gig... and, of course, that never happens for
socioeconomic reasons) because anyone who is capable of getting a realistic
picture of his or her probable future in that game is going to exit.

~~~
evanwarfel
Ah, perhaps. Our systems will only improve to the extent that someone takes
the inherent issues on as personal problems.

And in some sense, what we are saying is that systems with metrics that are
only shallow proxies for actual success (citations, valuations) often fall
into multi-polar-trap type situations [1].

I fully believe it's possible for new(ish) models to outperform Academia and
some of the sillier SV practices. It's a question of getting things right in
the beginning.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

