Tenured faculty at university still exist to provide an aspiration to academic labor that they too can receive tenure. They're more like jackpot winners. Casinos need to produce some winners, but only because nobody would play otherwise.
The casino, however, is more fair. At least in the casino the winners don't have to submit their bets for approval to a committee of former winners who don't understand that they are a product of chance and had published many books and papers on gambling strategies. Awarding tenure at random might even produce better outcomes.
I was speaking to some PhD students this summer, and the thought that popped in my head was “grad school is child abuse.” It preys on your self-conception as a bright person, a good student, etc. and takes your twenties away with nothing to show for it. It’s abusive to take in more grad students than you place in jobs the year before.
Forgive me if I'm reading too much into your quoted statement, but I really wish we lived in a culture where adults in their twenties weren't actually children.
The adults are the ones making the culture. But by the time you're a twenty-something, you're the one making choices for your own behavior, regardless of who failed you or not. I dearly wish our system helped make that clear to the 19 year olds emerging into higher education. I suspect that the 19 year-olds joining the workforce instead have it tougher and are already a long way toward understanding that.
I will certainly take a portion of that responsibility. I am doing what I can with my own child. Work hard, teach strategies for self-control, strategies for understanding and dealing with adversity... But the hardest work of all as a parent is being the kind of person you want your child to be. They're going to emulate the behavior of the adults around them no matter what you say. The single greatest thing you can do to mold your child into a good person, is to show them you mean it by adopting those behaviors.
The same goes for being a career manager, or faculty in school, I suppose.
I don’t have a lot to show for my master’s (2 years in Europe), I didn’t get into academia for a PhD, and don’t intend to in the foreseeable future. On paper, my experience was practically nil before I joined AWS.
However, I found myself doing one half of the technical leadership of a major project at my org as a “new grad”. I am leading the science and deeply technical aspect and seniors do the operational aspect.
The reason I could do what I have is because of stuff I learned in gradschool. The last 4 years of my life (2 undergrad, 2 msc) put me in a very unique position. In the process, I earned plenty of “trust”, especially of senior engineers and skip+ managers.
Meh, I think you have to look at it for what it is. I got a PhD and I found it a very useful experience. But, the key is to go into it with the purpose of developing expertise in something you are interested in.
Now, if you're getting a PhD for any other reason, then forget it. If you're getting a PhD in one of those make-believe fields like social constructivism, forget it. If you're doing it to get a job, forget it.
Yes, part of the problem is false advertising, but part of the problem is people going into it just for something to do.
This is very country-dependent. In some countries, there is a glass ceiling in commercial, government, and even politician jobs for those without PhDs. I was surprised to find folks pursuing a PhD simply as a career move, but apparently* it exists.
* The folk I met sure were convinced and were motivated enough to obtain the PhD to get access to better non-academic careers.
I concede that -- and there are some jobs specifically for PhDs. However, I was actually more saying that the reason why I DON'T recommend it for most people is that a PhD could be very frustrating if the only reason why you're getting it is to get a job. OF COURSE, if the job you get is one you truly like afterwards, then it's not so bad. But then, in the case that you mention, there should be a clear path towards that, and not some vague notions that it MIGHT get you a job.
This is crazy. Spend 2 years getting an MA just because you love the subject? Sure. Fine. NBD. But spending at least 6 years, maybe a decade, with no job at the end? That’s abuse of smart people in the same way that it’s abuse to run a casino and take money from gambling addicts. Nothing’s wrong with playing some roulette for fun (an MA), but if the house lets you give away your car keys, the house is abusive.
I got a job...but quit five years later because I hated it. In fact, I am happy I spent 11 years post-graduate because I didn't have to waste my life participating in a sick corporate world and working. Now I'm working to be independent and without those 11 years getting used to not working in the traditional way, I would not have the general intuition to break off from the system.
Undergraduate programs — esp. ivy-league ones — are valued because they enculturate people to the particular (almost always upper-class) culture of the school, which is carefully curated by maintaining a certain mix of pre-enculturated students (= "legacy" students) and a certain student body size. Someone who went to Harvard, acts like "someone who went to Harvard." Even if they grew up in Kolkatta.
For the longest time, "a highly-competitive hiring process requiring a University education" (as still exists in e.g. finance) really just meant "we want upper-class or upper-class-enculturated people; the more upper-class the school, and the more steeped in the culture of the school the person, the better." That's also why (most) state colleges, (most) trade schools, etc. were considered close to valueless as degrees for decades, despite accreditation: they weren't going to enculturate you to the upper class, because everyone who went there was middle-class. It's why "living on campus" is considered more prestigious than commuting to school: more exposure, more enculturation. It's why fraternity membership is prestigious, regardless of what fraternity: it's even more enculturation. Etc.
Graduate programs are valued for similar reasons, but where the culture being enculturated toward, is the culture of academia itself (a culture valued mostly only by academia itself — though also by a few parts of industry that do research and want to attract academics.) Academic culture has an even more rarified upper-class nature than regular university culture. This is why the economics of academia is the way it is — it's a set of (dis)incentives that work out fine for the independently-wealthy trust-fund hyphenated-last-name crowd, but are prohibitive for everyone else.
Academic tenure was and is not supposed to be about getting a steady pay-cheque. For the type of people who academia expects to become professors, the pay of a professorship, tenured or not, is valueless. Rather, academic tenure exists to guarantee that you'll always have access to the resources of the institution to use in your ongoing research — no matter how heterodox that research is vs. the views of the institution. Tenure is a staple through your card on the org-chart that can't easily be removed when leadership (of the University, or of the cultural zeitgeist) shifts.
If you look at the academic "ladder" through the lenses of 1. an assumption of already being independently wealthy and extremely upper-class; and 2. the end-goal being "you can do whatever research you like for as long as you like, under our roof, using our staff, and we'll get it funded for you, no takesie-backsies"; then I think it's all structured in a way that's pretty optimal to achieve adequate gating and filtering of applicants.
Just, the applicants to this "ladder" seem to mostly mistake what it is they're vying for; and often inherently don't have the resources to qualify.
Commenting only on a small fraction of your post: The "independently wealthy PhD student" is not much of a thing anymore. Similarly, professors are very rarely independently wealthy folks. The vast majority of PhDs I know come from the lower-to-mid middle class.
And I wouldn't disagree! But keep in mind the difference between "a PhD" and "a research professor." My points about Academic culture were specifically about the culture of research professors — and of the graduate-degree-program insofar as it exists as a system for at becoming such.
Let me restate my points a different way:
1. The whole University system has always been set up to rely on the existence of independently-wealthy professors. There has been no consideration ever given to surviving on a professor's salary, with or without tenure, as the University-as-institution is not set up to expect professors to need the salary the University pays them. Professors are basically expected to have other jobs — usually upper-class, no-real-work-expected "head of a nonprofit" kind of jobs. They're expected to have these jobs before becoming a professor. A professorship was, historically, just something you would stumble into out of a career as a "man of science" (which is like being a "man of leisure", but with more science.) The pay is a bit like the pay for jury duty: it's a stipend for taking time out of your life to do something that's worthwhile, but not profitable in its own right.
2. In the distant history of the concept of higher education (Ancient Greek through to ~medieval), research professors came first; and at first there was no codified progression system that would make you into one. Rather, Universities were "monasteries of research"; if you would attend them to learn, it would be in the same sense that apprentices attended a master artisan's workshop. The people doing the research there would put you to work (in research), already expecting you to have a grounding in the culture required to understand the work to be done (which you'd get from your parents, and from private tutors, or from being sent to e.g. grammar school.) Over the course of helping out with such research, you'd hopefully attain a useful education in something. The research professors did not give "remedial education" lectures, except insofar as a team lead might give a lecture to their team about how to do the work they're doing. They sometimes gave public lectures about their advances, or debated other professors, but neither of these were with the goal of giving "an education" to the attendees of the University.
3. As with the trades, if you wanted to become part of Academia yourself, there was a "journeyman" phase: you'd graduate from the school you attended, then go off and have a career in the arts or sciences. That career might take you into close collaboration with the staff of a particular University; and that might then naturally lead to you being offered a professorship there. This professorship was always tenured; there was no concept of a non-tenured position. A non-tenured position (with some temporary office space, use of labs, a stipend for lunch from the cafe, etc) is what you already had just by the fact of partnering with the University in your private work!
4. Circa the Renaissance, the "University as higher public education" concept was invented, bringing in the concepts of research professors giving "remedial higher education" lectures; of teaching assistants; of paying to attend the school; of the nouveau-riche sending their children to the school to be "raised up" to the upper-class through exposure to the liberal arts; and so forth. This proved to be a successful model for several centuries, although it seems to be falling apart today. (It also closely mirrored the introduction of officer candidate schools in military contexts.)
5. Later, seeing the success of the "higher public education" concept in minting new members of the upper class from middle-class University attendees, there was an attempt to create a similar process that would mint people having the specific culture that academic research itself had: to create researchers from whole cloth, without them needing a career as a journeyman scientist. This led to the creation of the PhD system, the concept of the tenure track, the concept of adjunct professors, the cordoning-off of apprenticeship duties to "graduate" rather than "undergraduate" attendees of the University, the concept of a "teaching assistant" being a "graduate" position, and so forth.
This kind of worked, but when it did, it only worked because the people becoming professors were already members of the upper class. (Note how it's possible to do a doctorate program without first doing any kind of undergrad program, but that this is rarely done. The expectation is that those already in the upper class would just go straight to a doctorate program; while those in the middle class would need enculturation to the upper class first, through an undergraduate program.)
6. Due to the removal of real apprenticeship duties from undergraduate programs, the "spirit" that made undergraduate programs real engines of enculturation began to fall out. If an undergraduate higher-education program was just a bunch of lectures and homework, then anyone could run one; and so Universities began popping up all over that offered the same undergraduate education but didn't do any enculturating.
This also meant that "having a University undergraduate education" could no longer be used as a signal that someone would be able to successfully take part in a PhD programs. So the oldest Universities became picky and whitelist-bound — the creation of the Ivy League as a useful concept (separate from a sporting context) is due to their recognizing only undergrad degrees from certain "sibling" Universities as being worth something (that something is enculturation!) in graduate-program intake.
But all the other, newer universities and colleges and technical institutes? They just blindly went on trying to make graduate degrees and tenure tracks work, cargo-culting the process invented (and then discovered to only work given specific prerequisites) by the old Universities. (Hey, cargo-culting their undergrad degrees worked, so why shouldn't cargo-culting their graduate programs?)
So most universities proceed without a clear understanding of the fact that Harvard and Yale have the pay scales for grad-students and tenure-track professors that they do, because the people staffing those positions are of a certain socioeconomic standing, that is unique to Harvard and Yale. They copy the pay scales, but they can't copy the candidate pool. So instead, they force middle-class people to try to survive on pay that exists — as part of a system designed centuries ago — to serve as an upper-class "trivial stipend." And then people wonder why nobody wants to work in academia.
You are making some interesting point, but one of your main ones, point 1, is not even remotely true today (if ever?). Salaries for tenured (research) professors in STEM fields are "good". Starting salary in mid-level CS department is >150k for tenure track positions. That is within the top 10 percentile of salaries in the US. No one is expecting STEM professors to be from some blue blood family background. The majority of STEM professors I know came from lower-middle-class backgrounds and are significantly outearning their parents (adjusted for inflation too) and their professorship salary is far bigger than any other salary they have had in their lives (frequently by more than 2x).
I was offered more as a junior web dev with no experience than I was offered for a tenure track job. It obviously varies a lot by field, but even if you are on tenure track, you can still be under 100K.
Was that in a STEM field? I know there is discrepancy between STEM and non-STEM and I can more easily believe that @derefr is right in the non-STEM context.
I spent some time doing a (never completed) PhD in chemistry before I got into CS. One thing that stuck with me was a comment my PI made frequently -- he always said that there were fewer tenured chemistry professors in the US than there were professional baseball players.
I never followed up on it; it might not be true![0] But it does back up your "jackpot winners" comment, which I think is true even if his particular stat is wrong. It's really formed my perspective of academia, given that it came from someone with both tenure and decades in academia.
[0]: a quick search didn't yield any hard numbers. Maybe someone with better research skills could find 'em.
There are about 6000 professional baseball players in the US, in both major and minor leagues, and while I can’t find how many tenured chemistry professors there are, his assertion seems within the realm of reason.
The hard part is getting hired to a tenure-track position. While there are exceptions, most universities award tenure to a majority of people who become eligible.
It's a useful if (as the author admits) hyperbolic metaphor. And really, no single metaphor (or essay) needs to (or can) address all relevant issues. But, I think the next thing that comes to mind after reading it (if, like I, you fundamentally agree) is, "why is it like that?"
Academia is, at the graduate level, one of the most fundamentally hierarchical, arbitrary, and unfair work environments. It is the very opposite of all of the progressive, power-to-the-people ideology that most of the people in it would profess to believe in. The reason that faculty are godzillas, is that the system is designed that way. I can believe that using this metaphor is a great way for someone (especially newly in the role) to realize their perceived power, and how to minimize the destructive consequences of that. But, really, the problem is that the way in which academia is structured is far more unjust and hierarchical than even the corporate world.
As someone still struggling with this after recent-ish promotion to an engineering leadership role, first I was heartened to read that it's common; then worried to read it might take several more years to fully come to terms with; and finally devastated to hear even then it's only resolved by factors in the academy not applicable to those of us with a private industry job (especially given a huge lack of "reformed kaiju" to turn to for advice).
The bullets in this post are surprisingly applicable to executives, and CEOs in particular. The lack of awareness of the first list is very common among new CEOs. And the second list has some solid advice to improve things.
As an (academic) friend of mind mused rhetorically recently over a few beers, "Why is there so much politics in academia... Perhaps because the stakes are so low".
The idea that politics in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low is a meme that has been around for many years, so perhaps it's just the first time you heard it?
I'm not convinced of the meme despite its cleverness or the many blog articles discussing it. I don't think it would get less politically intense if the stakes were raised.
Quote Investigator cites a Charles Frankel, in 1964, though my sense is that the saying long predates that (I seem to recall a variant attributed to Woodrow Wilson circa 1915). There are similar observations dating to Samuel Johnson in the 18th century:
As former tenured faculty I can attest some are aware of their power. Some are not; some pretend not to know; some think they have more power than they do.
I think it's a bit dangerous to generalize about power in academics. Academics is a heterogenous environment, and even assuming faculty have more power than they realize can be a detriment to those who truly don't have it.
Self aggrandizing comparison, whole article is a humblebrag about how powerful the author is. You're an insignificant spec compared to the old grand lizard. In your most destructive, you are nothing like him. In your most heroic moments, you are nothing like him. If you ever think to compare yourself to Godzilla, the only similarity is your rampaging ego.
If the author was aware that Godzilla was a metaphor for the atomic bomb, they may or may not have chosen a different movie monster. I would hate to think that faculty are unwitting weapons of complete and utter annihilation aimed primarily at students. Godzilla’s design and purpose was to indiscriminately destroy.
As US/Japan relations improved Godzilla could be seen as a protector, but that strains the faculty/student metaphor too far, imho. There are other movie monsters that may be more appropriate.
I'm not a fan of the monster metaphor, it blows the power disparity way up and doesn't leave room for reconciliation.
Prefer thinking of the author as a pig instead, as in "men are pigs". In this case, instead of feasting sexually, they are gorging emotionally on attention that comes from their status.
Seeing "eye-to-eye" is an equal meeting of souls. It gets corrupted by power - the moment might be neutral, but the 2 parties aren't entering on even terms.
The casino, however, is more fair. At least in the casino the winners don't have to submit their bets for approval to a committee of former winners who don't understand that they are a product of chance and had published many books and papers on gambling strategies. Awarding tenure at random might even produce better outcomes.