Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Scott Jaschik writes in Inside Higher Education that the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities. According to Alexandre Afonso, academic systems rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of 'outsiders' ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. 'What you have is an increasing number of brilliant PhD graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and high salaries, a bit like the rank-and-file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord,' says Afonso. 'To achieve that, they are ready to forgo the income and security that they could have in other areas of employment by accepting insecure working conditions in the hope of securing jobs that are not expanding at the same rate.' The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on adjunct lecturers who rely on food stamps to make ends meet. Afonso adds that he is not trying to discourage everyone from pursuing Ph.D.s but that prospective graduate students need to go in with a full awareness of the job market."

Comments

Of course, no mention of the staff

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're staff, you're not even a potential member of the club. It doesn't matter how much of an expert you in are in your field, if you're not faculty, your opinion doesn't matter.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[mjwalshe]

and they also get poor wages I worked at a word leading RnD organization as a research assistant and I was at the time paid abotu 1/3 of what a nurse was (the roles had the same educational entrance requirements :-( and this was when nursing was consider a badly underpaid profession.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[rmstar]

If you're staff, you're not even a potential member of the club. It doesn't matter how much of an expert you in are in your field, if you're not faculty, your opinion doesn't matter.

Of course it doesn't. Think about it: it really can't. While everybody talks science, they are really in the rat race. Whatever you, as non-rat-racer, tell them, is irrelevant because it misses the point by definition.

Let me try to explain with a car analogy. Suppose you are in a kart competition. A long winded, gruesome affair spanning uncountable races over many continents. And suddenly, in the midst of it, one of the tire salesmen appears with a formula one car. It obviously makes no sense. Get it?

In sum, be thankful for not being in the rat race.

Disclosure: been there, done that.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[ceoyoyo]

But twice as much as a post doc.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[mjwalshe]

Actually not I was paid the massive sum of £1620 PA that was back in 79 though the guys doing their PHd's where paid a bit more than us

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're staff, you're not even a potential member of the club. It doesn't matter how much of an expert you in are in your field, if you're not faculty, your opinion doesn't matter.

Ship's engineer doesn't decide where the ship goes. NCO doesn't decide whether to invade a country or not. Manager doesn't decide whether to buy another company or not. Welder doesn't decide how many floors are in a skyscraper. Scotty wasn't captain of the Enterprise.

In every field, there is need for highly technical, highly competent people who are not the ultimate decision makers. Don't like it? Go after the job where the decisions get made -- you may be disappointed that you don't get to do all the stuff yourself then.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[khallow]

They'd be "hoes". Opinion doesn't matter and you're there to be used by the faculty.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if the ship's engineer tells them it'll take 7 days to get there with 3 fuel stops, he doesn't get told to make it happen in 2 days with no fuel stops. Well, at least not in the world of reality.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[FatdogHaiku]

Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge: Look, Mr. Scott, I'd love to explain everything to you, but the Captain wants this spectrographic analysis done by 1300 hours.
Scotty: Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
La Forge: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long will it really take?
La Forge: An hour!
Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
La Forge: Well, of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you work in a University environment? There tends to be a staff chain of command. Then there's faculty, who aren't really your boss, but they still get to dictate what you do. I've heard the only similar sort of environment is hospitals, with doctors playing the role of faculty.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[ceoyoyo]

Where I work (now, not in '79), the research associates make more than the post docs. Maybe not twice as much, but a significant amount. PhDs make less, unless they have a scholarship (I made twice as much as a PhD than as a postdoc, factoring in the tax advantages). Research assistants are undergrads or equivalent (so I assumed you meant an equivalent of research associate), and they usually get paid about as much as grad students. Nurses are somewhere off in the stratosphere, making more than professors.

Re:Of course, no mention of the staff

[mjwalshe]

ah no it was a research association based at CIT so sort of a half way house but the prestige of working their meant that pay was depressed all round the civil service (know for low pay) paid more

The sad truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that for many fields everyone involved is incompetent and has built a career off of misinterpreted p-values.

So, Like any Tournament Model

[Hardhead_7]

There are many career paths, such as professional sports or marketers. But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[superwiz]

Sports model is equally inflammatory. The idea of academic freedom being available only to those who have already made their most significant contribution (and therefore get tenure which is supposed to provide academic freedom) is an idea that needs to be discussed. It is a problem.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Guppy06]

Professional sports isn't exactly known for myriad career opportunities either.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[rjejr]

What he said. Emphasis on sports and inflammatory. Basically big fish eat little fish. L.I.F.E.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Tenure is the worst idea ever. It is essentially saying that it doesn't matter you are unproductive and a waste of space, you did something really good in the past so you are now in the Club now.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ganjadude]

so its like congress!

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[rmstar]

Tenure is the worst idea ever. It is essentially saying that it doesn't matter you are unproductive and a waste of space, you did something really good in the past so you are now in the Club now.

This is only partially true. At the very least, most people who make it to professor are crazy by then, and just continue in there never-ending fight like ever before.

Additionally, tenured professors will be bullied by the administration if they underperform. That can get very nasty.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[JeffOwl]

I don't think I understand your point. How is anybody being denied "academic freedom?" Who is stopping these PhDs from studying whatever they want? Or by academic freedom do you mean "the freedom to make somebody else pay them for their studies?"

This isn't a dig, I really feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle because I just don't get the outrage, particularly with this statement: "The idea of academic freedom being available only to those who have already made their most significant contribution (and therefore get tenure which is supposed to provide academic freedom) is an idea that needs to be discussed. It is a problem." If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ceoyoyo]

Sad that you'd look at, say, people working to advance human knowledge and cure diseases being treated like crap, say it's just like professional sports, and think that's okay.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Livius]

you did something really good in the past

So, no, not like congress.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[khallow]

Academic freedom != tenure. Obviously, if the university can fire you for saying controversial or inconvenient, but scientifically valid things, then that's not academic freedom. Indefinite tenure is meant to address that, but it's not the only way to do so.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Hardhead_7]

I don't think I understand your point. How is anybody being denied "academic freedom?" Who is stopping these PhDs from studying whatever they want? Or by academic freedom do you mean "the freedom to make somebody else pay them for their studies?"

This isn't a dig, I really feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle because I just don't get the outrage, particularly with this statement: "The idea of academic freedom being available only to those who have already made their most significant contribution (and therefore get tenure which is supposed to provide academic freedom) is an idea that needs to be discussed. It is a problem." If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?

This is generally done by the same people who use the term "elites" derisively. There's a culture - often promulgated by Libertarians - that people who aren't directly enhancing some corporation's bottom line somewhere don't deserve recognition or respect. The fact is, someone who has made significant contributions to their field deserves some job security.

It's not that these naysayers have a better system for who deserves tenure (or, if they want to eliminate tenure altogether, a tenure-like protection from Administrative whims). They don't want anyone to have such protections, because then scientists who tell inconvenient truths about politics or science ("Hey, did you know Climate Change might be a problem?) can be easily silenced by politically or corporate-backed powers.

Is the tenure system perfect? God, no, but what system involving human pecking order is? But it's pretty good, actually, for the most part! They're a reason the western-style educational system has been rocking it hardcore for hundreds of years now. And the fact is, the attack on professors, tenure, and the scientific elites in general is mostly coming from the corners that are trying to tear down science as an edifice in general.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[timholman]

Additionally, tenured professors will be bullied by the administration if they underperform. That can get very nasty.

On the other hand, I can tell you (based on first-hand observation) that you'd be astonished how much bullying underperforming tenured professors can tolerate.

These types are not going to give up guaranteed employment. They simply grow a thicker skin. Furthermore, they learn how to strike back. For example, if the department chair tries to increase the teaching load of a non-performer, the inevitable result is horrible teaching reviews and angry students changing majors. The administration very quickly learns to just leave the non-performers alone and wait for them to retire.

The better alternative, of course, is to hire non-tenured faculty. Much easier to get rid of (if necessary), and in general more productive researchers and better teachers.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and depending on department, adjuncts and people on tenure tracks may be engaged in research that goes against the ideological grain of whoever is carrying the purse strings for the campus.

Look, this is really more a problem in disciplines other than computer and natural sciences. I'm a grad student in cultural anthropology, and arguably the entire basis of my field is in questioning those things in everyday life that everyone takes for granted. When studying issues that have political/economic implications -- like, say, researching healthcare access among migrant workers on the southern US border -- it's really easy to fall afoul of campus leadership if your work addresses failings of capitalism, engaged in the long-term effects of poverty on a community. You make too much of a fuss over poor brown people who have been systematically screwed over by "the system," and you risk offending key administrators where you're slaving away hoping that a tenured position opens up. These days, the people in charge of campuses and entire state university systems have little background as actual educators, and are increasingly originating in businesses and bureaucracies. Questioning how society works is not in their best interests. Make too big a deal over things like social inequality, and expect the boot.

Now, when it comes to teaching in classrooms, then more departments open themselves up to criticism than the social sciences and the humanities. If I'm teaching about human evolution in a conservative part of the country (which I have), I can take for granted that a significant percentage of my students are going to object to the course material. As an adjunct, I have no job security whatsoever. Any student can go to the administration and complain that my course offends their delicate sensibilities, and if they happen to find a sympathetic ear with the higher-ups, well, I won't have to worry about having my contract renewed the following semester. After all, there are plenty of other desperate M.A.s and Ph.D.s ready to take over at the podium.

If I have tenure, I have much less to worry about as far as what research I can do, and what I can teach in my classrooms. Just stepping on someone's toes because their ideology is too constrained to accept reality (which, as Mr. Colbert famously pointed out, has a liberal bias) is no longer a significant concern. I can instead be judged solely by my peers, who -- while not perfect -- are more qualified to evaluate me than some nervous bean-counter.

These are a couple of broad examples, but I hope they give you some idea of why academic freedom allotted by tenured positions is crucial to the function of higher education. Part of the reason this has become such a major issue in academia is that university systems are so opaque to most of American society. No one outside the so-called "ivory tower" has a good grasp of how it's structured and ranked, or even how the tenure process works (other than vague references to "publish or perish"). If more people outside of academia were aware of how business interests have been affecting higher education since the '80s, I would hope there would be more public outcry, and more support for faculty and staff.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Oligonicella]

The fact is, someone who has made significant contributions to their field deserves some job security.

That's an opinion, not a fact.

They don't want anyone to have such protections, because then scientists ... can be easily silenced by politically or corporate-backed powers.

Not true. And, by the way, academic powers do most of the professorial suppression, typically against those who do not share their world view. .

And the fact is, the attack on professors, tenure, and the scientific elites in general is mostly coming from the corners that are trying to tear down science as an edifice in general.

Again not true, as many academics are amongst those advocating the demise of tenure.

Nice political screed though.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Better model is to simply deny them grad students. Without grad students, they can't deliver on grants, and their salary will drop as it's partially contingent on grants. Don't let grad students pick them as advisors, don't fulfill contracts with them.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Rob Simpson]

you did something really good in the past

So, no, not like congress.

Not necessarily. Good for whom?

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[dcollins]

Academic freedom, as in, freedom of speech, "free to express their opinions without fear from institutional censorship or discipline".

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?

How will you know when they've proved themselves?

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were delivering on grants, then, by definition, they wouldn't be underperforming professors.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[khallow]

Eh, I think it's warranted. For a supposed bastion of the intellect, academia is surprisingly non-intellectual, like drug dealing. And that irrationality is baked in and institutionalized (like training (excuse me, "educating") way too many graduate students for degrees which are known to have vastly fewer available positions).

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Goldsmith]

You're asking why it's a problem that the government excludes the majority of scientists from applying for funding. Wouldn't you just want the best teams and proposals?

I feel like the academic freedom comments are put out there mainly to try to get non-scientists at universities interested in this issue. To me, this is simply about spending tax dollars effectively. It does outrage me when I see a professor getting a big government R&D contract to research something I've already done, or could do at a much lower cost, when I didn't even have a chance to make my case.

I'm currently an industrial scientist, and have been a government scientist. In both of those positions, I am prevented from fully competing with academic, tenure track researchers for government R&D funding. Why?

The only special thing tenure track professors do is bestow PhDs on students. One, we don't need more PhD students; half of those kids should be going to medical school, really. Two, I still train and advise students as a non-tenured scientist, I'm just not the guy who puts the hood on them at graduation.

I compete with academics for patents and private investment. There is nothing stopping an academic from applying for the small business set aside funds, signing a research contract with a government lab, or competing with me for an investor's funds. But unless I'm in a tenure track academic position, I cannot even be considered for many government R&D grants. That's pretty stupid.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ganjadude]

congress did good in the past, under washington anyway

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[HiThere]

Good. What are some better ways? Has anyone debugged them?

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[khallow]

What are some better ways?

Post a bond, say which is invested in the NASDAQ index, for example, that pays off when the university lets the professor go for any reason other than something that would get a tenured professor fired.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[umafuckit]

If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?

That's a reasonable stance, and one the funding agencies and journals more or less follow, but it it's somewhat blinkered. Some researchers produce good work early in their career but then become stagnant or a little nuts in the second half of their career. However, if they have built up a sufficiently big name they are able to attract more funding and get papers into better journals than their contemporary output really deserves. The money would have been better spent on budding new minds.

Anecdote: There's a Nobel laureate in my field who routinely gets spectacularly shit papers into the very top journals. These papers take up space that should have gone to deserving work, they don't help the lead author (student or post-doc) because everyone knows the paper is over-sold shit, and they are bad for our field because people outside judge us by them. Furthermore, this person and progeny from the lab tend to stick together and block outsider's work from getting into these journals. The reviews that come back are obviously obstructionist bile, but the editors don't have the balls to do deal with it. I had a paper blocked this way: the second reviewer even wrote to the journal to call out the first, obstructionist, reviewer but it did no good. A shittier version of our work, authored by people more established than us (but not those who blocked us), eventually appeared in this top journal. I know others who've had worse experiences. It's terribly demoralising.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[JeffOwl]

For lack of a better option, I guess it would be how they are selected for tenure today. If I understood correctly, the parent to my original post was asserting that people who have never done anything particularly noteworthy should be hired by universities and subjected to little oversight. This model has the potential to find some really outstanding young academics (which I think was the point of the earlier post), but most of what you will have are just average. Do I want to commit to keeping a bunch of average academics around forever on my limited budget? /Leaving aside the fact that tenure decisions are usually made by a committee which is the best way to make sure the optimal decision is never actually reached.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's an opinion, not a fact."

Of course it is. Just like everything is. That doesn't mean every opinion is equally valid. It's a good idea to have some protections for scientists trying to speak their minds, just like it's a good idea to have some protections for freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and so on. For the sake of informing the public, scientists are supposed to be able to speak out against powerful people and tell them things they don't necessarily want to hear.

"Not true. And, by the way, academic powers do most of the professorial suppression, typically against those who do not share their world view."

Like what? The way scientists suppress flat Earth theory, phlogiston, or homeopathic medicine? If a scientific idea can't withstand a little criticism from scientists or anyone else, then it's not a very good idea. It's pretty hard to keep a good idea down in the scientific realm. Usually the people complaining are the ones that have the weak ideas that don't pass scrutiny, and can't get their ideas published because they really *are* bad at it. Either that or there is some genuine uncertainty or controversy that isn't yet sorted out.

You're right on some level, because the science will still get out there somehow, but why make it easy to get rid of inconvenient ideas by political means?

"Again not true, as many academics are amongst those advocating the demise of tenure."

I've heard few people in academia suggest tenure should be abolished. Most of what I've heard is people suggesting it should be reformed, but that's about it.

Most people misunderstand tenure anyway. It doesn't protect you from getting fired for everything. It protects you from getting fired for speaking your mind on an issue in your area of specialty. You can still be fired for incompetence or a host of other reasons. It's a distinction from "at will" firing, but it doesn't mean you can't be laid off and your contract terminated for lack of performance, for financial reasons, or anything else but your opinions.

The grandparent is right. This whole thing is an effort to tear down science and academia so that it doesn't get in the way of politics or other powerful influences. Science continues to be inconvenient, and if enough people start thinking like you, I guess you'll be happy with science so politicized you may as well not bother doing it. Of course, you probably think that's already the case if there's something science suggests that doesn't conform with your wishes.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ColaMan]

Tenure is there so that you can go 'against the grain' of university higher-ups without fear of reprisals. It's to allow dissenting views to be held and debated.

It's similar to parliamentary privilege, where they can say whatever they want basically whilst talking in parliament.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Better model is to simply deny them grad students. Without grad students, they can't deliver on grants, and their salary will drop as it's partially contingent on grants. Don't let grad students pick them as advisors, don't fulfill contracts with them.

You don't know what you are talking about. A grad student is typically worth three times (or more) the income to the University than an undergrad. Grad students are further subsidized and supported by (typically government) funds.

The University is happy to give grad students to poorly performing professors, and who knows, occasionally the right student with the right prof turns things around. It's not like an under-performer was always so, nor is a performer guaranteed to remain so. The performing professors have all the grad students they can manage, and if slipping a few into the hands of under-performers can be done, the University will gladly do so (barring a major loss in politics) as grad students are (relatively) cash cows.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[frank_adrian314159]

How is this more efficient than tenure? Why bring yet another external party into the mix? Seems like a jury-rigged solution, actually. Try harder next time, Mr. Goldberg.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[hraponssi]

I don't think I understand your point. How is anybody being denied "academic freedom?" Who is stopping these PhDs from studying whatever they want? Or by academic freedom do you mean "the freedom to make somebody else pay them for their studies?"

He/She who pays the bills? As a postdoc your freedom is to do what the professor bids you to do or so.. Of course nothing necessarily wrong with that since they do pay the bills from the grants etc. But I wouldn't call it much of an academic freedom.

This isn't a dig, I really feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle because I just don't get the outrage, particularly with this statement: "The idea of academic freedom being available only to those who have already made their most significant contribution (and therefore get tenure which is supposed to provide academic freedom) is an idea that needs to be discussed. It is a problem." If I only have a small pool of money to pay tenured professors, why wouldn't I want to select the ones that have proven themselves?

Of course you would. But before you get there do you have academic freedom? You have to be politically correct, suck up to everyone, pick topics that lead to gaming the best metrics to get there etc. I don't have a better system but I wouldn't call that academic freedom either.. Maybe to some different degrees or so.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[khallow]

How is this more efficient than tenure?

It allows universities to fire faculty for any reason at a price.

Seems like a jury-rigged solution

Compared to tenure itself? Why would you say that? Businesses do this sort of thing all the time for CEOs and other high level executives. There's probably a bunch of university officials who get this sort of deal too.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, the people in charge of campuses and entire state university systems have little background as actual educators, and are increasingly originating in businesses and bureaucracies. Questioning how society works is not in their best interests. Make too big a deal over things like social inequality, and expect the boot.

What you are saying here is that you don't really have universities anymore. Sad, but true. If you don't have the academic freedom to research whatever you want regardless of which way the results point to you can't rreally research anymore. Societys loss. Something new will emerge, as there will be people who see the need for real unbiased research. Even the most idiotic business owners see the value of having truthfull data at their hands instead of fabricated results.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine art practice is the same sort of thing, a casino economy.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[ananamouse]

"Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and..."
Actually, the position of Administrator is a roach-motel for psychopaths. That is the number one reason for tenure.

Somebody's Law states that Management ends up with the Union it deserves.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you miss the point. The point is not to belittle the concept of higher education. The point is to call out and belittle the pathetic, cutthroat state we've allowed US higher education to reach. Our healthcare system is in similarly ignominious state. It's almost like the common factor is uncontrolled greed, if I didn't know better.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[superwiz]

If you challenge consensus, you challenge social standing of those who established it. You challenge their station in life. Some may ignore it, but some may attempt to preserve that station by denying new researchers access. Unable to get a job, a new brilliant researcher would be forced to leave the field. The academic freedom is there to protect those who are disliked for the results of their findings.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[superwiz]

This is generally done by the same people who use the term "elites" derisively. There's a culture - often promulgated by Libertarians

C'mon. Really? I'll be generous and assume that you have defended your findings against those who don't understand them too much to make a distinction between them and those who challenge standing on legitimate grounds. But you are unquestionably defending yourself against an attack which hasn't been made in this case.

The fact is, someone who has made significant contributions to their field deserves some job security.

Maybe they do and maybe they don't. But tenure in research (rather than in teaching) exists for the purposes of protecting the scientific inquiry as a process. It doesn't exist (even if it has come to be viewed as existing) for the purposes of rewarding those who advance that process.

It's not that these naysayers have a better system for who deserves tenure

naysayers? Really?? I don't know how to rationally defend against slurs. Nor do I feel like trying.

They don't want anyone to have such protections

What protections? It is the nature of the protection itself that is being discussed rather than who is deserving of it and who is not.

but what system involving human pecking order is

So you do agree that it is a pecking order rather than a protection of the truth-finding process. Welcome to the club.

And the fact is, the attack on professors, tenure, and the scientific elites in general is mostly coming from the corners that are trying to tear down science as an edifice in general.

Nonsense. Pure unadulterated nonsense. It is not an attack on professors. It is not an attack at all. It is an attempt to see what would create a better system for protecting scientific inquiry. You attempt to claim that is only needs to be protected from those outside of the scientific community. And you fail to recognize that it also needs to be protected from the weakness of human nature inside of the community. Orthodoxy is the problem that is being challenged -- not elitism.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[superwiz]

It protects you from getting fired for speaking your mind on an issue in your area of specialty.

No, it really doesn't. It was conceived that way, perhaps. But it doesn't serve that function at all in the current system. If what you are saying were true, almost every single professor would have to be tenured. But it's not what tenure is. It's entirely a job-contract status.

Re:So, Like any Tournament Model

[superwiz]

Because administrators by and large are politically conservative

That is suuuuuch a nonsense. Most administrators are former educators. And if some of them not rabid left wingers, that does not automatically make them right wingers. They have to remain level headed and balance priorities within the restrictions within which they operate. That doesn't mean they are out to promote some right-wing agenda. This is such nonsense that I am not even sure this reply was worth making.

Just academia?

[gallondr00nk]

with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities.

So academia is just like the rest of the world, then.

Re:Just academia?

[theheadlessrabbit]

"So academia is just like the rest of the world, then."

Not exactly. The reports in academia are much more long-winded.

Re:Just academia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I'm not sure why drug gangs are necessarily a better match than anything else. Sounds like just about any business. There aren't many people that rise from corner store to head of city-wide or nation-wide grocery store chains either. Same for the restaurant business and major franchises.

Re:Just academia?

[strength_of_10_men]

Yeah, I'm not sure why the analogy to a drug gang was used as this applies to pretty much ANY organization. Even one of TFAs states as much:

As it turned out, the gang worked a lot like most American businesses, though perhaps none more so than McDonald's. If you were to hold a McDonald's organizational chart and the crack gang's organizational chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.

Re:Just academia?

[ceoyoyo]

It's not the few at the top. It's the wages. Grocery clerks (zero education or experience required) make as much or more than grad students (minimum four years of post secondary, excellent performance through high school and undergrad). A good cashier (few years experience and the ability to count, sort of) likely makes more than a post doc (ten to twenty years post secondary, excellent performance). The manager makes as much as a professor will probably top out at. University administration is sometimes (but not always, and less and less now) promoted academic staff; that's where the money starts.

So in academia you work half your life to make as much as someone who can be trusted not to steal from the cash, and that's pretty much where you're almost certain to top out.

Re:Just academia?

[iONiUM]

Isn't that how a free market works? Groups of people get paid what the entities want to pay, and if they don't like it, they work elsewhere forcing wages to rise, or they just do it anyways and potentially form a union.

If it's so much better to work as a grocery clerk financially, and that's what your measure of 'success' is, then do that. Nobody is entitled to any salary, nor is anyone forced into any career. In fact, if workers for these jobs were more rare, you can bet salary would go up.

Re:Just academia?

[AthanasiusKircher]

So in academia you work half your life to make as much as someone who can be trusted not to steal from the cash, and that's pretty much where you're almost certain to top out.

It is rather sobering to note that median salaries for grocery store managers in the U.S. are roughly $70,000. The median salaries for the lowest paid fields with tenured professors (generally in the humanities) are around that.

But it really depends on your field. Median salaries for professors in the sciences or engineering are higher than that. And if you look at salaries for faculty at professional schools (law schools, business schools, medical, etc.), the median salary is roughly double that, though still less than what those professional faculty would likely make in private industry/practice.

So, yes, if you work in the humanities, you'll probably top out at the level of a grocery store manager or so in terms of salary. But keep in mind that humanities academic careers don't tend to have semi-required post-doc phases, as in many scientific fields. So, those extra years spent in post-docs in the sciences may be rewarded with a slightly higher ultimate salary (quite a bit higher if you land a job at a prestigious top-tier research school).

Re:Just academia?

[dcollins]

Or you might say it's the last bastion where a strong union keeps a voice for the actual workers and experts at the table. And therefore is top on the chopping block for the capitalist enterprise.

Re: Just academia?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a depressing world view

Re: Just academia?

[Anonymous Coward]

You americans really need some teutonoic input to this discussion: obviously the politicos, the banksters and mic have ben actively fucking up the almost entire pax americana world since 1999. 14 years of cynical, corrupt and irresponsible action. First excessive levereage, then inflation of all sorts.

Do you seriously think this will not affect everybody, including academics?

During ww1 germany had leading-edge industry, which was very efficient and invented revolutionary, large-scale processes like fischer-tropsch coal to liquid fuel. After germany lost the war, she was financially castrated. Plus we were indebted heavily to the madhouse new york.
So one of the most advanced and probably most efficient economies was in the crapper because of finance.

First fix finance , public an private, then think about fixing things like these. Lead the horse from the mouth, not the arse.

Re: Just academia?

[Anonymous Coward]

I forgot to mention that about 30 percent of germans were unemployed after ww1, despite an industry that could outdo france, russia and england combined.

Re:Just academia?

[ceoyoyo]

It is. Which is perfectly fine if that's the kind of society you want to live in. Unfortunately, private enterprise doesn't seem to be particularly good at long term investment, in particular, things like basic research. So if all the scientists go work as grocery clerks we're all going to be short on cures for diseases, breakthrough technologies etc.

I'm in academia at the moment but every year I'm having a harder and harder time justifying working for a quarter of the salaries drawn by my childhood friends who dropped out of high school, particularly since there isn't really much hope of advancement.

Re:Just academia?

[ceoyoyo]

Hey, so you're saying that if you work for twenty years for food-bank money you might, one day, just maybe, make a bit more than a grocery store manager? Except almost certainly not, because professor is like drug kingpin - lots and lots of aspirants and almost no positions.

Re:Just academia?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. Which is perfectly fine if that's the kind of society you want to live in.

And that explains why some people work in grocery stores and some pursued higher education, even though both paid similarly. Some can only see what's around oneself, some can see the bigger picture and realize some work ought to be done by someone.

I left academia and works in private industries now, and it is more or less as bad as I thought it would. I am working on things that are, compared to advancing human knowledge, very trivial and boring, AND very easy compared to the work I did in academia. Essentially, I am now just competing with the people who failed to get top grades in undergrad (i.e. I had already beaten them once before). On the human aspect, there are political games and backstabbing, as expected, but keeping in mind that the same things also happens in the academia (only possibly less severe), so it is ok once I got used to it and learned how to survive.

BUT, most importantly, it pays very well, I can provide for my family and have even saved up quite a bit.

I have a lot of respect for people who pursued higher learning and made so much personal sacrifice to advance the human knowledge. I am just too selfish to do it myself.

Re: Just academia?

[Talderas]

I'm confused. The reparations were imposed by the allies because of the perceived damage inflicted by Germany in the Great War. This totaled to about 50 billion which Germany was more than capable of paying off. Germans were just unwilling to pay it off because it would have required increased taxation. The Germans were also unwilling to do so because Germany didn't suffer a military defeat in the Great War which also helped feed a lot of the tensions in between the two World Wars and helped to feed the German unwillingness to pay reparations.

It certainly didn't help that Germany got raked over the coals so heavily because of their alliances that dragged them into the war because every other nation she was allied with was impoverished so Germany was left holding the bag. Austria fucked Germany hard.

Not a great analogy

[siwelwerd]

I'm not really sure this is an apt analogy. Yes, you forgo higher wages while in graduate school, but if you don't make drug lord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a tenure track position, you can head to industry and make a good wage. I don't think street dealers have this option. Yes, most of us want to go into academia, but having a fallback option with 50-100% higher salary doesn't seem so bad (speaking as a mathematician here--maybe humanities Ph.D.'s really are like drug dealers).

Another thing they downplay in the reward side of academia is the time flexibility. There are absolutely zero vacation days, but for the most part, outside of hours physically spent in the classroom (usually less than 10 a week, less than 40 weeks a year), you get to arrange your schedule. I've known professors who worked from home in the morning and the office in the afternoon, and one who showed up at 4:00 PM and stayed until 12 or 1 (I was always amused when he joined us for a beer "after" work on occasion). To a lot of us, this is a huge perk

Re:Not a great analogy

[rmstar]

Another thing they downplay in the reward side of academia is the time flexibility.

For many people, time flexibility de facto means working essentially around the clock. Also, in many places this time flexibility is just an illusion. When there is a problem then it turns out that by constantly arriving late you weren't fulfilling your duties, no matter that you stayed until 2:00 AM.

Re:Not a great analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, sums up everything that is wrong with higher education today.

Re:Not a great analogy

[AthanasiusKircher]

For many people, time flexibility de facto means working essentially around the clock.

It doesn't usually mean that in academia. You need to be present to teach your classes, hold office hours, and attend various meetings. For many people (particularly senior professors), this may add up to less than 10 hours/week where your schedule is actually set. If you have a research lab in the sciences or something, you need to negotiate times to deal with your grad students and lab assistants that are reasonable for everybody, but most senior faculty have a lot of power in choosing their own schedules.

Tenure-track faculty may feel like they need to "work around the clock" to ensure that they will receive tenure. After tenure, however, the expectations are more flexible.

Also, in many places this time flexibility is just an illusion. When there is a problem then it turns out that by constantly arriving late you weren't fulfilling your duties, no matter that you stayed until 2:00 AM.

Again, this isn't really relevant to academia. There is really no "arriving late," except arriving late for a class or meeting or something, which is obviously bad. But if you teach your classes at 4pm and arrive by that time, no one is usually going to care how you structure the rest of your day.

The main "duty" of most non-tenured professors is to produce research. If you do that best by working regular 9am-5pm hours or by only coming in in the middle of the night, nobody's going to care much. Aside from that, you need to attend occasional meetings and turn your grades in at the end of the semester. Once you have tenure, the obligation to produce continuous research is lessened a bit, and most of the schedule on which you "fulfill your duties" is really up to you.

It's not exactly an "easy" life, because you still have significant responsibilities to fulfill outside of the few meeting times each week that are set. But the schedule you choose to fulfill those other responsibilities is truly rather free.

Re:Not a great analogy

[Chalnoth]

My understanding is that people with humanities Ph.D.'s also make pretty good money in the private sector. Certainly people with Ph.D.'s have much lower employment and much higher wages on average than those without.

I have a Ph.D. myself, and left academia because of the poor aspects for a permanent position. My total compensation is now six times what it was as a postdoc.

That said, I do feel that much of the job insecurity in the lower rungs of academia is due to a severe lack of investment in education and science, as well as some rather horrible business practices at many schools that lead to huge amounts of money for deans and coaches, but not much for teachers.

Re:Not a great analogy

[Chalnoth]

Typo in the above: much lower unemployment, not employment, obviously.

Re:Not a great analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, sums up everything that is wrong with higher education today.

That public employees don't fleece the government for insane wages, and that adults at the top of their field are trusted to set their own hours? The horror!

Re:Not a great analogy

[gnupun]

I'm not really sure this is an apt analogy.

Indeed, the analogy is terribly misleading. Here's a list of why the analogy completely fails:

1. The drug lord managing director makes $500k/year. A tenured professor makes roughly $100k -- that's the same as the drug affiliate manager.
2. Board directors do very little work -- they mostly monitor their underlings and make some decisions, typical management stuff. The tenured professors do more grunt work. They actually have to read and understand difficult material they are either teaching in their classrooms or doing research on.

Re:Not a great analogy

[RuffMasterD]

Brilliant Freudian slip :) I'm surrounded by PhDs. They earn three times more than I do per hour, but they only work one or two days a week because of it. Your original statement holds true.

Overstating their case

[shikaisi]

Generally speaking, not so many people end up dead in battles for tenure.

Re:Overstating their case

[superwiz]

I'd say that being on food stamps after earning a PhD is a fall pretty far down... As far as death? Just about.

Re:Overstating their case

[dangle]

Exactly. For a while I was "going for it" to see how far I could rise in academics. I used to joke that I had risen from street thug to one of the guys that gets to sit at the bar in the local don's place. But I always added the caveat "at least I don't have to kill anyone or worry about being killed."

Re:Overstating their case

[esme]

Though this is because the only people who get tenure-track jobs in the first place are those who've already gotten a PhD., and so by definition have the self-control to resist the urge to kill the back-stabbing bastards who deserve it.

Reminds me of the shooting at SDSU in 1996 -- I knew several grad students who were stunned that a master's student had gunned down his committee. Not that he's shot them (which they could sympathize with), but that he'd done it over a master's degree.

-Esme

Re: Overstating their case

[stokessd]

That's a real shame. What sort of "Art Studies" were you in? As a PhD in a hard science, I've found employment outside academia to be fairly plentiful.

The real problem that you bring up is that many higher education institutions don't provide guidance in probability of feeding yourself verses major chosen. This is a real shortcoming in a place that you are investing a HUGE amount of time and money into

Sheldon

Re:Overstating their case

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. For a while I was "going for it" to see how far I could rise in academics. I used to joke that I had risen from street thug to one of the guys that gets to sit at the bar in the local don's place. But I always added the caveat "at least I don't have to kill anyone or worry about being killed."

Uhhh, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#List_of_bombings

Re: Overstating their case

[Rob Simpson]

superwiz was referring to the adjunct professors on food stamps mentioned in the summary, no need to get personal. (Clicking the link, the woman on food stamps is a medieval-history Ph.D, heh)

Re: Overstating their case

[Sarius64]

Mod him up please!

Re: Overstating their case

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a real shame. What sort of "Art Studies" were you in? As a PhD in a hard science, I've found employment outside academia to be fairly plentiful. ...

Well, Biology is pretty widely considered a hard science. Yes, there is employment outside of academia; however, most of it requires specialty degrees, which are competitive (MD, DDS, OD, Nursing, medical tech, etc). Considering that there are about 1000 BS Biology majors out there for every 1 job, I would say that a hard science degree isn't guaranteed to be the golden ticket you make it out to be.

It could be worse, one could discuss the fate of Physicists.

subject agnostic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice that the article is completely devoid of any subject detail. PhD in what? If you are a STEM graduate (or PhD) and are adept at computers and mathematics, this would be a crisis. The reality is, that academic jobs depend on writing grants to fund the university. Depending on your discipline the university "deserves" more or less, but you will find those promoted pay the "administrators". By more or less I mean, an English professor needs a library, a chemistry professor needs a lab.

Universities are a business, their product is teaching students, and carrying out research, which pays for staff.

Endowments (i.e. donations which are a tax write off for the donor...) pay for endowed chairs.

Faculty is the equivalent "company man"...... The customer may get to complain, but anyone else...

Re:subject agnostic?

[superwiz]

Universities are a business, their product is teaching students, and carrying out research, which pays for staff.

And building statues. "Donated in loving memory of..." pays for a lot of higher education in the US.

Re: subject agnostic?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you we had unemployed chemistry phds here in germany between 2002 and 2006, because our government had almost bankrupted the country by means of a super-expensive reunification and by means of an out-of-control social security system.
This is the country which invented stuff like aspirin and clotrimazole; both still highly useful. A stupid elite can destroy everything !

EMULTIPLEHREF

[Anonymous Coward]

Another one of these posts with multiple links. So what's the principlal TFA?

Education is like drugs.

[__aaltlg1547]

Education is like drugs. Once they get you hooked, you can't quit. The fuckers. It's more than 20 years since I got my MS and my house is still full of books.

Re:Education is like drugs.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I have resolved so many times to stop reading the literature because I already know they will conclude something they shouldn't be based on p value and leave out the actual data other than averages. Yet I keep returning. I have gotten myself off textbooks and review articles though.

About to complete my PhD

[trackedvehicle]

I am facing the dilemma of whether to go (back) to the industry, where I was working before starting my PhD, or continue in academia as a researcher. On one had you have the job security and better salary offered in industry. On the other hand you have the thrill of scientific work and fewer (albeit not 0) corporate psychopaths.

I decided on Friday that I'll go for academia. My health is failing, I think I have 10 to 15 years if I'm lucky, and life is too precious to waste it on doing something I don't like all that much, just because of money.

Re:About to complete my PhD

[hraponssi]

I am facing the dilemma of whether to go (back) to the industry, where I was working before starting my PhD, or continue in academia as a researcher. On one had you have the job security and better salary offered in industry. On the other hand you have the thrill of scientific work and fewer (albeit not 0) corporate psychopaths.

I decided on Friday that I'll go for academia. My health is failing, I think I have 10 to 15 years if I'm lucky, and life is too precious to waste it on doing something I don't like all that much, just because of money.

So what do you like? Writing grant proposals, rubbing some theoretical corner of a small theoretical problem area for the next 10-15 years with very little practical impact? Just sayin' there are many sides to it all... But if you really feel that is your thing, I would absolutely recommend doing what you like.

Re:About to complete my PhD

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you given up on having a family (or already had all the family you want)? Because you'll be sorry you don't have money or a job or a stable home when those things are impacting your spouse and children.

Re:About to complete my PhD

[trackedvehicle]

I have nothing theoreticians, and I certainly know my theories and put together meaningful hypotheses - but I work a lot on experimental research and, of course, experimental corroboration of the hypotheses I mentioned. I don't even do models, almost at all. I am first and foremost a well-educated and skilled experimentalist.

Re:About to complete my PhD

[trackedvehicle]

I have a wife and a kid.

So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you do work your way up, and become a tenured man within the organization, can you send your grad students and postdocs out to do hits on faculty aligned with rival cartels?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

More or less. You neglect your students and make them look better on paper than they really are. Then you send them to a "collaborator," someone who really works on the same thing you do, so actually you are competitors. Your poorly trained student (now a postdoc) takes up her time and money, reducing her effectiveness. Sure, she can neglect that postdoc too, but she still has to pay him. At the very least, the rest of the lab will not shun him, and he will waste everyone else's time instead. Meanwhile, the postdoc's former advisor is rid of the trouble and now has more time to spend on his own stuff.

That's the form of an academic hit.

Re:So...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Jimmy 'the dean' approves of your ruthlessness; but wishes to inquire as to whether you are bringing in enough 'grant money' to carry your weight.

Re:So...

[femtobyte]

What does this idiotic made-up fantasy story have to do with anything?

Gradstudents are at the core of getting stuff done in the lab in your own research group. If you're neglecting your gradstudents' effectiveness, you're destroying your own research group from the inside out. Not that some advisors don't neglect gradstudents --- but they do so such that gradstudents learn enough anyway (through peers / self-study / etc.) to keep the lab going.

After that, foisting off a failing student as a prize postdoc --- in your tiny subfield where everyone knows everyone else --- isn't gonna happen more than once, since it will ruin your own reputation in the field to have incompetent idiots going about naming you as their graduate advisor. Tenure may protect you against repercussions from your university administration, but when all your colleagues (including those sitting on funding agency science panels) decide you're an incompetent dick, say goodbye to having funding for a lab and students.

Re: So...

[stokessd]

That is very true. Advisor reputation flows out through his grad students. I'm known as one of "Mark's" students and that comes with significant baggage, both good and bad. In general his student have been very successful and when in certain circles that flowed back to him. Both in reputation and grant money. The grant money comes from people who know him or were his students and are working in the field and control research dollars that can flow to colleges.

It's a cool world, not without problems and inefficiencies, but it would be hard to create a better one that would be stable long-term.

Sheldon

Re:So...

[mikael]

Yes, you can block the publication of rivals research papers by getting on a committee. If you are particularly powerful, you can even instruct a supervisor to drag out a PhD for four or more years and railroad that person out of their field of interest.

Re:The CAGW mafia

[Richard_at_work]

Except that the UEA climate department was investigated and no problems with their science were found...

Correct Terminology

[Roger W Moore]

But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.

Not really - he is just a little ignorant of the correct academic terminology. For future reference they generally prefer to be called the "Faculty of Pharmacology" rather than the "Drug Lords".

Avoid the PhD...

[Moof123]

I can tell you as someone who has interviewed a lot of engineering candidates, PhD's tend to get a very skeptical eye. Occasionally you find a great one, but usually they are a nightmare of disfunction, and almost never anything in the middle. It is too bad we can't accept more of a skills based compensation model, instead of one that automatically pays a large premium for an extra slip of paper, no matter how much of walking horror show it makes you skill wise.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Trepidity]

Statistically that isn't true; engineering PhDs have virtually zero unemployment rates and high salaries in industries.

Granted, not high enough salaries to justify the time spent: you don't get a good monetary ROI on the PhD. But you can easily land a job at all sorts of places, ranging from Google to quant shops to Lockheed.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[tapspace]

As someone who has worked in industry (where we occasionally considered PhDs) and is now in graduate school looking to get back into the job market soon, this is complete and total BS. You are seeing what you wanted to see. My first time in industry, I bought the "overqualified" line hook line and sinker. In retrospect, it was some sort of organizational bias that lead us to believe that people who could do the job happily for the money we offered could be overqualified. Now, I am leaving with an MS after several years functioning as a PhD student, and I see the same skeptisism applied to me (which undergraduates don't get, despite us competing in the same pay scale).

The fact that you think a PhD is just "an extra slip of paper" shows how out of touch you really are. A PhD can be very grueling, both personally and intellectually. Those who succeed are often elite within their discipline, and despite the laser beam focus, PhDs are often great generalizers in broad realms. I think you are not capable of recognizing talent. You have some other, perverse metric you're using (most likely an organizational bias), and ability to do the job is not it.

In fairness, your organization's disfunction is par for the course. Only exceptional companies really ask root striking questions in job interviews (and many otherwise exceptional companies aren't very good at that either). Most just ask where we want to be in five years, then walk out wondering why they can't find the right person for the job.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Gr8Apes]

There is more truth to it than what you say. A host of companies don't want or need PhD's for 99+% of their jobs. A PhD will automatically be rejected at many of these. Sadly, PhDs seem to expect more and do less actual work from personal experience with quite a few PhDs, the entitlement problem. In general they don't take direction well from people that don't also have PhDs, especially if it's for "grunt" work that needs to be done. I personally wouldn't hire a fresh PhD.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience as a math PhD student is that about 2/3 of my colleagues are really narrow specialists who view anything outside their narrow specialty as a waste of their time. They probably aren't great fits for industry, especially because the natural result of their attitude is that they have acquired no applicable skills. On the other hand, those who make it through the meat grinder will be great researchers.

The other 1/3 get bored working on narrow, specialized problems; they want to learn lots of stuff and think about all kinds of different things. I think these people are great fits for industry (and will not actually fit in that well at a research university). If you name something, whether it's web programming, fluid dynamics, statistics, or whatever, they've probably dabbled in it to some extent -- and if they haven't, they'll have done something closely related. These people will adapt fairly quickly to any company that hires them. On the other hand, with rare exceptions (Feynman) they probably don't have the talent (and luck) to learn all that stuff and still make a major contribution to their own narrow specialty.

I'd bet that the same distinction exists in other fields, albeit in different proportions.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[gtall]

I work in a combination engineering (without PhDs) and science (with PhDs) environment. I'll admit the PhDs are bit high on the Oddness Scale. The engineers, however, have this enormous chip on their shoulder about the qualities of the PhDs. They widely deride the PhDs has not doing anything real or even capable of doing anything real. Some PhDs are like this. In general, though, the PhDs are working on higher level problems, so it isn't any mystery that the engineers find them difficult to relate to. I get the general impression that for engineers, good mathematics is born of a virgin and immediately applicable to their interests. That "other" mathematics is the stuff that's difficult to understand and probably invented by PhDs somewhere in a ivory tower dedicated to the ineffable. Getting engineers to back off their immediate problem and tell us any general lessons about their widgets is nearly impossible, and they take pride in snowing us with trivial detail that makes no difference in the general picture. When we do attempt to generalized, we are immediately hit with "it doesn't solve my immediate problem with all the details filled in." Yeah, well, that's because your problem was generalized into a class of problems and the math we gave you will work for the entire class; now quit bitching and particularize it to your widget.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't really do a good job refuting his argument did you?

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[tommeke100]

> Granted, not high enough salaries to justify the time spent: you don't get a good monetary ROI on the PhD.

You get paid to get a degree (PhD). A rather sweet deal, no?
If I had to choose (software engineering) between a fresh out of school PhD or a M.Sc. with 4 years of work experience and having a couple of projects under his belt though...

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one was talking about math folks.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Trepidity]

If you like research, I agree it's a good deal. It's not a good ROI on a purely monetary basis (your lifelong earnings will probably be higher if you skip the PhD), but you do indeed get paid to go to school and take a deep dive into a research area.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[tapspace]

You don't like what I have to say, so I must be a terrible candidate for a job? Sounds like a job interview.

Re:Avoid the PhD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because I was amused - it looks like your perception of organisational bias is itself an organisational bias stemming from work in your first industry job.

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[mjwalshe]

Its the real world telling you your an ideal candidate for working at McDonalds

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

If six sentences is too much for you to read, you should learn to enjoy your ignorance and stop complaining that you don't understand what the adults are talking about.

disciplinary

[Geoffrey.landis]

I do have to say, that was an interesting use of the word "disciplinary" in Jaschik's first sentence.

Grammatically accurate, yes, but I had totally the wrong picture in my mind when he said "disciplinary meetings."

--or, from the rest of the articles, maybe not so inaccurate as all that--

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh; sense of humor much?

Tenure is destructive to higher education

[onyxruby]

Tenure is one of the most destructive things to ever happen to higher education. The entire concept is much akin to the widely reviled stacked ranking that many corporations have started to use in their ranks. The entire concept is that whoever wins the political / popularity contest at the educational institute is rewarded with tenure.

The result of the tenure system is political backstabbing, a good old boy (girl) club, group think that literally requires the death of the elders to change. Because the existing staff with tenure are often the ones to choose the new they do everything they can to ensure that even upon their death that things still will change as little as possible. Since the leadership of departments can't be fired the result is an elitist entitlement attitude where because doesn't have to answer to the real world and a feeling that should be isolated from it, no matter how callous their actions.

An academic institution that is isolated from the real world with tenure will become so separated from reality that term 'Ivory Tower' was coined to describe the phenomenon. The net result is that they do not serve society or their students, instead serving only themselves. Without checks and balances a department can become more and more self feeding on their own dogma each year. Because they do not ever have to interact or answer to the real world their coursework and degrees become more and more disconnected from the real world and students continue to be granted degrees irrespective of whether or not they will ever be able to use them.

The results are hardly academic when society suffers from a large influx of college graduates that receive degrees that have absolutely no value outside of academia. The results have been overwhelming with recent college graduates finding that their college degrees are often worthless, even when granted by well known Universities. Millions of college graduates have discovered themselves working jobs at places like retail or fast food when they had a harsh reality check that their degree was worthless. These graduates are now being tasked with repaying a four year degree with a McJob, a task that cannot be done. With crushing debt and chronic underemployment the student loan crisis in America is arguably the next mortgage collapse.

In Europe unemployment rates among college graduates are at record levels with many graduates lucky to find jobs doing things in supermarkets or factories. Finding a job in your field often requires getting a job literally without pay for a couple years just to get experience so that you might have something that will apply to the real world for the employer. /Formerly worked at a University for a few years and saw this madness from the inside.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[femtobyte]

Blaming all these societal/academic issues on tenure is incorrect. The tenure system has its problems, but it also yields large advantages to academic work. Most importantly, it puts a few professors above the fray of very short-term, ignorant, simplistic-metrics-driven management decisions. There's a lot of important long-term progress to be made in fields of study that doesn't always fit into the "publish-or-perish" and "maximize each year's grant money" models; placing quality over quantity is a possibility protected by the tenure system.

Given that tenure positions are becoming rarer, with far more professorships being ephemeral and low-paid (especially for teaching positions), the tenure system can hardly be blamed for the educational outcomes from universities. If anything, if tenure was a problem, then things should have gotten much better over the past few years alongside the erosion of the tenure system.

Blaming any part of the external job market situation on tenure is downright ignorant. Graduates aren't working at McDonalds because of decisions made by some tenured professor; the job market is set by decisions from a super-wealthy oligarch class far from the ivory tower.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[dcollins]

You should read this article in the current Thought & Action magazine -- http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA2013Rosenthal_Schnee.pdf

Summary: For the first time in 40 years, the City University of New York (CUNY) has started up a new community college, dedicated to novel teaching techniques. As part of that, they've refused to hire or grant any tenured faculty at all, not implemented departments or department chairs, not given faculty a vote in committees or any faculty senate structure, etc. The article writer is a long-time professor of math at another CUNY school, who was so excited by the prospect of trying new teaching techniques that he jumped ship anyway, despite concerns from colleagues. End of the story is that administration took away all their initial promises and there was nothing the faculty could do about it (for example: promise of 40% concentration on math studies, and one-on-one contact time between students and faculty, replaced by peer tutoring). This formerly excited professor is one of several who have now left the new community college and gone back to their old jobs.

Who will care more about the integrity of the academic discipline: Faculty or administrators? The former are the people who have some direct personal contact with students, and have some likelihood of defending their interests as people. The latter are just PHB's looking to increase the bottom line. Shifting power from the former to the latter is one sign that we're not really serious or respectful towards real learning in this country.

Re: Tenure is destructive to higher education

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the corruption at the highest levels of our world, i will just dismiss your ayn-randian complaints as wholly insignificant. Russia and china are better governed these days than the countries under u.s. control.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[mikael]

Fortunately, it wasn't like that 15 years ago. It seems the universities expanded just to take on as many people as possible, and employers have absolutely no way of telling whether that person is a good deal or not.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[onyxruby]

The fact that a few professors (the chosen few that run each department, choose the curriculum and set the tone for everyone that serves beneath them) have tenure does not change anything about what I have said. If anything all it does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer and fewer people ensuring that they have even greater sway over everything.

I have seen professorships that are low paid, with PhD's that work for less than what they could make in fast food when you factor in the number of hours. This is common in academia from my conversations with people in other institutions when I worked in the environment.

The fact that you have a large number of overly qualified people chasing far too many paying positions only enforces my point about the disconnect between the real world and academia. The problem has been created by a system in which there fields in which there are effectively no jobs due to over-saturation of the market. The result is that if you want to have any chance of having your degree actually be used in your professional career you must work at one of these jobs and compete where you can easily have 100 like qualified people in identical situations per job. If those kinds of numbers were being used at a vocational school the Federal Government would shut the program down for being unsuitable. It's a pyramid much like a multi-level marketing scheme, only your working with students, teaching positions and the very rare tenured position at the top.

There is nothing ignorant about my post, I saw students at my University realize with horror the uselessness of some their degrees for years. I watched academics fight for positions and saw everything that I described to you from a position as an administrator. I also have sheer statistics in terms of millions of workers that are underemployed, out of work or working in a field that does not match their degree. You can easily Google the statistics, the number in the millions.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[femtobyte]

Tenured professors at the top are not the reason there are too few academic positions. They are not pushing for that --- saying "oh noes, keep the department tiny and never add new positions". Unlike in the private sector, the top professors are not an immense drain on the resources of the institution: compensation ratios between top positions and median/lower workers are not hundreds to one. Those tenured professors are probably making more like a 5:1 wage ratio compared to less-than-fast-food-wages gradstudents at the bottom (and 10:1 would be exceptional). Removing them from the system doesn't free up vast resources for increased pay and positions at lower levels (unlike in private industry, where the tiny percentage at the top walks off with the vast majority of the money, personally pocketing billions of dollars stolen from the wages and jobs of workers).

Limitations on good positions for educated people are not imposed from "within" by tenured department chairs. They come from "without," in terms of the total amount of funding available to universities, to be used to hire folks and run research groups. When government research funding is flatlined (or declining in real dollars), in order to save a microscopic fraction of the percent off the budget so the ultra-wealthy will not have to pay more taxes, then there is no way to expand employment opportunities for highly qualified individuals. Similarly, the unavailability of jobs outside the academic sector to take advantage of well-educated individuals, cannot be blamed on what a handful of professors is doing; this is a systematic result of our immensely unequal society, focused on serving the desires of a tiny wealthy elite while generating mass poverty and unemployment for everyone else.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[onyxruby]

Okay, I'm going to try and explain it to you step by step because you are talking about things that are completely unrelated. I never said anything about the pay that tenured professors make, nor did I talk about the drain that the professors make on the resources of the institution.

What I talked about was the disproportionate level of power that is seated in the hands of tenured professors. Tenured professors have an attitude of entitlement that they do not have to answer to anyone, most especially the world outside of academia. Tenured professors then create an ivory tower that is disconnected from the real world because they do not need to have any connection to it.

The result is that degree programs often do not have any connection to the outside world and programs are created that do not serve the public or private sector and therefore do not serve their students. In parts of Europe the problem is so bad that many companies won't touch a graduate without two years of unpaid free labor just to show that they have gained some actual real world knowledge.

In other fields departments do nothing but churn out students for degrees that have little or no prospects for a job as certain fields simply have far fewer positions than degrees are granted for each year. The net result is that those students are forced by a job market that does not have enough jobs for their field to become the proverbial PhD at a fast food job while they compete for a too few positions with all of their previous classmates.

Words like best practices, ITIL, industry, government, the private world are answered with "that's not how we do things around here" - and it doesn't matter what the subject is. I have seen this attitude up close and personal with tenured professors routinely doing things that would get them fired in any other setting that didn't have anything to do with free speech.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the ultra-wealthy (whom I do not care for and am not defending) or the business world and everything to do with the Ivory Tower and it's disconnect from the real world.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[femtobyte]

The fact that employers are expecting unpaid free labor is not because employees are coming out of the "ivory tower" with any less practical educations than they always have. It's because employers, faced with more employees than they need (a situation they soundly encourage) are able to get away with pitting the potential labor pool against each other to accept ludicrously low wages, while skipping the job-specific training that employers would have provided in the past. There were no "good old days" when PhD's stepped out the door ready from day one to do exactly what employers needed --- instead, employers would make a long-term investment in an employee to mentor and train them in real world specifics; building expertise over several years at the start of a life-long career (not a 12 month temporary gig).

As I have pointed out above, the tenure system has already been steadily in decline for several decades. Schools have fewer tenured positions; and they do not have a monopoly on course content. Indeed, tenured researchers often have the least to do with teaching, which is planned by administrators and foisted off on low-paid adjuncts. If the power of tenured professors within institutions was a negative factor on the quality of instruction, then the quality of instruction should have been steadily rising over the past few decades as the position of tenured professors has become marginalized (their "disproportionate level of power" is in decline). The fact that the correlation goes the opposite way empirically counters your entire argument --- in the "good old days" when academia seemed more "connected" to the world, tenured professors were an unchallengeable cornerstone of academic institutions.

If academia has become any more distant from the private sector, it is because the private sector has itself moved away from all norms of human decency and career professionalism. Educated workers are treated as expendable, temporary labor to be shredded up and spit out, not lifetime-career professionals deserving respect. Companies have become ever bigger and more management-heavy, replacing leadership by people who understood engineering/science/whatever-the-company-was-doing with cookie-cutter empty suit MBAs. If you want to talk about "concentrated power" problems, the "concentrated power" problem is that of multimillionaire management class with an iron grip over industry, who are more than happy to shit all over the lives and careers of mere PhDs.

Re:Tenure is destructive to higher education

[Anonymous Coward]

Professors should organize and fight back. Yes, I mean union.

The economics of academia

[timholman]

Most people don't realize that the tenure-track faculty position is rapidly disappearing at U.S. universities. Tenure is instead becoming a tool to accomplish two goals: (1) recruit superstars, hopefully with the goal of increasing your school's numbers in the USN&WR college rankings, and (2) reshape the demographics of the faculty, e.g. increased female and minority hires.

Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt.

The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.

As to the original article, the drug lord vs. drug seller analogy is largely a side effect of the economics of Ph.D.s in liberal arts and soft sciences. There are only so many university positions available in sociology, history, english literature, etc., and almost zero positions outside of academia to absorb the surplus. So if you truly love Medieval European History, and cannot conceive of doing anything else with your degree, you're going to fight tooth and nail doing academic scut work for slave wages in the hopes of making yourself more competitive for a rare tenure-track opening.

The analogy falls apart with engineering and computer science, because a good Ph.D. can usually find a relevant job in industry, and quite often at better wages than in academia. Ph.D.s in liberal arts don't have that luxury. For them, it's either academic grunt work, unemployment, or getting a job completely unrelated to your degree.

Re:The economics of academia

[Atmchicago]

One solution to the issue of the faculty who have "retired in place" is to implement a system where faculty older than 65 are subject to 5-year performance reviews and effectively lose tenure, but not necessarily their jobs. This gives the benefit of academic freedom to younger faculty with no strings attached without the pointlessly harsh mandatory retirements that are common in Europe and Asia, but implements a system to get rid of unproductive old timers who are taking up jobs that newer people could have.

Re:The economics of academia

[dcollins]

"Otherwise, tenure has outlived its usefulness, at least to university administrators. Go to any major university, and you'll find tenured professors who "retired in place" years ago, and who are worse than useless as researchers or teachers. To them, academic "freedom" translates to "leave me alone, you can't tell me what to do". University administrators have had their fill of those types. It's the old "10% making the other 90% look bad" syndrome, and consequently the other 90% must bear the brunt."

I think you give university administrators too much credit. Good or bad, they just want things cheap, and non-tenured positions are cheaper (and also easier to intimidate and get rid of arbitrarily; quite a bit like H1B visas). I had a dean literally laugh in my face once in a job interview when I said I was an excellent teacher with high student evaluations. "We don't care about that, we can get anybody off the street to teach a class," he said.

Re:The economics of academia

[hibiki_r]

Sure, you can get a job in industry after a PhD, but it's probably not paying enough over what you'd get with a 4 year degree to compensate for the years required to get the PhD. This is specially true if you actually paid for your education, instead of riding full scholarships.

My current employer is choke full of Science PhDs that left academia when they saw the hell that is a postdoc. You won't find many that didn't regret at least 6 years worth of their education.

Re:The economics of academia

[twistedcubic]

The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on.

I think this provides even more incentive to fabricate research results. If not getting funding means losing your job and the ability to provide for family, I wouldn't consider you crazy for thinking of cheating a little. Tenure is good for many reasons people on this board never think of.

Re:The economics of academia

[AthanasiusKircher]

Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.

In what dream world do adjuncts earn $15k per 3-hour course??

Aside from some sort of special appointed lectureship, the highest adjunct pay I've ever heard of was in the $12k range, and that's only at one top-tier university that is a known outlier.

Most top-tier research universities pay $4-8k per course, with actual salary surveys showing an average of $4,750 per course.

And that's top research universities, usually in desirable disciplines like engineering and science.

Smaller schools, rural schools, satellite campuses for state universities, etc.? You're looking at more like $2-5k per course. Community colleges? Often less than $2k. A lot of adjuncts have to cobble together a teaching load of 5-10 courses PER SEMESTER at multiple colleges just to get a salary of $30k or so to live on each year (generally without benefits).

While you have a lot of insightful elements in your post, the magnitude of pay disparity between tenured professors and adjuncts is woefully underestimated. It's not at all unusual for tenured or tenure-track professors to earn over 5 times the salary for teaching the exact same course as an adjunct.

If they actually had adjunct jobs that paid $15k per course, I know loads of people who would immediately jump into such jobs. They could teach 3 courses per semester and earn $90k per year, with absolutely no research expectations? With that sort of pay, I bet you'd see a huge number of regular faculty volunteering to take adjunct jobs.

Re:The economics of academia

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not at all unusual for tenured or tenure-track professors to earn over 5 times the salary for teaching the exact same course as an adjunct."

Maybe, but they're expected to be doing more than teaching. There's a lot of variation in contracts, but maybe a third to half of a full-time faculty's wage is going to teaching. For the rest of the wage you're going to be doing research and bringing in grant money, or you're going to get your contract reassigned to lecturer only and take on a lot more teaching load. Staring salaries average around $40-60k. They won't pay you that much if all you are doing is teaching.

Re:The economics of academia

[timholman]

In what dream world do adjuncts earn $15k per 3-hour course??

I should have been clearer about that. That $15K included maintenance and supervision of two different teaching laboratories, on top of teaching a 3-hour class. So essentially it was a $30K / academic year salary for what was practically a full-time job. Not surprisingly, they still found a Ph.D. willing to do it.

You're right, typical adjunct per-course fees (without additional responsibilities) do run about $5K for STEM classes at a decently large school. No one is going to choose that over a full-time industry job.

Re:The economics of academia

[Anonymous Coward]

The future of academia is one-year to five-year contracts with non-tenured faculty. If you can bring in research contract money, your academic salary will still be reasonably competitive, at least in engineering and the hard sciences. If your research contracts dry up, your contract won't be renewed, and you'll need to move on. Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.

And this isn't a great way of providing the next generation of scientists. Grant money and industrial money is centralised onto senior academics and more junior academics have a vanishingly small success rate. It also takes 5 to 10 years to establish a lab and a research programme (both in terms of physical equipment but also corporate knowledge and know-how being passed through generations of students). That doesn't work on 1 to 5 year contracts.

Real World

[geoskd]

Even in academia, the labor supply far exceeds the demand. That does not bode well for any of us...

C.R.E.A.M....nothing like a tournament

[globaljustin]

TFA is right...it's not "belittling higher education" you moron...bullies "belittle" their victim...TFA is a valid criticism...**ACADEMIA** is the one who bullies!

Academia suffers from

1) Bad Management from people who are not accountable by rule (tenure professors)

2) Artificial Scarcity motivated by politics

Academia is **all about the money**....just like being a gangster!!! C.R.E.A.M.=Cash Rules Everything Around Me

"gotta get the NSF grant, gotta get tenure, gotta get the project approved..."

Academia is competitive, but in ways that have nothing to do with science and only waste energy.

tenure track

[volmtech]

Most PhDs, like my daughter, teach because they LOVE academic life. Also it's probably the only life they know. And like drug dealers, if enough die off you can move up.

Re:tenure track

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a phrase in the UK, "dead man's shoes". Back in the 1980's, large companies would have very high management pyramids with a 3:1 ratio of staff to managers. You'd have three senior managers to one director, three managers to a senior manager, three senior engineers to a manager, and three engineers to a senior engineer. The only way to get promotion was to wait for someone at the top to shuffle off somewhere (retirement, change job, ill health). People would spend decades of their lives waiting to get "that promotion".

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

Well obviously "your" not an ideal candidate for novelist.

So says ...

[PPH]

.... Dr. Walter White, Dean of the College of Chemistry.

Sounds like the rich at work

[mveloso]

Wow, that sounds exactly like how the rich operate.

Few even get to compete for tenure

[damn_registrars]

A large number of very competent and qualified scientists get pushed out of the system long before they ever get to compete for tenure. The system is arranged such that there is not much room for full faculty, hence the odds of reaching one of those positions is remote for any grad student. That is part of why many grad students end up going to industry after completing their PhD.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple - for all those 'professors' who advocate communist and socialist ideas and the distribution of other peoples wealth, you force them to take a minimum wage rated salary (as the average would be if they got what they advocate). Most will quit (hypocrits) and the field opens up for all those smarter than they are. Whole lot of untenured ones will take off as well.

This isn't a free market

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that how a free market works?

This isn't a free market. Unless you're arguing that money being taken from citizens at gunpoint (taxation) and forcibly distributed to "public" universities, who can then use said dollars to advance their own agenda at the expense of everyone else, is a "free market." But it isn't.

captcha: layoff

I do.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on adjunct lecturers who rely on food stamps to make ends meet.

I am an adjunct professor at a tier-1 university, and rely upon food stamps and occasional unemployment benefits to make ends meet.

I've even had times where my TA received more money than me for a class (as well as tuition).

STEM Shortage?

[Sir Holo]

Wait, wasn't there a thread just yesterday that we had a STEM shortage?

But today it's an over-abundance?

Theory and undergrad

[bussdriver]

Nearly every undergrad degree remains largely static over time; having old timers repeating the same thing is just fine as long as they don't get too bad at it. Bringing in adjunct is often covered by some false premise that they are up to date and out in the "real world" but that is not all that useful for most material-- some courses and probably more at higher levels like the graduate level. The real reason is they don't want to pay for a full timer. A big cost for full time employment is health benefits-- if you can decouple that from employment then you'll see a big shift in the actual motivation behind many of these policies.

There is always a small % who give simpletons some example to cite. Entrenched management, employees (relatives,) politicians does encourage abuse of their power - but this is education- there is not much money or power involved compared to those others. Sometimes solving a problem is more trouble than it is worse-- Perfect can be the enemy of good. Take the UK postal service-- 2% failure rate on delivery times or something like that-- and they spent billions trying to be perfect and made everything worse; now they've sold off and gutted the royal mail (the inventors of mail) and it will not get better than it was before they tried to perfect it. Often, the best attack is to use the enemy and their supporter's own nature against themselves... This is often done when destroying democratic/public organizations -- the terrorists sure beat the USA with the tactic.. the Americans win battles but they've lost the war (or if you are optimistic, they are still losing the war.)

Article is vacuous

[vlad.nic]

Yes academia is like drug related jobs, but so is everything, i don't believe this article brings any insight into anything.

To sum it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in this generation is tired of being replaced by an over motivated immigrant, and we are at war with each other over the last few remaining "cushy jobs" academia or industry, take your pick which are fast disappearing its what was bound to happen when the over coked out 80s drugs on demand generation of grads hit upper management when they get to political career age we are all so screwed its not even funny, i flat out quit trying or giving a shit along time ago i have whittled down all my bills to the point i no longer have to care.

So if I understand...

[argStyopa]

...what you're saying is that the tenure (I get a great salary, can never be fired unless I practically murder a kid, and have a giant professional union handling all my negotiations) bullshit is like winning the lottery, and you're unhappy that buying a bigger, more expensive ticket isn't an "automatic" win?

Wow, I think I'm tearing up here.

Tenure depends on funding

[Anonymous Coward]

and the sources of funding operate like an old boys' network... or the Mafia.

Re:The CAGW mafia

[harvey the nerd]

Many "environmental" hoi polloi are so innumerate and scientifically illiterate that they don't understand what the verb "investigate" means. Dream/scam on.

Point of clarification

[awtbfb]

The main "duty" of most non-tenured professors is to produce research. If you do that best by working regular 9am-5pm hours or by only coming in in the middle of the night, nobody's going to care much. Aside from that, you need to attend occasional meetings and turn your grades in at the end of the semester. Once you have tenure, the obligation to produce continuous research is lessened a bit, and most of the schedule on which you "fulfill your duties" is really up to you.

From my perspective in the trenches, the reduction is not as big as most people might think for CS and the sciences. If you worked like crazy while building your credentials, either for tenure or to a senior position in a non-tenure research track, you can't really slack off too much. You still need to bring in the cash to cover your team, grad student tuitions, and your own salary, which are now more expensive too. This means just as much research effort and proposal writing. This is exacerbated when research funding is cut at a large scale (sequestration). The reduction really comes from i) having established robust lab practices, methods, and management skills and ii) improved proposal writing skills combined with a track record. Junior faculty expend a lot of time finding and developing the right models, processes, and skills.

Another problem is that you spend your early career developing and reinforcing workaholic habits. It is very hard to step away from work, even for a regular weekend. Unlike most high intensity jobs, the flexible time is great for scheduling around family so they actually see you. You can insulate them from the worst of it.

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[mjwalshe]

LOL no took my 4 years longer to do my English O level - Dyslexia's a bitch.

Re:Long articles are hard to read

[mjwalshe]

I was channeling Jethro or Ducky from NCIS