Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid their career trajectories, rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.
They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common.
Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)
>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.
We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.
>not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about
Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.
It’s a colloquialism about trade-offs and not meant to be taken so literally.
Again, autonomy is another aspect that you may need to consider as part of that tradeoff. If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay (as a general rule).
Most jobs are like this, I don’t see why academia should be any different. I also don’t think it’s coincidence that pay in academia has stagnated as the number of PhDs ballon.
Right, and it was phrased with "unfortunately" and as a "dystopia" which I took to mean "it shouldn't be this way." I wasn't trying to refute their point that tradeoffs exist, but rather indicate that's exactly how one should expect the system to operate. (Possible I misread their intent, though.) The idea that someone would expect to 1) land a job they love while 2) making gobs of money and 3) have it generalizable across an oversaturated market like academia seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the incentive structure within the system.
> The idea that someone would expect to 1) land a job they love while 2) making gobs of money and 3) have it generalizable across an oversaturated market like academia seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the incentive structure within the system.
I think that’s a strawman, even if unintended. The idea is that academia means a pay cut in exchange for a job one loves and more research freedom. The worsening situation of research funding makes the academic track pointless.
Again adding that I mostly mean in STEM, I don’t know the other fields that much.
What part do you think is specifically a strawman? The idea that they want to make more money in academia? My response was to the OP's "not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about" statement. The only part I've added to their argument is that the PhD market is oversaturated; I added that because it adds important context to the market dynamics that govern pay.
I'll try to put a finer point on it. Why should the work in academia not result in a tradeoff? Why should the jobs in academia pay the same in industry when you are given other benefits?
You are generally removing yourself by a degree or more from the economy to work in academia. E.g., you may develop a new algorithm that helps image recognition, but you aren't likely to be putting it directly into a production environment. As I previously said, pay is generally commensurate with your direct contribution to the economy. So if the nature of your job distances yourself from the economy, you should probably expect lower pay. Now what you get in exchange is some more autonomy in terms of what you focus your energy on. The idea that someone expects both autonomy and high pay seems at odds with reality.
Practically every job results in weighing tradeoffs. People get paid in more ways than just economics. A social worker doesn't get paid the same as a financier because they are more distanced from the economy. But many people find the job still worthwhile because in exchange for lower pay they have a more fulfilling job. Military members weigh whether to continue serving in uniform or make more money as contractors. PhD astrophysicists may have to choose between making lots of money in finance or studying the cosmos. In the same vein, the academic tradeoff is only pointless if you don't value the other non-economic parts that academia offers. If you want to maximize pay, academia probably isn't the track for you; maybe you're better off working on maximizing ad spend in the attention economy. But if you want the autonomy to focus on problems that you feel are more interesting or more important, maybe it's worth the tradeoff. It's all about the tradeoffs but the OP doesn't seem to acknowledge that these tradeoffs exist because they imply one should be able to make lots of money while working on what they love. That's only available to a relatively small number of people, especially in an oversaturated market. There's only one starting center fielder position for the Yankees and it seems odd if we lament that we can't all seem to play. That's all I was pointing out and I'm not seeing how that's a strawman.
I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc.
As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work.
I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.
Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.
I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.
You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.
> You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution.
But why does he need students to do his own research?
I made a similar calculation and went into industry. I am now at the point where I could self-fund an indefinite post-doc (with benefits) at the risk-free rate of return. By the time I would be going up for Full Professor, I'll be able to self-fund an equivalent salary -- again, at the risk-free rate. And I don't have to worry about the inevitable layoffs coming to higher-ed, tenure be damned. And I can do my Science from a ski slope or a beach instead of from some random rural town.
If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money. If you want to lead "The $LASTNAME Lab" at "Famous University" where you have "X PhD students" and "Y post-docs", then you're going to pay for the silly prestige game by giving up actually doing Science for the rest of your life.
The situation may be different for people who need wet labs, but in Math and CS here's just no reason to bust your ass to get tenure. Just bust your ass in industry instead. You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise, and honestly industry often has more interesting problems than whatever happens to be of interest to whichever person was willing to live in an expensive boring place on a small salary while shoving their ideas into the Heilmeier Catechism.
> You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise
As an academic who does work on my own projects all the time, I'll have to disagree. I mean, yeah I have to do things I'm not thrilled about, like advising students and filling out course evaluations. But at the same time, I only work 4 days a week, 28 weeks of the year, and those days I'm done at noon. The rest of my time I spend working on my projects, which are 100% what I'd be doing if I were to come across a billion dollars tomorrow.
> If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money.
I see this advice a lot, and it's logical. But I don't think practical. If it were, I think we'd see more people going this route, but I'm not aware of too many (well, any really). Can you point to anyone who has amassed a small fortune in industry and now is a successful independent researcher?
It seems like the more popular route is to spend 1-2 decades amassing wealth and then just retire on that money. Or to invest it. You'd be what, 40+ at that time? That's a prime age for family rearing. The kids' college funds need to be swelling at that point. At such a critical time in a family, who in their right mind would leave a lucrative career to be an independent researcher, a job path that is largely reserved for independently wealthy people.
If you want to blow your family's nest egg at 40 by pursuing an independent research agenda, go right ahead, but I think that's a risk most people won't take. Even if successful, it's not going to have a positive ROI (that's not what research is about). That's why researchers spend other peoples money and not their own.
> But at the same time, I only work 4 days a week, 28 weeks of the year, and those days I'm done at noon.
TBH I have no idea what number of "bullshit hours" I work, but I spend the vast majority of my time working on things I'd probably be doing anyways. I certainly think what I'm working on is more interesting than what I'd almost certainly be doing if I had accepting one of my TT offers.
> If it were, I think we'd see more people going this route, but I'm not aware of too many (well, any really). Can you point to anyone who has amassed a small fortune in industry and now is a successful independent researcher?
This largely depends on how you define success.
They certainly aren't doing things like putting together performance bonus packets or playing the peer review game, so if you look to things like bonuses/promotions or journal papers in prestige venues they're probably not "successful". But isn't the goal to get off the bullshit ladder? You don't really think the prestige publishing game is anything other than BS make-work, do you? ;-)
> It seems like the more popular route is to spend 1-2 decades amassing wealth and then just retire on that money.
Sure. If your version of "what i would do with a billion dollars" involves lots of slopes and beaches then why not? What's wrong with this?
> Or to invest it. You'd be what, 40+ at that time? That's a prime age for family rearing. The kids' college funds need to be swelling at that point.
I know a lot of folks from my PhD cohort who went this route and took Professor of Practice positions for their kids' college years.
> If you want to blow your family's nest egg at 40
Who said anything about blowing? The principal should continue growing, just a bit slower since you're spending some of the interest...
> At such a critical time in a family, who in their right mind would leave a lucrative career to be an independent researcher, a job path that is largely reserved for independently wealthy people.
A STEM PhD, after 10-20 years in tech or finance, IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.
> A STEM PhD, after 10-20 years in tech or finance, IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.
Was an independently wealthy person, as the US job market was rigged to favor upper middle class professionals. Nobody knows if that's going to be the case for the fresh PhDs entering the job market today. Those lucrative careers may be threatened by any number of reasons, including political pressure and/or instability, more PhDs entering the industry, increasing competition due to remote work, and AI.
This is a good point. I think there are still opportunities, and will be for the next 10 years, at least for good CS PhDs. Certainly not for all PhDs in all disciplines.
> rigged to favor upper middle class professionals... remote work
In the case of PhDs, it's exactly the opposite. Those jobs have very weak immigration moats compared to eg law, medicine, engineering, even software devekopment. The vast majority of phd students in CS are already non-residents and that's been true for decades at this point.
For the same reason, PhD labor is probably the least effected by remote work.
> but I spend the vast majority of my time working on things I'd probably be doing anyways
But is it your project? Or is it your employers, and do they actually own it? If you’re fired, do you still get to work on that project?
> what I'm working on is more interesting than what I'd almost certainly be doing if I had accepting one of my TT offers
I’m curious, why wouldn’t you just decide to work on a project that was more interesting to you?
> But isn't the goal to get off the bullshit ladder?
The goal would be to do research. So my question is: who is doing such independent work? Who are these researchers and how are they disseminating their work? If there aren’t very many of these people, can we not conclude this mode of research is not a viable alternative to mainstream research?
> What's wrong with this?
Nothing is wrong with this. But the suggestion is that if someone wants to do research, they should amass wealth in industry and then do research. My point is that close to 0 people end up taking this route (at least from where I’m sitting, maybe there is a whole community of multimillionaire tech researchers I don’t know about).
So I wonder how viable this path is? Do people just not consider it? Or do they lose interest in research over those two decades? Does life get in the way?
I guess my overall point is that, most people who want to do research, just do it. Spending decades amassing resources just to get started seems backwards.
> took Professor of Practice positions for their kids' college years.
And so you’re saying they funded their own research with their wealth at that point?
> you're spending some of the interest...
I thought we were talking about funding a research agenda. From where I’m sitting, that costs millions. If you’re making millions in interest income, I think we’re talking about at different scales here.
> IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.
My meager research agenda costs roughly $1 million per year (no special equipment or facilities). How long can a retired tech worker burn cash at that rate and still make it through retirement?
One big thing is it's basically impossible to start doing research when you are 40 or 50 after spending 10 to 20 years not doing research. You might imagine that you can, and I do know a few people who think they can, but no it's extremely difficult and basically not happening. Is there literally any highly cited journal paper with a first author who didn't do research for 20 years?
Also, you have way more energy, drive, creativity when you are young and you just spent 10 to 20 years on other things instead of doing research during a time when you could have had the most impact.
> But is it your project? Or is it your employers, and do they actually own it? If you’re fired, do you still get to work on that project?
Varies. I optimize my employment situation for my personal ROI.
But it turns out that making money off of even excellent scientific work is often very hard and involves insane amounts of slog. Like 1 hour of science to 10 hours of not-science. So usually employment and assignment has better risk-adjusted return. Not always, but usually.
> So my question is: who is doing such independent work? Who are these researchers and how are they disseminating their work? If there aren’t very many of these people, can we not conclude this mode of research is not a viable alternative to mainstream research?
I know there are several people like this in my field. They publish a paper every year or three, often in smaller venues. Or just throw things on arxiv.
> So I wonder how viable this path is? Do people just not consider it? Or do they lose interest in research over those two decades? Does life get in the way?
I think the middle and latter options happen quite a lot. I meet a lot of early retirees on Tuesday mid-morning lifts. I think a lot of people lose their passion for research in their 30s. This happens in the academy as well. Sometimes after amassing wealth you realize "hey, you know what I enjoy more than doing world-class mathematics? Chilling in my cabin with my family and skiing."
> And so you’re saying they funded their own research with their wealth at that point?
They took the PoP positions to pay for their kids' college without spending down savings. A sort of middle ground between working and retirement, and also a good way to build some collaboration opportunities.
> I thought we were talking about funding a research agenda. From where I’m sitting, that costs millions.
To be clear, the premise that started this thread is the "a guy and his laptop/occasional cloud spend" style of research that's prevalent in CS and Math. Yeah, if you need $1M/yr then you need an income stream or a different level of wealth.
> I guess my overall point is that, most people who want to do research, just do it. Spending decades amassing resources just to get started seems backwards.
I think this is reasonable advice for people who (1) need something more than a laptop and modest cloud compute, and (2) are absolutely sure that they would rather pursue that particular research as opposed to retiring early, and (3) are certain they they will be able to retain funding streams for the duration of their career.
What about them? There’s no way they would be able to get an academic position, which requires orders of magnitude more mental health fortitude than an industry position.
> But why does he need students to do his own research?
What a... weird way to phrase this.
"Need"? All the faculty I've worked with have wanted students to work with them. Science is frequently a collaborative effort, and having more than one person working on a project is often a good way to make the project better. They generally do not see students as a burden, but as an investment into the future of the field (and their own success, of course, but in a collaborative sense).
It's fine if you decided academia wasn't for you, and I don't doubt even a little bit that people do exist who see students as a burden to be dealt with. But my own experience has been vastly different from that, so it strikes me as odd that you simply assumed a cynical stance off the bat.
Anyway, your general stance seems very cynical. I like doing my own work, but I also like collaborating with people, and I know I'm not alone in that.
> But why does he need students to do his own research?
That's a phenomenally good question. Short answer: because of incentives in academia().
To be high up in the academic hierarchy(), you want top-ranked publications. So you work on those and score a few - good on you! However, a researcher in the same field outdid you by publishing their own work AND supervising a student. That increased their output, so they get the promotion. Now they get more means to attract phd students and postdocs, all collaborating with them, further increasing output.
The nasty thing is that this cycle has knock-on effects. Do everything by yourself and you're stagnating; collaborate and you are rewarded with more recognition, promotion, more citations, more reviewer invitations, more invites to give talks/keynotes, etc. And: more quantity and quality in those trigger more and higher-valued of those. Suddenly you're growing into a "respected member of the community" - which strengthens your position at your instituting. Stronger position locally is more local options for growth, leading to the next cycle.
TL;DR: Because the direction of academia is in the hands of managers (uni admins, politicians, grant body admins), and managers need quantifiable data... so you're incentiviced to make your numbers go up.
Benefit to that is you are training the next generation. Do research on your own, good, but have ten grad students working for you and you can basically multiply your output by ten. Note, the grad students a majority of the time won't be able to do the research without your advice, this is just a fact; there are exceptions but that's just how it is the majority of the time.
Cannot you just get a library card at the university? I live next to a university where I have no affiliation, and if I pay $150 a year I can eat all I want. (Though I do think I have to be onsite as there is no remote access.)
Another trick is to sign up for the adult ed classes, or basically retiree classes to get access. I've even heard of people doing this to get cheap health insurance!!!
It depends on the field, but I don't think access to papers is such a big deal anymore. Preprints and open access mandates have become popular enough that relevant papers are usually available for free through legitimate channels. When I'm working from home, I rarely bother starting a VPN to access a paper, because it's usually not worth the effort.
A bigger issue that affects independent researchers (and academics who are the only ones working on some topic in their department) is the social context of doing research. Even if you are a big name in your field, your ideas are probably not that special, and neither is your ability to execute them. For most researchers, the real value comes from having regular discussions with other experts.
Sci-hub has become significantly less useful because all new uploads are paused pending resolution of a court case in India. That includes anything published in the last year. A large portion of a working academic's reading load will be keeping up with recently published literature.
Just imagine how useful search engines would be if you had to email someone every time you wanted to click a link. Just keeping up with the literature is typically a dozen or more papers a week, plus skimming dozens to hundreds more if you're actively doing research. That's a lot of email and it's a lot of unnecessary burden for the very nice people who reply.
Piracy and open access are the only scalable alternatives to institutional access.
"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...."
This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.
Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding.
The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil.
Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers.
The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs).
That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention
This sounds pretty similar to non-academic corporate life. People who show up to hang out, get mad at people who don't do the same, you're encouraged to work extra hours to get ahead, only able to work on things you get funding for (i.e. what clients will pay you for or projects that those above you will greenlight), being controlled by corporate executives, etc.
But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.
> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.
There are certainly some pockets of academic circles that only try to appear to be working hard 12h every single day and only care for having you rub my back I'll rub yours kinda deals. But many of Ph.D students that are monkeying around in STEM doing seemingly useless stuff actually expand their areas of expertise and encourage each other, gain curiosity, become creative and it helps them to make progress. You have to look for certain clues, they can't be having too much fun -then they are not doing any good work, if they appear too bogged down -they don't know what they are doing and shouldn't be there in the first place.
> They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The author is too optimistic. There are going to be continuous waves of mass firings of tenured faculty in the 2030s and 2040s.
The overwork and stress culture are going to get much worse over the next quarter century. The problem is structural, not cultural, and there isn't much that academics are going to be able to do in order to combat the problem.
Specific to the USA, but also true in much of the west:
1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia's revenue streams come from three sources that are decreasing in real terms. Those revenue streams will likely begin decreasing even in nominal terms even as inflation reaches a higher steady-state! Government budgets for higher education and academic R&D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won't keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, due to demographics, the USA in particular is about to enter a period of decreasing college enrollments (unless the percent of the college-going population can increase substantially, which is unlikely).
2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.
3. Some of these problems used to be manageable because academics controlled the institutions that employed them. But the management culture of universities is becoming professionalized. This means that academics are losing institutional influence that would allow them to maintain good working conditions even in the face of unfavorable market conditions.
I don't think we should give young academics feel good advice like "don't work too hard". What we should be telling them is that even if they bust their ass and get tenure, it's very likely that their pay will languish and they will live in fear of layoffs despite being tenured and working at a steep discount to pay in other industries.
Academia is just another industry, and it's entering a period of secular decline. That situation is never fun for the foot soldiers.
> 1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia's revenue streams come from three sources that are decreasing in real terms. Those revenue streams will likely begin decreasing even in nominal terms even as inflation reaches a higher steady-state! Government budgets for higher education and academic R&D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won't keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, due to demographics, the USA in particular is about to enter a period of decreasing college enrollments (unless the percent of the college-going population can increase substantially, which is unlikely).
On the other side, spending is a huge problem as well. Like... professional grade sports teams? As an European: WTF does that kind of shit have to do with universities? Yes, I get it, it attracts students, but you could also carve out the sports teams into separate commercial entities. And the bill isn't small either - the US government helped out with 6.5 billion dollars and student fees with another 1.5 billion dollars [1] in 2018! That is, frankly, insane.
Also, at least Ivy League universities have endowments valued at literally dozens of billions of dollars [2]. The US needs a complete reform of university financing.
> On the other side, spending is a huge problem as well.
Of course. But universities will 100% fire tenured faculty before they kill off a D1 football program or spend down endowment principal. So from the perspective of academic laborers, it's a moot point.
Government could enforce both of these. Threaten universities to either split off their commercial activities or to lose tax benefits. And tax endowments.
> 2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.
Can't say I agree with that statement. It was true for decades, but academic employment had been losing its status for years, and the pandemic greatly increased that. There are lots of examples of research positions having few or no applicants. Grad students these days are much less intent on getting academic jobs than even five years ago.
Now, that's not to say that deans across the country aren't continuing to plan as if that's the case, but they may find themselves with a serious problem a decade from now.
> There are lots of examples of research positions having few or no applicants.
I've mostly heard of this happening for two types of roles. The first are post-docs. The second are low-paying primarily teaching positions at exactly the types of places that will probably blink off the map in the 2030s.
In both cases, the hard truth is that the institution will simply leave the position unfilled before increasing pay or improving job security. Compensation is nearly perfectly inelastic and job security cannot be guaranteed.
> a decade from now
A decade from now their enrollments will have declined due to the post-2008 baby bust, in many cases by double digits. They'll be more worried about who they have to lay off than who to hire.
Particularly true for those instructor and other teaching-oriented positions.
> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation?
Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.
I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certainly won't get budget increases to keep up with inflation. Even defense spending, a massive sacred cow, might take a cut. There is just no way that base closures happen without DARPA et al. also taking it on the chin.
There may be one-time infusions into critical sectors here and there (CHIPS, probably energy, etc) and the STEM fields may benefit from a systematic defunding of humanities departments in certain states, but it's not enough to make up for secular headwinds.
The only saving grace for budgets might be if universities could create and capture the value that their R&D spend generates. But most research doesn't provide any value to society, and for the research that does capturing that value is often harder than creating the value in the first place. And even in that case, the change in management culture and workforce dynamics mean that the "relaxed tenured professor" is quickly going extinct.
The only thing academic hustle will get you in the 2030s and 2040s is a relatively low-paying job that requires even more hustle.
> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments
That's not at all how modern money and economics work. There is no transfer mechanism from Debt:GDP to economic productivity. That's not to say that a sovereign currency issuing government can't shoot itself in the foot any number of ways of course.
It's definitely how the US Congress works, which is really the only relevant consideration since the purse strings are controlled by Congress. Debt servicing costs and the cost of new debt have a direct impact on spending levels via the debt ceiling, which is controlled by Congress.
On an unrelated note, I'm not sure what modern money theories you're referring to, but the theories which purported that we didn't have to worry about inflation seem to be... slightly more out of favor than they were 1-2 years ago.
> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.
Wouldn't this be a plausible story immediately post-WWII?
Perhaps, but couldn't be less comparable from the perspective of higher ed:
1. The budgetary context in that case was the end of total warfare. Debt was high, yes, but a TON of the war expenditures from the last half decade were being unwound. So the place that the cuts would come from was very obvious and directly related to the reason for the high expenditures in the first place. You could unwind deficits while simultaneously increasing spending on everything except total warfare. Cf now: the US isn't going to cut SS or Medicare, and cuts to Defense would hit university funding streams hard.
2. The political environment is radically different. The success of the Manhattan Project, RADAR, etc. created a political environment that was amenable to shifting spending from wartime manufacturing to peacetime R&D. Cf now: there is an enormous amount of political animosity toward the academy coming from the political coalition holding most of the structural advantages. Even through the Bush presidency, Science funding was largely bipartisan. That isn't true now. At all. I think many academics under-appreciate just how toxic NSF/NIH/etc have become to roughly half of this country.
3. The GI bill infused tons of demand (and money) into the academic system, and was followed by the Baby Boom. Cf now: there's a massive demographic collapse on the horizon and people are seeking out alternatives to university education due to the cost.
I don't see things going back towards the first and second sectors human labor wise, so it would have to all be taken up in the third sector (service sector)? I guess it is plausible with healthcare.
> Wouldn't this be a plausible story immediately post-WWII?
> "I feel I must remind you that it is an undeniable, and may I say a fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable." - Dr. Leonard Church
It turns out that debt and money are no problem when your existence is threatened by an enemy who ideologically is committed to your total extermination. The Cold War made spending on military tech a non issue because the alternative was falling behind the Communists and possibly losing a war.
As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results.
As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence.
Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as much. But I bet they are going to be more stressed as life goes on, while she's in a great spot:
Due to her earlier work, she's at a place to reflect and say "I am at level X, I can dial it back" which is great. But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
To some extent. My wife is about to finish her PhD. She's not even a top-level publishing academic and the amount of work she's had to put in for next to no pay (sometimes literally no pay) is insane. Hard work is great and but there is such a thing as too hard and I would argue academia takes advantage of some of the hardest working and most qualified people in the country (I'm in the US).
I don't know, it's a little bit different from the other side of the lectern. As a professor, I am mindful of keeping a work-life balance in my classroom. I try not to over-assign homework, and I'm mindful that students have lives outside of the classroom, so I'm flexible with deadlines and other minutia.
Even still, I'll have students emailing me for more work. They want to do research, get involved in competitions, write a paper, do independent studies. Every semester I have to approve overloads for students who want to take more classes. Individual institutions aren't forcing these students (who are often the most qualified of the qualified) to take on all this extra work. It's more like, the whole system is a race to the top for them. It's hard to disentangle that drive from industry and the economic system and blame it just on academia. After all, why do they want to take these extra classes? To be better job applicants.
This sounds a bit like what is discussed in the book "The Meritocracy Trap".
The idea being a hyper-competitive environment creates pyrrhic victories where even the winners are less well off. Your last sentence leaves the impression that those students aren't doing it for love of the work but only as a means to an end.
The US does this in every instance where passion is involved. Passionate people, especially those who are passionate about their work, are more easily convinced to take less pay because they are "passionate" and want to see their work come to fruition.
Exploitation of youthful passion for profit is basically the centerpiece of how America beats its workers into submission and slowly breaks down their expectations for anything good in the workplace. The worse condition the workers are willing to accept, the more profit to be made off of their labor.
// The US does this in every instance where passion is involved
I don't think there's a conspiracy. High performers in "passion" fields are sought after and make bank (Tom Cruise vs starving actor, eg)
The problem is the oversupply of middling talent. If I needed a random average actor for something, there are thousands of them fighting for the job, so it doesn't pay much. If I need Tom Cruise I am going to pay a lot.
The passion lense is useless. Doctors are passionate. Engineers are passionate.
The difference is the bar to entry. Getting into and graduating med school is very hard. Very few people, relatively, have an MD so they are in demand. And failure is clean - if you didn't make it to medschool, you go do something else. You don't spend the rest of your life as an "aspiring physician"
There's no such filter for acting etc so lots of people flood the field, don't get a natural weed-out and thus spend the rest of their life competing with each other for mediocre opportunities. And we just don't have a shortage of actors.
The US system is provides a practical signal. If you aren't making it on your "passion field", at some point the money signals that you can contribute better to society elsewhere.
I think there's some validity to this perspective, but it oversimplifies the systemic effects. MDs, for example, are artificially constrained by the AMA in the number of doctors needed by society. It's been likened to a cartel that acts to keep doctor pay high by artificially limiting supply. Let the "bar to entry" be constrained by merit, not by a cabal. Likewise, most engineers aren't capital "E" engineers in the legal sense. Most work under an exemption to be able to call themselves engineers. Most don't even realize it - they are, to a certain extent, 'aspiring' engineers (legally, at least).
As a fellow immigrant, can confirm, hard work works. That’s the main reason I came to USA – hard work didn’t feel like it would work back home. Nothing nefarious, just tall poppy syndrome and general environmental influence or multiplicative factor.
In America, with a bit of luck, it feels like 1x hard work produces 2x result. 3x if you’re privileged. At home, it felt like 1x hard work would get 1.3x result.
BUT! It is important to realize you’re solving a cold start problem. The hustle and hard work only gets you so far. You have to switch to using leverage once you have it. Do not grind yourself to dust.
Yes, dialing back is a luxury. That’s what the hard work was for. Now you can focus on using that position to do more with less. I liken it to running an ultramarathon to get to the start line of the marathon. You now have similar footing to someone who grew up in the social class to which you now belong, just a little later. Good luck.
edit:
I’m not saying hard work guarantees anything. In life there are no guarantees. But I do think it’s a necessary input.
At the end of the day, if you want exceptional results, you have to do exceptional things. Such is life. Only 2% of Americans have a PhD. Getting into the top 2% of the population sounds pretty exceptional to me. Doing it in a population you weren’t even born into? Heroic.
Lack of hard work definitely isn't an hindrance for grow. Having the right family name, pleasant facial structure or just being very likeable and sociable are all possible replacements for hard work.
> Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as much.
This is could be true assuming that the goal of society is maximum production and not maximum well-being.
> But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
Most of the results of hard-work go to the owners of business, not to the people doing that extra effort. And that is also true for academia. To overwork human beings to increase profit in exchange of a fraction of the produced seems inefficient at least, evil at worst.
When it comes to research maximum output is maximum well being for society (assuming the research isn't garbage, looking at you large parts of the humanities department) because that research drives productivity increases through multiple avenues. This is true because the effect of research is usually broadly applicable (i.e. a more efficient engine can save trillions in fuel and environmental damage) while the costs of overwork are concentrated on a very few that are self selecting for that lifestyle.
That most of the results of hard work go to the business owner is a result of capital being scarce while labor is more likely to not be right now (this is changing but it is a slow process). This is definitely true of academia with massive phd overproduction. If you want more benefit to accrue to phds you need to end the pyramid scheme that has been massively overproducing phds for decades or create broader non teaching/research demand for phds (ideally real demand, not manufactured credential requirement inflation because that causes massive dead weight loss)
The point you missed is she got where she is with a very very large amount of luck too. Most grants have about 100+ equally high quality applicants at this point in history. If you dont make it 8 years out of PhD (which is a huge investment of your productive life) you get shit canned forever on funding and "early career" opportunities. The system is exploitative in the extreme.
It's interesting you say this, I've realized it true in mine own life, I worked very hard, and admittedly was blessed with some wonderful opportunities early on in my career that led to me being far ahead of many of my peers age wise. I spent several years early in my career and life working very hard, working, full time school, full time parent, etc. Because of that I am now at a place where as my children have the ability to speak I have been able to dial it back a bit and still maintain my standing because of the foundation that was put in place long ago.
As my mother said "Life has to get hard at some point it can get hard now or it can get hard later."
// As my mother said "Life has to get hard at some point it can get hard now or it can get hard later."
She's wise. The way I express the same idea - I'd rather make my own life hard on my own terms, than deal with it just being hard and struggling.
Easy example - it's much easier to chose to save money when you have it (forgo something) than to somehow deal with not having money later. Or - it's totally fine and cute to have to live with roommates in your 20s so you can save and invest. Living with roommates in your 40s because you haven't saved and invested - less cute.
I am 100% certain that this rug is going to be pulled out from under any academic who is currently under the age of 45 or so. Tenure and seniority aren't going to mean much when budgets are tight and the admin is run by professional managers instead of senior-academics-on-admin-rotation.
Painful for anyone who's currently an Asst or Assoc Prof and was planning on retiring-in-place in academia, but I think it's a net good for academic culture in the long term.
Isn't a lot of the increase in costs coming from the admin side, where folks are easier to lay off? My understanding (married to an academic) is that it's pretty difficult to get rid of tenured folks, and much easier to eliminate admin positions. And in some cases, the admins make a lot of money, even in comparison to the professors.
> My understanding (married to an academic) is that it's pretty difficult to get rid of tenured folks
This depends on the type of institution, but it's mostly a shared fiction on the order of "corporate culture". Ie, The sort of fiction that no leader dares to undermine when times are good but which goes out the window as soon as revenues start declining and cuts must happen.
At many institutions, there are no actual legal or contractual barriers to dismissing tenured faculty. Tenure is nothing more or less than a gentleperson's agreement. A social expectation.
Even where actual legal/contractual protection does exist, it typically protects the person's job but not the job itself. Ie, a university might not be able to fire a tenured professor and hire a new professor. But they can simply downsize the academic department and release the faculty member by virtue of the faculty position no longer existing. Maybe hire back ad junct labor a few semesters later if necessary.
> much easier to eliminate admin positions.
This largely depends on what you mean by "admin". Typically the split is between "staff" and "faculty".
The explosion of "staff" is not (just) a story of bloated middle management. It's also a story of the ongoing move from tenured to untenured labor. In particular: "staff" often includes people like instructors, ad junct teaching labor, research scientists, and post-docs.
Why would you fire an ad junct instructor or research scientist (staff) if they are cheaper than a professor (faculty) for roughly the same work?
In fact, a savvy financial engineer might even prefer the more contingent form of labor even though they are more expensive because a friction of releasing traditional faculty is expensive in terms of opportunity cost and agility.
> At many institutions, there are no actual legal or contractual barriers to dismissing tenured faculty. Tenure is nothing more or less than a gentleperson's agreement. A social expectation.
What are some institutions where this is true? Are we talking 10% of institutions, or a more substantial number? I've read about many dismissals that were challenged, and I've never heard the institution defend itself on the grounds that tenure isn't actually guaranteed, but is just a social expectation.
> I've read about many dismissals that were challenged, and I've never heard the institution defend itself on the grounds that tenure isn't actually guaranteed, but is just a social expectation.
Lots of colleges and universities have done layoffs and cut academic programs. They don't even say it's a social expectation, they just say they're laying off faculty and leave it at that, no explanation required.
I've never actually heard of a role reduction successfully challenged. The usual cases that get contested are firing for cause, not layoffs.
Also: note that even the AAUP allows universities to lay off tenured faculty. They just insist that the non-tenured faculty get axed first. Labor solidarity n'at.
Well I mean Einstein, Netwon, Maxwell, and Galileo were probably more valuable to advancing our understanding of physics than every one of their contemporaries combined.
The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous. If anything this speaks to me that we want only those people in the field who would do it even if there was no reward for they will be the ones who produce earth shattering breakthroughs.
Well not "earth shattering" by any means, but I did all of my research
and published with MIT while entirely outside the university system.
Everything I achieved was despite, not because of the university
system, which having previously encountered I knew would only obstruct
my work. What really helped was the internet, patiently emailing other
researchers and kindly being sent papers. Without that generosity and
the fact that in 2005 people in my field (DSP) kept personal websites,
it would not have been possible. Fortunately in many areas of
computing research, you don't need much equipment, or it is cheap or
even free to get your hands on. I fee sorry for people who work in
physics or fields that need expensive specialist facilities for their
work.
This is why I vehemently support SciHub and hope other budding
researchers get the same breaks that I did, without having to kill
themselves in dead institutions.
Having had one foot back in academia for 10 more years now I am
absolutely convinced it is doomed. The death spiral of efficient
self-cannibalism is reaching a frenzy. Outside a handful of top tier
institutions they are not even fit places for teaching and learning,
never mind original research. It is so sad what "ideology" can do to
great institutions and nations.
But wasn't he working at a patent office? I was under the impression that working on a PhD at that time and place would not have been considered "in academia", in that he was not teaching or assisting.
Maybe. But also it seems like there's some exponential benefits too. Who can produce the next earth shattering discovery: a 1000 researches who've only done one study, or one researcher who has done a 1000 studies? All that experience and context matters.
The woman who wrote the article is sought after today not because what she's produced over the past years, but because of what those efforts enable her to do next.
>> Due to her earlier work, she's at a place to reflect and say "I am at level X, I can dial it back" which is great. But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
This is pretty typical, especially on Hacker News. A bunch of people saying working too hard is bad who are rich primarily because they worked too hard while they were younger.
Mostly I think they don't get what they're saying. Though I suspect some of them actually say it to prevent competition.
I'm struggling with a pervasive culture of inverting this pattern. "I do nothing unless you give me a lot of privileges". And if you come with motivation and desire to achieve more (overachieving to an extent) you become the enemy.
I think about this as another of those "industries" in which a lot people want to get into. Similar to art, animation, acting, screen writing, recording artist music; I suppose any creative industries will be like this.
All these 'industries' become exploitative (possibly capitalism has something to do with how this happens. but let's stay on topic)
So then, I consider this pattern of exploitation -- of "put up with it or get out", to be a sort of collective (or cultural, organizational) trauma in the sense that it self-perpetuates.
People join, get overworked, become traumatized, and then some make it through. Now, once on the other side, they proceed to overwork newcomers.
It's very common to think "I made it through, and I've become what I am because of those experiences" a rationalization of the trauma.
But I wonder about them who make it... was it because of overworked abuse, or was it in spite of it?
Academic institutions are loaded up with people who are skilled at political manipulation and bureaucratic infighting, and who often have little real interest in their supposed field of research. For these types it's basically a game of getting in with the reviewers of grant proposals, rubbing elbows at scientific conferences, hiring technicians and postdocs and maybe some pHD students to generate a steady stream of papers, cozying up to university administration, attending dinners and so on.
It's gotten even worse since the corporations started getting exclusive licenses to university patents, now there's all the secrecy in those fields as well as the PIs start salivating about the possibility of getting a small percentage of the royalties on those patents.
Trofim Lysenko would have recognized the system, it's similar to the one he ran in the Soviet Union for decades.
>> Academic institutions are loaded up with people who are skilled at political manipulation and bureaucratic infighting, and who often have little real interest in their supposed field of research. For these types it's basically a game of getting in with the reviewers of grant proposals, rubbing elbows at scientific conferences, hiring technicians and postdocs and maybe some pHD students to generate a steady stream of papers, cozying up to university administration, attending dinners and so on.
This is an accurate description of the current situation!
The only way to undo the culture of overwork for academic professors, is to increase bottleneck somewhere upstream (e.g. cut the number of PhD students in half). Any time you have a situation where 300 people are applying for the same job (as is common for ladder rank professorships at research universities), the people who end up getting those jobs will inevitably have been overworked. Imagine if less than 10% of people who went to med school ended up landing a job as a physician - that's basically the situation with professorships.
To be clear, Ph.D. students are very expensive. I don't know where you would get the idea that they are "free labor". Sure they're not as expensive as software engineers, but they also can't (or shouldn't) be "fired" per se. There's a certain latitude you are afforded as a student, and that's something that I think a lot of Ph.D. candidates don't appreciate when they complain they are underpaid compared to their industry counterparts.
Source: was a Ph.D. student who complained about being underpaid, now a professor who sees how expensive they actually are.
I think I was paid like 18K a year when I got my STEM PhD in 2018. So, when you say that PhD students are not as expensive as SWEs, you could be making the understatement of the year. I bet the Mcdonalds workers made more than me.
When people say free labour, the mean how much you're paid. Even slaves have to be bought, housed and fed so they have a cost, but they're pretty much the definition of free labour.
I really have to draw the line at Ph.D. students being compared to slaves. Doing a Ph.D. Is an amazing opportunity, and a voluntary one at that. Far beyond being uncompensated, Ph.D. student are in fact compensated with a stipend, tuition, and mentorship. To compare this arrangement to slavery is to both cheapen the experience of a Ph.D. and to minimize the horrors of slavery.
I didn't meant to call Ph.D. student slaves, I'm just trying to point out that by your definition even slaves are not free labour, which I think we all agree is wrong. I just couldn't think of another situation where people aren't getting paid, but in retrospect I guess volunteers would have been a less insulting example and convey my point better.
Okay, even so, I must push back stronger on the point you made initially, that professors are looking to exploit free labor and therefore would never cut Ph.D. enrollments in half.
The first notion I would like to dispel is that we are looking for employees of any kind. To be clear, a Ph.D. is closer to an apprenticeship than it is to employment, so benchmarking it against employment leads to all kinds of wrong conclusions about the arrangement.
In fact, we are looking for students, which is to say that when admitted to a Ph.D., students lack the skills necessary to undertake the work, and the expectation is that they will be trained as a matter of course. How this differs from typical on-the-job training is that the training period can last years.
The flip side is that business has adopted the philosophy "fire fast", meaning that that if some employee isn't working out, it's best to just let them go rather than let the issue persist. With a student, the philosophy is reversed; a student who isn't working out should be mentored.
All this training and mentorship does not come cheap. For one, the facilities they use are expensive. For another, faculty time is expensive as well. Students don't appreciate this because the economics are hidden from them, and it often leads to perceptions that they are only paid the small fraction of their compensation that flows into their bank accounts. But to be clear, this training is in fact compensation to the student. It's not given to them at zero cost to the university. I can charge up to $300 per hour to give advice and training as part of my consultancy, but my students as part of my regular employment get carte balance access. They don't ever see an invoice from me, but that doesn't mean my time was spent with them out of the goodness of my heart. It certainly doesn't mean I'm exploiting them by not paying them market rate. If they want market rate, they should have marketable skills relevant to the position.
The slavery comparison falls apart for obvious reasons. The volunteer comparison also falls apart because volunteers act as such to give, whereas students start a Ph.D. to get something out of it. And they do, it's just not all money. It's not even mostly money, and I think this should be clear to anyone thinking of starting a Ph.D. at this point. So for a Ph.D. student to complain that they were paid a small amount compared to someone who was employed, while eliding the vast array of other compensation they got, and simultaneously ignoring all the privileges afforded to students that aren't to employees, that to me is missing the entire value of the degree.
> In fact, we are looking for students, which is to say that when admitted to a Ph.D., students lack the skills necessary to undertake the work, and the expectation is that they will be trained as a matter of course.
Except you are not looking for students, you are looking for the top graduates in the field, and you are training them for a job that barely exists.
> Except you are not looking for students, you are looking for the top graduates in the field, and you are training them for a job that barely exists.
Ph.D. students are in fact students, and I'm training them in a discipline in which I am one of the few experts in the world, to the point where they are an additional world expert on that topic. That takes a lot of time.
Personal experience: my advisor brings in somewhere between 2-3x my nominal pay as a Ph.D. student just to employ me. In his words, the excess goes into the "university", which I believe is just the org structure/bureaucracy that we at HN love to hate. So, all I want to say is
> was a Ph.D. student who complained about being underpaid, now a professor who sees how expensive they actually are.
They both can be true! You can be paying through the nose just for a middleman fat cat to take a fat cut, leaving the Ph.D. student with very little power to receive an unlivable amount.
> In his words, the excess goes into the "university", which I believe is just the org structure/bureaucracy that we at HN love to hate.
Yes, we all love to complain about paying overhead, the same way we all love to complain about paying taxes. "If only I didn't have to pay this chunk of money, imagine what more I could do for myself!"
And yet, we all know that it's not as simple as that. Yes, it's a shame that your advisor can't keep all his grant money and pay you 2-3x more. At the same time, the overhead money he pays is going to fund (among many other things) teaching assistantships, which will fund some other grad student whose advisor isn't as fortunate to have landed a lucrative grant. Or it will fund a new professor's startup package who is just starting out. Or it will fund startup research internal to the university. That same fund could support you in the future, if your funding runs dry; typical projects are funded for 4-5 years, whereas a Ph.D. can be longer (up to a decade even).
There are a million excellent uses for that money. Honestly this wouldn't be much of a discussion if the housing and healthcare markets were more sane; most of the stipend money is spent on rent anyway. My institution is able to subsidize housing for many grad students, but when a 2 bedroom apartment costs $3000/mo on the open market, it's true that it can be tough to be a grad student. Especially with a family.
But at the same time, those who seek to pursue a Ph.D. are often young and unencumbered. This can be a great option for many, as you are aware. I don't see the need to make it more like employment, when employment is already an option.
> Yes, we all love to complain about paying overhead, the same way we all love to complain about paying taxes. "If only I didn't have to pay this chunk of money, imagine what more I could do for myself!"
I agree with you! I believe a tax rate of 0% OR 100% is insane, and the right number is somewhere in the middle. Right now, paying 67-50% "taxes" to the university and then also paying ~30% in real taxes just seems unfair/inefficient/unjust.
unfair - what is the fair amount? I think if we were to decrease university overhead, anyone whose stipend may be affected by that would be right to say that it's unfair they are left without a stipend while you not only maintain yours, it might even increase.
inefficient - yes, probably. But I'm not sure that many universities' missions are related to efficiency. This of course makes it a bad profit maximizing organization, which is fine because it was never intended to be one. For instance, it might be more efficient for a university to cut all the under-enrolled programs and to only focus on STEM. But the mission statement of the university precludes that, so STEM is heavily taxed to support the philosophy department. It's not efficient, but I'm happy we have a philosophy department.
Also there's another degree of efficiency here, which is economies of scale. Overhead goes to pay for administration (the one HN loves to hate) which to a large degree increases my efficiency. For example, research overhead goes to fund the research office, which helps me get grants and stay compliant. They help me file for patents, and publish my work. Professors wouldn't be able to afford the staff at the research office with our individual grants, and even if we could we would be inefficiently duplicating the office in each of our individual labs. But by pooling our money (paying the overhead tax), we can afford a number of support staff who can help us all write better grants.
unjust - what is the just amount? The PI knows ahead of time all the taxes, and can request as much as they need from the funding organization to conduct the research. The only limit here is the total budget of the funding organization. If it's a public organization like the NSF, that budget is set by Congress, which is democratically elected. Your stipend is only limited due to the public's willingness to fund research. Since all of this follows the rule of law which has been democratically decided upon, I don't agree that the system is unjust.
The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar reputation. And reputation is the key determinant for being offered a permanent position at a high-ranking institution.
However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.
Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.
The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.
This just in - competitive people in competitive fields compete.
The only way to fix this is to make rules about how hard anyone is allowed to work. By definition this is a denial of freedom and stifles progress.
The real solution for an individual is to be satsfied with less. Just don’t expect that of anyone else lest you tread on the thin ice of communim, which is ironic considering the birthplace of the author.
This conclusion does not at all follow from the premise. The myth that more competition means you get a better result absolutely does not hold and needs to die. There's a fundamental equilibrium shift when you spend more resources competing than you do on progressing.
> The myth that more competition means you get a better result absolutely does not hold and needs to die. There's a fundamental equilibrium shift when you spend more resources competing than you do on progressing.
I did not make the original claim, that more rules stifles progress. Please show me the experiments done to demonstrate this or the logic used in deducing it and I will attempt to devise a counterexample.
To be clear, my claim was specific. It was that if you make rules about how hard (long) someone is allowed to work, you will stifle progress. That is because the highest performers who accomplish the most per unit time will have their output reduced. I can't see how this is not objectively true.
So if Wendy can get 2.0 units of work done per hour and Bob can get 1.0 units of work done per hour, then Bob has to either reduce his expectations or try to get the rules changed so Wendy can only work half as long as she normally would. I'm specifically saying that rule should not be allowed.
Also, there's nothing saying that a unit of time worked is being spent on competition instead of progress. Some people will spend their time undercutting their competitors, others will spend their time on true work. But saying that you can only work for N hours per day/week doesn't account for that.
As an aside, I'm impressed someone treated Nature as their personal blogpage and now has a nature publication on their CV as a result. I would never have thought if that. Hell, I just saw it happen, and I still wouldnt have thought of it.
That's the tradeoff -- lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated and won't abuse the privilege.
Part of her issue though is that academic research and academic writing are two different skills, and being a productive researcher essentially requires you to spend a lot of time writing papers. I would think that a grant that allowed scientists (especially) to hire dedicated scientific writers would have a multiplier effect on the productivity of the scientist and would also improve the quality of the papers produced, as having to explain the concept to a non-expert tends to crystallize ideas on presentation.
> lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated
Should people give their lives for a profession? That seems prone to create unhealthy societies prone to conflict and cheating. In my experience self described meritocratic societies usually are just cynic nepotist societies. The children of the poor have to work their asses off to get much less that what the children of the rich get without effort.
Homo economicus is dead, and it is time to update the world views on work and economy.
I have recently begun to appreciate how much (in the US) we structure our entire existence around our jobs, and how we earn money. The puritan work ethic, extrapolated out across BS jobs encourages so many of us to identify as our jobs, and make that our sense of self.
The puritans wouldn't have advocated holding off getting married or having children to work for a megacorp 80 hours a week. They wouldn't be impressed you are the "assistant to the senior vice president" or whatever. I don't think we can blame modern "hussle culture" on the puritans, it's more of a neoliberal thing to get let yourself get consumed by a job and hire out all your basic needs (take out, daycare, housekeepers) like we do today.
It's not just the Puritan work ethic. The dearth of support and extreme scarcity of housing play a huge role.
If you won't center your entire life around work, there's a long line of people who will, and your employer would happily hire one of them and throw you into the proverbial wood chipper of being unemploymed in the US.
I would like to highlight another aspect of the academia that has come to the fore in the past 15 years, which is the rapid rise of the publication indices such as the citations count and H-index. I blame Google Scholar and Analytics.
The indices have brought about a number of new problems. The goal in academia is no longer primarily production of science, but mostly maximizing these indices ( see here “I am a bigger guy”). The number of co-authors have as a result greatly increased, with politicians and research managers becoming skilled in putting their names in like tens of papers a year. Savvy junior players are also learning to foster as many “collaboration opportunities” as possible. Another practice is permutation of authors: it costs me nothing to put your name at the end of my paper, and you do the same, so that our citations counts go up.
Of course, in practice, I noticed, this often involves minor contributions.
I think the ability “to collaborate“ will gradually be an official job requirement.
Another striking feature of academia is the pyramidal structure of the system and rent-seeking. The professor collects the credit for the work of the students and postdocs. Of course there is some contribution, but a lot of time it’s commentary. When the researchers leave, the professor can hire new researchers to continue the topic. The credit for the professor adds up to a career on that topic. The career brings new grants, citations, awards, etc, all the while the professor is essentially acting as a manager than a scientist.
Im surprised the author does not mention tenure. I went to two uni's, one research based and one not. Once the professors hit tenure, the research professors mostly abdicated their teaching responsibilities, whereas the non-research just kept on teaching. I suspect once the author becomes tenured, and thus essentially immune to being fired or laid off, their tone will change.
Academic controversy within your field of research I doubt they care as long as you continue to bring in money via grants, if you're in the national news bringing down the reputation of the institution/university then you'll be probably be sacked.
> Once the professors hit tenure, the research professors mostly abdicated their teaching responsibilities, whereas the non-research just kept on teaching.
It's a lifecycle. Just-tenured professors are expected to spend those years being as productive as possible on research. That's what they're there for. Full professors conversely will neglect their research and focus much more on teaching, mentorship, and take on administrative roles.
I work with primarily academic types, and I’m careful to always use soft and work-neutral language as well as a few tricks I have learned to kinda “hack” out of their typical work mode and into their regular personality.
I’m notorious for chitchat, and one of my favorite ones is “What have you been doing for fun lately?” because of how useful it is for starting pleasant conversations. I’ve learned that a lot of graduates here (DC) like video gaming, hiking, and traveling.
I never say “we need to get X done by Y” with young people. I say “Ok, the next milestone task for us is X. How are we feeling about getting that done around or even before Y?” And with time, people learn that I want the honest answer, not the sugar coat. You can’t BS a BSer, as it goes.
Anyhow, my main thing is: when someone starts being weird or evasive when I’m asking about leisure, I assume that there’s a stressor in their life and often I’ll tell them exactly that. Sometimes they come clean, and say they feel the imposter syndrome (always the Ivy Leaguers) or that they don’t feel connected to the work and significance of it, or sometimes it’s just personal business and not for me to get involved with. I think it’s just a learned behavior with the young generations to always stay at a high velocity rather than taking time to just BE worried about their family or health or whatever it is, and let it happen and move on. Instead, they just kinda put it on a plate in their mind and keep scurrying forward to the things they think they’re supposed to be doing.
A lot of employers/managers don’t think like I do, but I think: if you’re so stressed out that your hands are shaking, I don’t want you poring over medical/financial/industrial data. You’re a huge liability, and you should be getting rested and relaxed to do this stuff. The culture has failed them in teaching them NOT to address these things as crucially important in their lives, or has robbed them of the financial stability to consider doing sk in the first place.
I think what we call academia isn’t really academia, but a system that’s subservient to the desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached. Sure, a tenured professor has more freedom than the average federal employee, but only because the state hasn’t felt the need to tighten the screws. If policy interests ever diverged from interests of the universities, I think we’d quickly learn that academia of today is not at all what it presupposes itself to be. It’s more of less the Ministry of Truth, to extent required by those who hold the purse strings.
I think it is easy to produce vague allegations of a lack of integrity, but I would really expect more substance to such a critique.
> ... desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached.
Is this suggesting that the public funders influence the outcome of research? It is not something I have ever witnessed. They sometimes may seek to take influence on the direction of a research programme, especially when the performance is below expectations. but I have yet to see an example where a public funder has attempted to influence research results.
> I think we’d quickly learn that academia of today is not at all what it presupposes itself to be
What does it presuppose to be? Academia of today is 1) a place of teaching and knowledge dissemination, 2) a place of research and knowledge creation, 3) a multibillion dollar business that sells tickets to successful professional lives. The latter leads to overinflated self-marketing, and unfortunately this affects how research results are communicated.
Those who hold the "purse strings" have little interest in influencing research outcomes. Rather, they care about the reputation of their course (students), their own reputation (alumni), recruiting talent and/or outsourcing research (businesses), or actual research results (public funders).
This is at least the case in most institutions in the US and the UK, and most of western Europe.
“Is this suggesting that the public funders influence the outcome of research?”
The funders decide what gets funded.
One example, from Stanford,
“ Stanford University receives hundreds of millions of dollars of funding from the NIH, without which researchers would not have the resources to conduct many worthwhile experiments and studies. NIH funding also confers prestige and status within the scientific community. At Stanford, it is very difficult for a biomedical researcher in her department to earn tenure without landing a major NIH grant. The attack by Collins and Fauci sent a clear signal to other scientists that the GBD was a heretical document.”
Shower thoughts: academia should employ part time project managers paid by the university. PIs can do less administrative work. Grad students can feel less lost. Time can be used efficiently. People will overwork less.
It's not just overwork, it's also about how society treats your lifework. The science is a collective effort of millions of people, of many generations. But here we have a situation where dickheads like Musk, who don't even have science degree, come and claim all the credits, suck enormous amount of attention and resources, like a black hole, and use them for pleasuring their own ego (while shitting on everyone else). It's nonsense.
“For young immigrant women like me, the pressures of early career research are even greater than for most.”
Ah, the “poor downtrodden women” angle.
Yes academia is very easy for white nationally born men. That’s why there aren’t any white male plumbers or garbage people.
Let’s take ukrainian men vs women. For women you are granted asylum, and probably fast tracked in a social program to help you. If you’re a man under 60 years old, you’re not allowed to leave Ukraine and instead are likely being drafted to a war you want nothing to do with. You’re physically prevented from leaving the country.
They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common.
Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)