[michaelochurch]

Academia is a horrible industry and it's really just CTD (circling the drain) at this point. It's sad, because basic research is important and right now, there's far too little of it being done. Teaching the liberal arts to the next generation is also an important and catastrophically underappreciated job. I think that only about 1 percent of the population (if that) is in-tune enough to see how bad it is that academia is failing, because we rely on it for so much and yet we've allowed it to fall into a state where (barring seismic social changes) it seems to have no future.

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

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

[evanwarfel]

+1

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

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

[michaelochurch]

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

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

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

[evanwarfel]

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

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

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

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

[norea-armozel]

It's why I dropped out of grad school. It wasn't so much that I couldn't get my Masters. I had the knowledge by then to do the required project option, but when I dug into the actual research done at my university that's when I decided it wasn't worth it. It may have been a bad play to bail out but I just couldn't see myself tied to bureaucracy. When I want to build or research something I don't need some pencil pusher to tell me to do it. I just do it. If it's on my dime, fine, but it seems if you go that route then it's much harder to get it published. So, why bother?

[kelseydh]

The biggest problem I see emerging with Academia is the rise of administrative spending. Per-student administrative spending relative to academic spending in universities has exploded. Those in charge of University budgets are grossly expanding tuition and sinking the money into unnecessary infrastructure upgrades and expansions to the university administrative bureaucracy, with very little of it focusing on quality of education.

[dstyrb]

In Germany, for every full time employed researcher at universities, there are 2 full time administrators... And the researchers still do all their own paperwork for grants, travel, etc.

[JoeAltmaier]

The infighting is so fierce, because the stakes are so small. The 'thinking about money' is not at all the same as we in industry think. Its about survival on a shoestring, not about making it big.

Anyway, the academics are so inbred because, well, we made them that way. Did you get your degree from Phoenix, the for-profit college? No? Because its not as legit somehow? That's the real issue. Ivy-league schools are the way they are, because we keep throwing money at them.

[michaelochurch]

The 'thinking about money' is not at all the same as we in industry think. Its about survival on a shoestring, not about making it big.

Absolutely correct. It also begets the False Poverty Effect, in which negative, antisocial, and even unethical behaviors become more acceptable because people think of themselves as poor relative to where they belong.

You see the same thing (False Poverty Effect) in startups. Plenty of startup CEOs and founders feel like it's OK to be unethical because, at a salary of a "mere" $150,000 per year, they're practically performing charity work. When people like they're underappreciated or behind where they "belong" in terms of money or status, they're more willing to do things that aren't exactly legal or ethical.

At least in startups, as you noted, there is upside. In academia, the reward for busting your ass and beating the piss out of the odds is... a middle-class job where you can't be fired. If you'd worked as hard in finance, you'd be able to retire at 40. The stakes are small, the rewards are meager, and this gives the people who are in that game a huge sense of moral superiority.

Did you get your degree from Phoenix, the for-profit college? No? Because its not as legit somehow? That's the real issue. Ivy-league schools are the way they are, because we keep throwing money at them.

And, sadly... we'll keep doing so. If I ever have kids, I'm going to have to spend six-figure amounts on what is, in essence, a socioeconomic advantage under the name of "education". Schools have become a socially acceptable form of inherited wealth that looks like meritocratic academic admissions because, for the outsiders, it legitimately is very difficult to get into the top schools, hence the mystique and prestige.

I think it would be better if we replaced this socioeconomic "black box" of educational admissions with a purely test-driven system. Sure, there'd be really smart people with mediocre test scores who can't get into top schools... but that already happens, just for different reasons (socioeconomic ones rather than flawed testing). However, you'd kill that stupid mystique about Harvard and Stanford having some supernatural ability to select future leaders and people could just say, "yeah, my test scores weren't great", and that would be that. It wouldn't be some huge shame for a valedictorian to get shut out of the top schools; it would be, "I'm not great at standardized tests" (and smart people who aren't good test takers do exist) and that no one would care after age 19. It would work out well for the students at the Ivies who actually want to learn because, on average, they'd have better colleagues. It would probably end the 6- or 7-figure per child, pay-for-socioeconomic-advantage racket surrounding the top colleges and prep schools (and, in New York, grade schools and fucking pre-schools).

[rrss1122]

The tenure system is a relic. It served its purpose but it's not compatible with today's culture.

It may or may not be the case that only 1% of the population realize the full extent of how bad it is, but a large part of the population knows something is wrong with the system. Just look at how expensive college has become. Everyone knows this is a problem. It may be that the tenure system has some part in the price increase also. Tenured faculty are not only secure in their positions, but in their salaries. This denies universities the flexibility to adjust salary expenses and forces them to charge students more. The majority of the population may not be aware of how bad the problem is, but the increase in tuition is a very visible symptom of the problem.

[teddyh]

“Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”

— Sayre’s law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

[iamcurious]

Academia is a horrible industry and it's really just CTD (circling the drain) at this point ... Or, to be more precise, the tenure system killed it by allowing older generations to cannibalize their young. At some point, academics began to openly cop the attitude that research and publication were the real work and that teaching and outreach were just grunt work.

America is not the world. Just as researchers fled to America, it might happen that they will flee to somewhere else.

[dstyrb]

I don't agree with how you frame the academics as the bad guys. I do agree the system is FUBAR.

There is a tremendous failure on the behalf of universities in the way they hire academics and how they treat them.

Universities preferentially hire world class _researchers_ so that they pull in maximal grant money which they can then leech upwards of 70% in dramatically overstated "lab fees". Then, they force these researchers to go through pointless habilitation exercises and then teach classes which, the vast majority of the time, have nothing to do with the academic's research. A new professor will likely be forced to teach the most advanced classes that are not specialty classes (in physics say Electrodynamics, or Quantum Mechanics) because no one wants to teach the hard subjects that aren't their own field. This means that the new professor, for the first several years, will spend 10+ hours a week studying the concepts themselves to they can adequately teach the class.

Then, in most situations, the academic, on tenure track is simultaneously forced into a support administrative position. They are required to arrange anywhere up to half a dozen business trips a year which entails days of planning, applying for permission, purchasing fare and lodging (of course out of the researcher's own pocket), applying for reimbursement, etc. And god forbid you host a meeting yourself, that has a whole slew of it's own responsibilities. Then of course there's the day to day applying for major grants which you need to do yearly, applying for purchase permission for lab equipment which, depending on your lab can be once every few years (computer labs) to once every few weeks (geophysics for example buying reagents). Also you need to organize and attend anywhere from 1-10 meetings / invited lectures per week.

This person, who has gone into academia because of their passion for a specific aspect of their field now spends the vast majority of each day micromanaging students, studying a topic they don't care about, teaching that topic to a class of students who likely also don't care, filling out redundant and often confusing legalese style paperwork and teaching the exact same skills over and over again to the steadily coming and going research assistants.

And _none of this matters a tic on the resume_. All that people care about is the paper output, which is what the researcher wanted to do in the first place. Is it really a mystery as to why your undergraduate professor seemed pissed off and stressed out?

The problem is universities hiring world class researchers to do administration and teaching when they should be hiring administrators and teachers. Researchers should work at research facilities like Fermilab, CERN, NASA etc. Does it really fucking matter if your Physics 1 professor got a Nobel Prize back in the 60s?

Also most academics I know don't share your perceived opinions of looking down on undergrad students, the general public, grad students, etc. Most of them are just really disappointed that they can't do what they got into the business to do and are used to dealing with people who don't care about them or their passions at all.

[michaelochurch]

This is an interesting perspective. I didn't intend to "frame the academics as the bad guys" but I can see how it came off that way.

To be blunt, I don't think that the current generation's academics are at fault at all. This rotten system was built decades before they came on the field, and they're just trying to survive in it.

I'm putting blame, mostly, on the older generations: the Boomers, the Silents, and the "Greatest" Generation. They had it so good that they must have assumed that they could just ignore the teaching part of the job, so they devalued it, creating a state where even those who want to focus on teaching aren't rewarded for it.

I don't even fault specific people. I fault the tenure system. I understand its value, but I also see how it allows the older, comfortable generation to behave in a way that hurts the young. The blow-off-the-teaching attitude isn't something I see in most 30-year-old professors (and, to the extent that it exists, it's a rational response to a system that doesn't reward it at all). It's something that started decades ago. The tenured professor, who could blow off his teaching and administrative duties with minimal consequence, could say to his juniors, "I get five papers out per year, so I don't see why you can't do it." Academia has this weird dichotomous system where you're either almost impossible to fire (tenured) or treated as human garbage, with nothing in-between.

Of course, university administrators and politicians are also at fault, but one has to wonder why they've decided to impoverish academia. Many of those administrators are ex-academics, and the politicians' anti-intellectualism and resentment of academia has to come from somewhere. To blame academics entirely is to miss a lot, for sure, but one has to assign to them (again, with blame falling most on the older or retired ones who were most influential when this mess began) a fair share of the responsibility.

[JoeAltmaier]

To start the flood of anecdotes, I'll suggest my old digital circuits professor who never returned homework, ignored the textbook and was never present for lab help. His grades always came out weeks late. And he started doing that long before he got tenure. Because he was a prolific researcher with lots of grant money coming in.

So tenure wasn't to blame - its an effect, not a cause.