[dbmueller]

> I am generally suspicious of anyone who voluntary pursues academia

That's very unfair imo. The majority of people I know in academia don't fit this profile at all. There is obviously disappointing stuff happening, but people generally still are working/teaching in good faith.

[LoveMortuus]

>but people generally still are working/teaching in good faith.

It depends on university. On mine, most professors just see it as a job, something that one must endure until it's over. And when you bring to attention that what they're lecturing is incorrect or not proven they don't really care, again not all, but most, at least on my university. Just today I reminded the professor that there is a difference between a theory and hypothesis, their response was that they don't know if the theories they're teaching were tested or proven, but they are teaching this because that's what's written in the book...

That made me really sad, it's already hard to stay motivated to not leave the university because you need a certificate of a higher education to be taken seriously, but such behaviour from professors makes it even harder.

I've already expressed my worries to those in control of courses and they say that they understand but can't do much to change things because the curriculum that we have was accepted by the government.

Here in Slovenia people that work in the universities are paid by the government regardless of how happy or unhappy the students are, which is probably the reason for the situation in which we are...

[avian]

As a fellow Slovenian, former student and now someone who's spent years professionally in academia, let me try to show your experience from a different perspective. I don't know anything about your professor except the anecdote you shared, so I'm not defending them. I'm just trying to shine a different light "on the situation in which we are" that you as a student perhaps didn't (yet) have a chance to see. I'm also writing this because I feel like your view is pretty common among our students.

How our universities work is that as a researcher a part of your duty to the university is teaching students. Unfortunately, fields of research and study subjects in most cases aren't aligned. Nobody will be researching basic subjects that must be taught to the students, and on the other hand a very specialized field of research might not be taught to anything but a small post-graduate course. This means that often professors will end up teaching an undergraduate course that has next to nothing to do with their field of study. In the end, someone must be teaching those introductory courses and for some subjects being taught the university might not have any professional researchers at all.

Professors are researchers first and teachers second. This is most likely the reason why it appears that teaching is "something that one must endure until it's over". Your professor might be a brilliant world-class researcher in their field and they pursue it with passion, but they might be teaching e.g. linear algebra to undergraduates twice a week based on "what's written in the book" to keep their job. As it turns out, teaching and research are quite different skills and they often don't coincide. When they do, you get some really amazing professors and I'm sure you have some on your course as well.

It's not a perfect system, but I've spent enough time in foreign universities where research staff was on-the-hook all the time and liable to get fired if students weren't happy with them. It's such a constantly stressful environment that I was amazed that people managed to do any kind of research at all. In the end, it's a trade-off. You can't have a university without either top-end research or teaching and we might have chosen a slightly different trade-off between these two than the countries you seem to look up to.

Anyway, I hope I've given you a new way to look at things and I hope you will stay at your university for more than just to get the "take me seriously" papers.

[juskrey]

The main problem in academia is that people still can be harmful even being in good faith. (remember that "road to hell" saying, right?)

[dbmueller]

> people still can be harmful even being in good faith

That's a general truth. You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever. Make a real case for you thesis then.

[juskrey]

People choose academia to be within (zero-sum) system and project the same expectations to students, while real life success is about being out of any system. Hence the harm.

[exdsq]

People don't 'choose academia to be within a zero-sum system and project the same expectations to students'. My partner and most of my friends are or have been in academia and the one common thing is a real passion for their subject of choice and industry doesn't offer the same flexibility to focus on it.

Being suspicious of those who voluntarily become academics is odd.

[sgift]

Talks about zero-sum. Uses things based on the results of said zero-sum system. Makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

[juskrey]

Real life results of academia are largely propaganda (tuition billions well spent). They are not even good in figuring out why/how things work and replicating success (additionally proven by Soviets).

[sgift]

Your language of choice - Clojure according to your HN bio - works on a product where important parts (e.g. Generics and the Java collection framework) were done by academia. One of the most popular compilers (LLVM) was done in academia (and still is in parts!). Most of the optimizations compilers use were done by academia.

Your work stands on the work of countless academic researchers and you run around "What did academia EVER do for us?" - the Monty Python sketch about Romans comes to mind.