Academia is a cult?

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 04, 2018, 11:49 AM UTC

maceurt wrote: post #40

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #14

Seems like this should be titled "Humanities Academia is a cult". Which is a conclusion with which I don't necessarily disagree. Frankly, the job numbers are out there. If you choose to get a PhD in history even after seeing them, you're probably delusional in some form. I'm not so certain about STEM however. While cults can pop up anywhere there is a leader with a non trivial power dynamic, I'd say that a fair porti…

Music academia is terrible and riddled with politics and infighting from my experience also. The number of actual livable jobs for classical musicians are very low. It makes me pissed off how public schools will still spend hundred of thousands of dollars and push kids into classical music when it is such a dead end, and competition is so high. It is a ponzi scheme where the students pay the teachers, then the studen…

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, Nov 04, 2018, 12:15 PM UTC

village-idiot wrote: post #13

guachesuedehack wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be your theory ?

Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days. Two things. First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their gener…

Post by JohnStrangeII » Sun, Nov 04, 2018, 12:53 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #84

briandear wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t underpaid. Tenured professors have the ultimate job security. They also get paid sabbaticals which is fairly rare in the real world. Adjunct professors on the other hand — those are definitely underpaid, but they’re often doing that work as a side job or they’re trying to fight their way to tenure. A job from which you can’t be fired? That’s worth something. Stellar benefits? That’s worth something as wel…

Every post-doc position is wildly over-subscribed and there is fierce competition for each one. So simple economics - the law of supply and demand - says they are not underpaid, in fact if anything they are paid over the clearing price for the market.

Post by Myrmornis » Sun, Nov 04, 2018, 12:57 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #85

Myrmornis wrote: post #42

Yes, humanities academia is severely flawed, not only in the ways that the author describes but also in the prevalence of pseudo-intellectual quackery in literature studies, cultural studies and areas of social sciences, philosophy, etc. The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.

A lot of biomedical science is also barely worth of the name science as it's not reproducible. And I'm sure you could find the same in physics and math too. But it's way easier to look at the humanities, not being able to understand the language used due to not having the required background and go "clearly it's worthless because I, someone with a degree in a completely different field, cannot understand it". And the…

Post by marmaduke » Sun, Nov 04, 2018, 1:00 PM UTC

infinity0 wrote: post #26

whatshisface wrote: post #22

> It’s not unusual for academic job seekers to spend 10 percent of their annual income — the amount of a tithe — attending a single conference for an interview (including airfare, lodging, registration fees and incidentals). You can tell the author legitimately knows humanities academia from the inside because they are experts at pointing out unrelated coincidental facts as if their simultaneous truth meant something…

bro, correlation causes causation