An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
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An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
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Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#2Having been in grad school for a while, I can totally relate on using grants to churn out papers and egos running research.
Want to slightly disagree with this though: "Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little, while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and begins to play on the other side of the table."
The same thing happens in industry, except that you're paid more, and your work is directly relevant to the world you see (and not just a journal/conference where it is never read again.)
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#3I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#4They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#5Real scientific progress does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. Sadly, modern day scientist are expected to constantly produce amazing results or face losing funding. And what do you think happens?
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#6They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
A marxist critique of community college.
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#7I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest – first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it.
contrast with the article and discussion at:
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#8Can someone please change `wity' to `with' in the title?
This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns.
EDIT: typos
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#9They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
What evidence do you have that business schools are the source of the problem?
Re: An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
#10They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
A marxist critique of community college.
Or someone speaking out of experience? I can testify[1] on the nefarious influence of MBA-like groupthink in academia: gigantic counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, obsession with pseudo-measurability of everything, from impact factors over “quality assessment” to “standardization” of examination and “competence matrices”. Top-down bogus coming from people who failed in the corporate world and met their Peter’s principle in the academia they never left.
[1] http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep...