A successful academic faces lifelong debt • Hacker News Board

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#31

Post by pwnstigator » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:03 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #27

patio11 wrote: post #2

Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.

How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one. I understand that you believ…

MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.

Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale).

Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#32

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:08 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #24

cynicalkane wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.

Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examinati…

[deleted]

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#33

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:08 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #13

jnovek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.

Yes, doing whatever you want regardless of it's commercial viability is a privilege reserved for the affluent. Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.

I think her work probably does benefit others. Maybe the benefits of teaching the history and situation of a defeated indigenous culture are not all that tangible, but I suggest that that is in part due to a weakness in our social mechanism of assigning value.

The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#34

Post by pwnstigator » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:08 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #24

cynicalkane wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.

Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examinati…

On humanities and "self-indulgence": I hate the corporatization of academia in general, but professors really dicked themselves over when they took the attitude that their research was their "real work" and that teaching was commodity grunt work to be delegated to TAs as much as possible.

Star physics researchers can get away with this-- just as, to use a fictional example, Dr. House can slough off his clinic duty-- because they are retained for their brilliant ideas. Most academics can't.

This attitude fails the humanities especially, because the entire point of these departments' existence is to transmit culture from one generation to the next (e.g. teaching). Most humanities research (unlike in the sciences) is not very useful, especially if only academics can understand it.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#35

Post by catzaa » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:12 PM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #28

sschronk wrote: post #10

I'm a college professor myself. It is a thankless job. You spend more than 20 years in school, washing dishes, working at a dead end job waiting for that moment when you finally get to teach. My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on. Also realize the pressures of college teaching: Society needs you to teach skills to the students that…

I think this is a huge problem for America. It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press ha…

> Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.

This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#36

Post by catzaa » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:16 PM UTC

jnovek wrote: post #24

cynicalkane wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.

Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examinati…

Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities.

Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#37

Post by ganley » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:19 PM UTC

Many people have worked off far larger debts on far smaller salaries, many of them working far more difficult jobs than being a college professor. Not to mention those to whom these kinds of educational opportunities were never even a possibility. A little perspective is in order.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#38

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:28 PM UTC

cynicalkane wrote: post #9

jnovek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.

And yet persistent threads in entrepreneurial discussions on HN is 'find your passion, the follow it' and 'make something great, if you build it they will come'. I agree with these ideas, the whole point of a large open economy (and one that is compounded by the internet) is that there's a market for everything and if you're really good at what you do then you'll get by. The point of meritocracy is to reward excellence.

And, you know, this lady excels in the field of native american studies. That might seem frivolous and useless to other people, but suppose we pursue your thought to its logical conclusion and let that field die off because the economic benefits are not clearly quantifiable. Who will teach it if anyone wants to study it in the future? It's not like we can import people from Asian or Europe, is it? They don't mint scholars of our indigenous culture. I'm disturbed by your suggestion that the history and anthropology of a country's indigenous culture (even one that has been displaced) lacks any economic utility.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#39

Post by tptacek » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:30 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #27

patio11 wrote: post #2

Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.

How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one. I understand that you believ…

Her field of study is an unwise economic choice. That part of the comment you're replying to isn't an opinion.

Re: A successful academic faces lifelong debt

#40

Post by pwnstigator » Wed, Dec 09, 2009, 7:36 PM UTC

catzaa wrote: post #36

jnovek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do what you love? Then you must be very lucky. I know that I thank my lucky stars every day that what I love doing also happens to be fabulously lucrative. It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life. Rhetorical question of self-examinati…

Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities. Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.

Even the poorest American have boundless opportunities.

You know nothing about poverty.

Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.

Almost no one expects or even wants "equality of outcome", but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs. You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.