Arnold Kling writes:
My tip on becoming a successful academic is to be careful how you define success. Any tenured professor has a great life by most standards. However, the default sentiment in academia is bitter jealousy. The folks at lower-tier schools think they belong at top-20 schools, the folks at other top-20 schools think they belong at Harvard, and the folks at Harvard think that they deserve more recognition than the other folks at Harvard.Once you get on the ego treadmill, not only do you become bitter, but you have to start viewing others not for their intrinsic qualities but for their usefulness as stepping stones. If you can stay off of the ego treadmill, then success becomes more a matter of being near friends and living in an area with the type of amenities you prefer.
In my experience, this is true; relative to other professions, professors don't seem to be having much fun. Everyone in any job has their list of jerks who don't deserve the success they've had, jobs they wish they'd gotten, and amenities they wish their job had. But for many academics, those lists seem to be the bitter cornerstone of their professional lives. I've never seen a group of people--including investment bankers--more obsessed with status.
I could be suffering from sample bias, or my own blinkered prejudices, but I'm hardly the only one to point this out, so let's assume that I'm on to something. What's the explanation? I can think of several:
1) The money is so low relative to the professions they might have gone into. Journalists also suffer from this bitterness. Interestingly, the more lucrative their current options are, the less bitter the professors seem to be--economists and engineers seem relatively cheerful compared to English and History professors.
2) It's so easy to tell exactly where you rank in the academic hierarchy. Well, I don't find it easy, but they all seem to. Unless you're very near the top, your ranking is reinforced every time you attend any sort of professional event. If you are near the top, you promptly switch to wondering why you're paid less than an entry level investment banking analyst.
3) It's so hard to switch jobs. Job mobility is so low that you can't salve your ego by telling yourself that your current job is merely a waystop en route to something better.
4) Academics have few alternative status hierarchies Getting tenure is an all consuming process that leaves very little time for developing other hobbies. And the job virtually definitionally does not attract the kind of people who will be happy putting their career on a back burner to family or lifestyle.
5) Academics have virtually no control over where they live They usually seem to go where the best job is, regardless of whether or not the local area suits them. In many cases, this further focuses them inward on academia, because there aren't all that many other people around who share their interests.
Those are just my guesses; academics among my readers are encouraged to offer more.
Update One commenter makes an important point: it's all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.
Academics are also bitter because they must also occasionally engage in the pesky responsibility of teaching, a nuisance if there ever was one for those seeking to become a respected intellectual.
Interesting. The same analysis for 1-5 holds for military non-commissioned officers as well, locked in a similar stovepiped career field.
6) As a soon to be finished doctoral student who actually got a job (!) for the fall, a big problem I see with academia is perceptions by non-academics. People with PhD's are trained to be teachers. They're trained to research -- whether that research be population migrations in sub-Saharan Africa or Syriac poetry. The only way one has any possibility of ``moving up'' in the academy is to publish books or articles that few will read but those who do read them have a good amount of control over your future employment. This research is a job in itself, and it easily consumes 80 hours a week.
_Yet_ within the broader world (and among your students) you are known primarily as a teacher. You teach graduate and undergraduate courses, you grade essays or problem sets, you meet with students, you participate on committees. Many academics find this quite meaningful and another job unto itself, but it has little or nothing to do with promotions, ability to change jobs, etc.
PhD granting institutions should put a 5-10 year freeze on accepting new doctoral students in the humanities. Supply of PhD's _far_ exceeds demand for them. And this is another source of frustration. (Are we up to 7 now?)
sorry -- that's _not_ trained to teach. Students aren't pesky at all, but the way academia is set up professors who spend more time with students will necessarily have less time for research, and without research there is no chance of getting tenure.
I'm not sure how to put this nicely (as I'm an engineer) but could it also be that status is the only meaningful output of their jobs?
Of the types of professors described here, I think we all believe they aren't in it to be 'teachers', right? For those who love educating, I suspect that they are mainly focused on how well their students do and on improving their pedagogical skills. At least this has been my experience.
But let's say you are an English professor and not passionate about your teaching. What else do you accomplish? In many fields the articles and books are only read by others in your field, and their only value is to convince others that you are smart. I.e. status. Literally, there is nothing else that they produce except for status. So of course you are all-consumed by relative status, there is nothing else in your life.
It's no different than a Gorden Gekko type who values everything in life by its dollar amount, except that dollars are fungible with goods, and also respected by society at large. Status, in contrast, only matters within your small, insular, group.
Finally, in my years of engineering and business school I have not found the half-dozen or so professors that I knew well to be driven by status. Largely, I suspect, because their other outputs (teaching, research, business opportunities) provided plenty of rewards.
As an assistant professor ending his 2nd year at a liberal arts college, I'd say... you pretty much nailed it. The only thing you forgot is the number of administrative battles faculty have wage to get simple changes or even maintain the status quo.
Administration has no problem doing cost:benefit analysis on simple things: We can save the college money if all the faculty teach overloads! and we double the class sizes!
However, they rarely seem to consider the long term morale effects of their decisions: I wonder why we have a 70% new faculty attrition rate? Students recruited here on an average class size of 17 are actually complaining about their classes with 60 people in them?
It has great perks (as I type this with my 10 month old daughter on my lap), no doubt, but there are days I still wonder why I took a 35% pay cut to do it.
Lou- "In many fields the articles and books are only read by others in your field, and their only value is to convince others that you are smart. I.e. status. Literally, there is nothing else that they produce except for status"
Lou, the primary product that academics produce is research. That is what they are trained to do from the first day of graduate school. Saying that there is nothing else they do is like saying there is nothing else a doctor does but treat patients.
Professors care relatively little about their status outside the academy--their primary focus is their status IN the academy. And its not because they hate teaching or can't control where they live.
Academics care about status because status is directly correlated to how much attention your research receives. Thats probably 99% of it.
To begin with I think that, yes, your seething contempt for the academy and academics has definitely clouded your mind on this issue.
It's not really possible to "prove" that professors are happy. It's going by definition to be anecdotal evidence. But since that's all I got, here goes: I'm in a grad school program. I just finished undergrad 3 years ago. I grew up on a college campus. Most professors seem to be pretty happy, and the all recognize what an amazing setup they've got going. My own father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, by all accounts, were very happy professionally. There's also the fact that so many people are so desperate to enter into the profession; I don't think all of these people are getting these jobs and instantly becoming embittered. I also think you are discounting the truly large number of people for whom escaping status anxiety is a major draw of academia. Once you have tenure, you're out of the race, for many. Not everyone wants to be chair or dean or to end up working at Yale. Many want to quietly pursue their personal academic interests, and tenure allows them to do that.
Look academics for some reason have a very poor public image in this country. But I've also observed a quietly seething resentment from you specifically. I can't imagine, for example, you doing a similar takedown of many other professions, and certainly not one of the professions that has elevated the worship of money above all other facets of human life. I imagine your disrespect towards them comes from the bitterness I find ultra-capitalists have towards any people who at least profess to be interested in more than the accumulation of capital.
Don't you dare call me bitter, you latte-sipping elitist!
Tenured engineering profs are cheerful because they can leave for industry if they feel like it. I would extend scott's comment re a new PhD moratorium to sciences and engineering, too. I wouldn't advocate a total freeze (profs don't even know how to use their own equipment, so no research would get done), but there is an oversupply of young PhDs. And the celebrated "Gathering Storm" report says we need to crank out even more. Hurrah for driving down the value of education!
Maybe it's because so few can appreciate the academic sense of humor.
Matt B-
The oversupply of Ph.D's does not drive down the education level because there is a relatively static amount of jobs available. The competition is just more fierce.
I have a PhD in engineering, but abandoned my plan to become an academic about 2/3 of the way through my program when I saw some of what you describe coming -- I realized that I would not be happy as a professor.
To echo Lou, I agree that the relative cheerfulness of engineering professors is not necessarily due to the high pay. I think it has everything to do with the tangibility of accomplishments. Even if you're "underappreciated," you can still usually point to some thing or process you've built, discovered, made happen, proved, patented, etc. If not, one of your students has.
To test my theory, you might compare the happiness of engineering professors from each end of the theoretical/applied spectrum.
First of all, Lou, to say that most professors are disinterested in teaching is just not true. Most professors love to teach and interact with students. They just don't want to have to teach more than 2 units a semester, and they'd prefer to teach advanced classes. But this evidence-free assertion that professors don't want to teach is baloney.
This is going to come as a shock to some of you, but most academics actually are interested in the accumulation of knowledge and the mission of the academy. We're just twisted enough to love to learn new things, to want to research, to explore our particular areas of interest down whatever rabbit holes they may lead. Grad schools have always been filled with people who have never fit in anywhere until they got there; it's a minority devotion. Now, I don't expect you all to value you it like we do. You don't have to. But a bunch of people sitting around sneering at people who have chosen a different lifestyle then them seems pretty lame to me. If you don't like the academy, don't enter it; but don't tell me that there's no one who does.
Also-- it's not like it's exactly a slave labor situation. You can expect to make more than the median income as a tenured professor, and some small numbers make significantly more. I can't imagine an occupation with more yearly vacation, and you have the opportunity to take sabbaticals, which is pretty amazing. Benefits tend to be fantastic, especially the kind of financial aid that's available to the children of professors when they go to college. The union is powerful, the work atmosphere tends to be laid back, and believe it or not you do get to me many bright, committed people, whether colleagues or students. Like I said, I'm not out to sell the job to any of you. You can go back to running on the endless hamster wheel of having a larger flat-screen than Dave from accounting. But some people love it, and not without reason.
I'm perfectly happy to teach three courses a term, every term, and enjoy lower-level classes. I've been at my school 4 years in a visiting (i.e., non-tenure-track) position. My department needs another year to fill in for a sabbatical , and has told me I'm their top choice...but the administration says I'm ineligible, because I've been here too long in a visiting role. This only months after the same administration vetoed a new tenure line.
That's why I'm bitter. I can't teach HS, because I only have a PhD and 7 years full-time experience, instead of coursework in Adderall dosages and bulletin board construction. I can't teach at my current school, because of stupid quasi-union rules (my school is not a union shop, but has enough members that they sort of implement the rules).
So how are you?
Academic vagabondage is overrated. You could simply forgo the fancy status-conferring title and stop squandering future income by abandoning the PhD in English, Linguistics, or Art History. Consider joining the Navy or the Peace Corps first if you really want to get out and see the world. Yes, that's what I shoulda done... *oops!*
"Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind! "
Sorry, Barton Fink flashback ... I still get 'em sometimes when I haven't been getting enough sleep.
The oversupply of Ph.D's does not drive down the education level because there is a relatively static amount of jobs available. The competition is just more fierce.
And when competition is more fierce, wages go down, no? Reduced earnings after years of investment are what I mean by "driving down the value of education."
I'm reminded of a classic comment that I heard for the first time just about 30 years ago, when working for a university-funded research institute:
Do you know why the politics in academia are so vicious?
Because the stakes are so small. ..bruce..
Freddie - I misused a pronoun. By these, I meant only the bitter, status-obsessed, professors that were the subject of the post. I was trying to differentiate them from those who really enjoy teaching, as I think those professors (as I assume there are many of at small liberal arts schools) are generally happier. But I have no idea of the ratio between the two types, except to say that there are obviously many of both.
However, to the rest of your points, I don't think most of the posters are sneering at those in the academy, as much as trying to figure out why they seem to have so little job satisfaction. Your final paragraph is all about how wonderful a job it is to be a tenured professor, yet the thesis of the original post is that many of them are bitter and status-obsessed anyway. Do you disagree? Because with 12 years of higher education, and with professors for a Mom, a Brother, and a Sister-in-law, there is more than a grain of truth in this characterization.
Also, to rickm. You said that the output of an academic is research. But a significant amount of academic research exists in an echo chamber populated only by others in your narrow field. In fact, much of it can only be described to others in your field. Everyone understands what a doctor accomplishes when they save a patient, or what an engineer does when they design a tool, but for an academic only a small group of people even understand what you do, let alone how well you do it. So you become hyper-sensitized to the approval of that group. I.e. status obsessed.
To take it one step further. To become a tenured professor you have to be bright and driven. Yet you are now in a field that is small, and where relative success is fairly easily measured (see original post). Therefore many, if not most, in the field will be below their expected level of success, and they will feel that their esteem needs (from Maslow) are insufficiently met. Per Maslow this will lead to interference in self-actualization, e.g. personal growth and a sense of accomplishment. This would certainly explain the bitterness and the political maneuvering. Obviously this does not describe all professors, but it seems to describe more than it should given how nice a job it seems like it should be. [Warning: Business school psychology - please take no life altering action without first having a discussion with a trained professional.]
I can't say I've ever been in academia, but it sounds very similar to centralized corporate functions. Many people are obsessed with status and often dissatisfied because there's no market mechanism by which they can measure their contribution to the world.
This is why customer-facing roles or manufacturing roles are often more personally satisfying. It's very affirming to be able to point to your accomplishments and say "I built this!" or "I sold $$ Million!" But when you're stuck at corporate headquarters somewhere developing processes or implementing internal controls... it's much more difficult to see tangible impact from your efforts.
I would imagine the same is true for publishing papers in esoteric journals.
Uh, I thought I already did disagree, Lou. I don't think many of them are. Some of them are, sure. That makes them no different than investment bankers or policemen or ministers.
bearing has a definite point. My experience with engineering faculty points to many of them being very happy with the job due to the tangible aspect of their successes.
On the other hand it seems that academics don't make up one group due to tenure. Does any other field have such a sharp distinction between the haves and the have nots? Before one gets tenure its a huge rush to produce research to get tenure. At that point teaching and administrative duties are seen as a huge imposition. After tenure it seems like you should be able to focus on what you like whether it is teaching, research, making the college better, or even (and I've known profs with this mindset) just relishing in the fact that you have won the plum job and can effectively coast from here on out. The two portions of the career appeal to two different personalities. On the other hand if you are driven by status you are going to have to keep pushing out research since otherwise you will fall below the non-tenured people who are gunning for tenure.
BTW, JDav, you need to explore private schools and magnet high schools (particularly if you are in science or math). They are often very interested in subject area specialists even without the normal education credentials. Due to the current educational climate you might have to obtain "credentials" after being hired but its not difficult.
Except, S, that many academics take pride in publishing in journals.
One possible reason for the relative lack of bitterness in engineering or economics is that engineering professors don't have to worry that they're studying a load of organic fertilizer.
The degree to which people who have no personal experience in the subject feel they are qualified to make blanket assertions on this blog is astounding.
Freddie's right. I feel everyone that believes academics are bitter status obsessed grumps are really just projecting. Sure, you may not like being underpaid and having to slave until tenure rolls around, or spending most of your time reading and writing, but for the people in the profession, and those aspiring to be in the profession, the life of reading, writing, and talking about the subjects you love IS happiness. And academics take immense amounts of pride in writing for a small number of people--this comment will likely be read by more people than anything I've ever written or will write academically, and thats fine by me.
Freddie, my father was a political science professor; two out of three of his sisters are professors; and I have multiple cousins with PhDs en route to, or in, professorships. I also spend a fair amount of time around academics in the course of my job. Some of my best friends are PhDs. I may be in error, but I don't have a secret resentment towards the academy, nor a lack of experience with same.
I don't claim to have too much personal knowledge. However, I'm pretty sure every person who has commented either went to college or has a friend/family meber who is an assistant professor, professor, administrator at a university. I'm not claiming an expertise, but you could just as easily argue that the people with personal experience are overly defensive about what they perceive as attacks on their chosen profession.
But you must have known that your commenters, being who they are, would take this opportunity to academy-bash, right? And so they have.
Bobar, I think that the burden of proof rests on those who are asserting that the academy is full of incredibly embittered and angry professors who, despite what they will tell you, are secretly consumed with rage. And simply saying it as though it were self-evident is not sufficient. But sadly that sort of thing happens all the time in this blog's comments. Also, the abundantly clear disrespect these people have for the academy seems to me to counterbalance my defensiveness. (And yes, I am defensive. Why not just say "working as a professor is not right for me"? Why are all these people so animated to attack other people's passions? Fuck off.)
McArdle: "Some of my best friends are PhDs."
I think it's ironic that, defending yourself against an accusation of anti-academic bias you fall utter the classic rebuttal offered by those accused of racism or other biases. It may work as a defense against ignorance, but not as a defense against bias.
As to your actual claims: There is some truth to them, but they are also massive over-generalizations, in my opinion. There are vast differences among disciplines, sub-disciplines, and institutions.
The academy is a putatively non-market institution inserted into an ever more market-driven environment. I think most academics feel the squeeze, the demand to justify their existence in a world that looks on them as "unproductive" and odd. In my experience, most of us love what we do--in the sense that we love our area of research and/or our teaching. If we seem less happy than the engineers and economists you know, it may be because our treasure lies in rather esoteric things, which can be hard to share with those outside the academy.
As someone who abandoned my quest for an academic position but left with the Ph.D, it seems that much of the bitterness is spawned by the all-encompassing zero-sum mentality that fuels the tenure quest of junior academics. I'm not sure there is another profession that has to confront, process, and overcome rejection and snarky, petty criticism (this is not to say this is the norm, but it is certainly common) from colleagues on such a regular basis. Acceptance rates for top-tier journals in the discipline are dismal, and for every article that is published by a colleague, that is one less cookie for padding your CV for your tenure review. Such conditions, combined with the massive egos of so many in the academy, is a perfect storm for an embittered professoriate.
Having left graduate school in the past two years for industry, I gotta say, professors have a pretty sweet gig -- tenure, academic freedom, good hours, etc. Freddie, that's probably why folks feel the need to bash -- they're jealous.
At the same time, science professors have an incredibly hard road. In my field, at least, professors are clearly the best graduate students and the best post-docs. It doesn't grant them the most social skills or the hottest spouses, but good night are they smart. And the hours! It's worth noting that for science types, pre-tenure hours are better compared to associates in a law firm. 80 hour weeks are quite common.
"The research is a job in itself and it easily consumes 80 hours a week."
No, Scott, it doesn't. In a competitive field, you win the award for overstatement. If academicians spent a minimum, as you suggest, of 80 hours per week on research alone -- leaving aside lecturing, grading papers, administrative meetings, and applying for grants (to say nothing of dining, commmuting, reading blogs, or diddling their undergrads or writing indignant letters to the editor) -- then they would probably be the hardest working professionals in the world. They are not. I'm sure you have an admirable work rate, and there are crunch periods where any academician burns the midnight oil, but the notion that they put in 80-90 hour workweeks on anything like a regular basis is ludicrous hyperbole.
I've been a litigator at a big law firm for almost 10 years, and I've only had to put in a handful of 80 hour workweeks in my career. One reason -- and this would apply to academics as much as to lawyers -- is fatigue, which impedes higher-order cognitive performance. If I had to put in 80-90 hours a week, week-in, week-out, I would be dead or disbarred for having committed malpractice. The degree of your exaggeration suggests a certain hypersensitivity about "work", which I think underscores an issue nobody has yet touched on: Academia does not draw a representative cross-section of personality types. It tends to draw from a pool of relatively inward types who've spent more time in the library than on the playing field or in the bars. Exceptions abound, of course, but point remains that academics are not characteristically a well-adjusted lot to begin with.
When I was teaching at University I remember a group of us chuckling at the observation that in academia the politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low. I think this captures most of it. So much of academic life is status driven and there is very little of real cooperative teamwork. Its not like you can go out and design the next great widget or clinch the next big deal or anything.
Of course the wise ones take their pleasure in teaching and research but most people aren't wise and academia provides an environment that is going to breed dissatisfaction.
Freddie,
Not to go all Eugene Volokh on you, but beginning a post, "your seething contempt for the academy and academics has definitely clouded your mind on this issue" is probably not the best way to convince someone that they are wrong and you are right.
A law professor was reputed to say, "I teach for free. They pay me to grade."
"The degree to which people who have no personal experience in the subject feel they are qualified to make blanket assertions on this blog is astounding."
"Like I said, I'm not out to sell the job to any of you. You can go back to running on the endless hamster wheel of having a larger flat-screen than Dave from accounting."
"I imagine your disrespect towards them comes from the bitterness I find ultra-capitalists have towards any people who at least profess to be interested in more than the accumulation of capital."
"The degree to which people who have no personal experience in the subject feel they are qualified to make blanket assertions on this blog is astounding."
Perhaps a little outside perspective is useful, if one is willing to listen.
Most professors were extremely good students and so in their youth developed high expectations about what they would achieve in life. As most professors fail to achieve much money, power or fame they feel disappointed with their careers.
Perhaps it's merely a mangled memory of my addled mind, but I recall some years ago hearing of a job-satisfaction survey that found (tenured?) professors reporting the highest job satisfaction rates.
Another thing: What's with the complaints of being picked on or maligned for being an academic? Should academics feel entitled to instant reverence? Is that the reason for acquiring a Ph.D.? What gives?
The whole academe thing wasn't for me after I wandered into the swamp of linguistics in graduate school. In part it was the field that I couldn't stand. Too much of what passed for research there seemed to be based on poorly formulated and unfalsifiable statements eagerly bludgeoned into a pulp of tangled syntax. Many of these unfalsifiable arguments were then justified afterwards by the claim that, well, you know, in the natural sciences they don't need falsifiable statements either -- they use unrealistic models, too! Great: an entire field of modern academic research based on "vicarious existentialism": "They think, therefore I am."
It wasn't my kind of thing. To each his own, though...
The degree to which people who have no personal experience in the subject feel they are qualified to make blanket assertions on this blog is astounding.
Oh, hell, just try to talk about the law with the non-lawyers here. I dare you.
That said, I thought I was headed for a professorial gig but I bailed on my PhD when I realized that what I loved about my undergrad physics program was the people I was doing it with, not the work I was doing. Also, I'm not enough of a genius to hack it.
I'm an academic, and I'm not bitter!
Before graduate school, I drove a cab / worked in a factory / did childcare work ( in support of addictions to skiing & rock climbing ). Scientific research is a ~much~ more pleasant way to make a living.
PhD granting institutions should put a 5-10 year freeze on accepting new doctoral students in the humanities. Supply of PhD's _far_ exceeds demand for them.
Instead of freezing new hires, doesn't it make a lot more sense to lay off the 'dead weight'?
Of course, Megan could use teh google and do some quick research to find out how satisfied academics are with their jobs.
Volokh shows us that, "67% of graduates working in academia said that they were "very satisfied" with their jobs, compared to 51% of those working in "public service," 30% of those employed by businesses, and 30% of those working for private law firms."
http://volokh.com/posts/1199044995.shtml
From the chronicle of higher education: "A new national survey by TIAA-CREF found that 53 percent of faculty members are “very satisfied” with their jobs and another 43 percent are “somewhat satisfied.” Only 2 percent were “not at all satisfied.” By comparison, a recent national survey of Americans in all fields found that only 42 percent reported being “very satisfied,” with another 38 percent “somewhat satisfied.”"
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/01/faculty
So, for all of you who asserted that academics are generally bitter people who don't like their jobs, maybe you should have paid a little more attention in college and developed some research skills.
As a non-academic I'm only qualified to name myself as anecdotal evidence of self-selection as a potential reason for such job satisfaction. Those of us who found our chosen field of academe mind-numbingly mind numbing simply left. There's always one less trouble-making malcontent to congest the highway to academic heaven.
Volokh shows us that, "67% of graduates working in academia said that they were "very satisfied" with their jobs, compared to 51% of those working in "public service," 30% of those employed by businesses, and 30% of those working for private law firms."
Yep.
So why is it so commonly believed that academics are bitter and dissatisfied?
So being forced to "go where the best job is" is considered a negative, right? Leads to bitter, inward-focused and insular people who exist as islands, "because there aren't all that many other people around who share their interests" in the places to which they are forced to move.
Why would this be any different for a steelworker? And yet "libertarian" economic theories and arguments continuously extol the virtues of the "mobile workforce" and "labor mobility."
Do you disagree with the desirability of a "mobile workforce?"
So why is it so commonly believed that academics are bitter and dissatisfied?
Well, you could start with the considerable spleen our resident academics exhibit in this comment section.
So why is it so commonly believed that academics are bitter and dissatisfied?
Because most people have known some bitter, dissatisfied academics? I've already said that the engineering faculty that I know seem at least as satisfied as my aquaintences outside of university settings.
However I also know a number of people stuck in a seemingly permanent rut of non-tenure positions. These people span a wide range of fields (education, physics, English, math). I'm not sure that they are any less satisfied with their work then the average person on the street but they are noticably less satisfied then tenured faculty (or young faculty still on a tenure track with good prospects). This isn't suprising - they had hopes of a job they really wanted only to see themselves fall short. But if you don't mentally look at this as two seperate groups its very easy miss the satisfied ones in the louder grumbles of the dissatisfied.
So are dissatisfied academics more likely to grumble (or grumble in a way that is more widely heard)? Perhaps since, at lesat anecdotally, many of these will be liberal arts majors who go on to spreading their discontent through books, blogs, and other things one does as a non-academically employed English major.
Update One commenter makes an important point: it's all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.
This is completely wrong.
Just as improvements in the automobile industry made the market for automobiles bigger, successful academics make academia a more in-demand business. There are more universities than there used to be. There are more academic journals than there used to be. It is no more "zero sum" than any other profession.
While another's success generally diminishes your chances (like any field), it is certainly far from zero sum. There are even instances where that doesn't hold - where a significant success can have the effect of broadening interest in a field. I remember years back, when big advances were made in high-temperature superconductors, that increased demand for more work to be done on them, not less.
I'm a scientist. Everyone bitches about their jobs, and when academics bitch, they echo many of the points Megan brings up. However, the number of bitter, jealous people in my field (astronomy) is quite small. Let's see: I get to set my own hours, I choose my own work, I travel all over the world, and I get paid to do what I love. Trust me, most of us know what a good gig we have.
I don't interact much with humanities types, where things may be less rosy for all I know. Science has pretty good funding (of course, we always want more), consequently a number of good jobs even outside the tenure track, lots of fall-back options outside of academia, and tangible, compelling research products. (Not many people are going to get around to reading my latest ground-breaking work on the masses of black holes in X-ray binary systems, but they sure are excited to hear about it.) We're generally high on the job satisfaction meter in my neck of the woods.
Ludwig is right: 80hr/week for research is off. (I attribute mistyping to staying up late to work.) My basic point about a divided existence between teaching and research and having only the research count still stands. I would say, though, that with teaching and research and university ``service'' a non-tenured professor can easily work upwards of 80 hours a week.
Update One commenter makes an important point: it's all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.
This is completely wrong.
Njorl is conflating quanity with reputability. In general, and I urge you to wade through, if you have the time or stomach for it, discpline-specific academic blogs for evidence of this. The duality in these forums undercuts your assertion that the proliferation of other/alternative academic outlets resolves the fixed-supply conundrum. They/I both lament the dismal acceptance rates at top-tier journals while also throttling suggestsions of establishing new outlets or, even, increasing publication frequency. The logic is simple: prestige is inversely related to ease of publication. Academic disciplines have established prestige benchmarks-both implicit and explicit--that allow both tenure review committees and hiring committees to gauge the quality of the work produced. This reduces information costs. Simply sending your work to alternative outlets will not circumvent this ordering, nor should it. In general, the supply of established, prestigous journals is relatively fixed.
I also know a number of people stuck in a seemingly permanent rut of non-tenure positions. These people span a wide range of fields (education, physics, English, math).
It's true that some people get hyper-specialized training, and then find that the labor market they hoped to enter has either vanished or is already filled. But this happens to lots of people outside of academia too, albeit that our training period is much longer.
I am now a tenured full professor in a completely different field from the one I trained in. I think this is going to be increasingly common. Graduate students need to think about skills that give them entree to interdisciplinary teams (certain kinds of applied math and statistics are the obvious examples).
Arnold Kling nails it, at least for high-powered faculty in the sciences. A faculty member in the humanities at a small liberal arts school may well be happy as a clam.
Let me add a few more random observations re academia.
Departmental politics can be brutal, and because of tenure, those who do the least productive work have the most time to engage in them. In industry those people tend to get fired.
In the sciences further concerns focus on 1) getting grant money, 2) getting lab space, which is always at a premium, 3) getting grant money, 4) getting grad students and postdocs, to help perform the research, and 5) getting grant money. Did I mention getting grant money? Science faculty are always running on the treadmill. Teaching wasn’t a problem (I enjoyed it), administration can be a pain, depending on how clued in (or out) the university is.
To another poster’s point that academia must be attractive because so many try to get into it, I think that that is in large measure a matter of inertia and intellectual props. Inertia, because it’s easier to carry on through the academic system (undergrad, grad, postdoc, faculty member) than to break completely and enter the cold cruel (and unknown) world.
Moreover, few faculty members have any experience whatever outside the academy, and tend to groom their best students for academia. Being seen as suited for academia therefore becomes a goal to achieve validation, with the also-rans leaving academia for industry. Call it the Studio 51 effect. Just the question “are you good enough to get in?” is enough to spur many to try.
The status obsession comes because it’s the only way to keep score. In the real world, as a lawyer friend once said to me, all that counts is money. In academia, it’s who is invited to sit at the head table at the conference banquet, which spurs an atmosphere like that of high school.
Furthermore, many who go into academia have their own self-esteem issues to begin with. They commonly think “once I get into grad school/get my Ph.D./get a good postdoc/get a good faculty position/get tenure/get in the NAS/get the Nobel Prize…,” never realizing that they’re scratching where it doesn’t itch. The problem is inside them, not outside.
The lack of mobility is a real problem. Because of it, once a faculty member is esconced in a university, many universities seem to feel minimal motivation to keep him happy unless he’s a real star. Where’s he going to go? It’s difficult to move (rather like placekickers moving from one NFL team to another – few jobs, little turnover), and moving itself is such a pain (grad students always overlap, so some are always just beginning, some are in mid-career, some finishing, making a move a logistical nightmare). So faculty are illiquid assets, and discounted accordingly.
For this reason, many universities treat their tenured faculty relatively poorly. My friends who are still in academia consequently squawk about salary compression, whereby the salary for new junior hires increases each year (to remain competitive), whereas the pay for experienced tenured faculty does not.
On top of all this is the collectivist attitude of many departments. In such departments, no decision can be taken unless unanimity is achieved, and consequently nothing ever happens, since it’s hard to get an entire department to agree on what day of the week it is. Picture the UN. It’s extremely frustrating.
For all these reasons and more I really feel sympathy for my friends still in academia.
(Per Ludwig: as an assistant professor I spent five years working seven days a week from 9 am to midnight, when I caught the last bus home, ate dinner, and went to bed. And, yes, I was exhausted, but lab work often doesn’t require higher cognitive powers. Once an experiment is designed, oftentimes it’s just a matter of making the hands move. The funny part was I did it for years after getting tenure too, because by then it was a matter of habit. I had no idea what to do with myself if I weren't working.)
"Njorl is conflating quanity with reputability."
No, I'm not. I am merely not stuck with a snapshot of the present as my only worldview.
There are more reputable colleges and more reputable journals than ever before. I'll go a step further and state that there are even more "the best" institutions than ever before. The significant demand for academic research has caused the burgeoning speciallization mentioned above. There are vastly more ways to be "the best" than there ever were before. These opportunities are caused by previous successful academics. Men like Einstein create more space than they take up. The sum is not zero.
And there you have it: I say scientists are happy and Occam's Beard says they are miserable. It takes all the fun out of generalizing.
Astra, all generalizations are ...well, you know... /g.
Seriously, though, the happiness of faculty members depends on any number of variables: which field they're in, which tier of university, the specific personalities in their department, their personal expectations and personalities, to name some.
A low-key professor of English with elbow patches at a sleepy liberal arts school with a chummy department might be perfectly happy. He's going nowhere, and doesn't expect (or want) to, and he's fine with that.
That's a very far cry from the departments in subjects and universities where various faculty members are on edge every October (whether they actually have reason to be on edge or not).
It was gorgeous on campus today. I TA'd a class of about 20. As usual, about 5 were totally disinterested, 10 worked as hard as they felt they needed to, and 5 were truly engaged and interested. And working with them, particularly those 5, was wonderful, as usual. Afterwards I graded paper for an hour outside, where undergrads were throwing frisbees, jogging and just hanging out. I watched tour groups go by and chuckled at all the wide-eyed prefrosh. Later I had class of my own, Rhetoric and Comp Theory, were I was able to engage a professor who truly loved what we were talking about, with some classmates who also love it. I ended a day with a trip to one of the food courts on campus with some friends from Psych. We took the food outside and played with someone's dog.
I love it, my professors love it, my fellow grad students love it, the undergrads most certainly love it, most everyone I know on campus loves it, and I don't care what you guys think.
Also: rickm found the data. So enough.
As a former Assistant Professor at a top business school who left for a Wall Street research job 21 years ago, I think (1) and (2) explain a great deal. On Wall Street, even those (including myself) who do not reach high level management make so much money that it asssuages feelings of envy of those who out-rank us. Even if you are not at the most prestigious firm or do not have the highest rank within your department, others in your firm respect you for your knowledge and experience, and people outside the industry (including your family) are impressed by your standard of living. The fact is that this society on the whole respects wealth, and professors do not for the most part rank high enough in wealth and income to impress those outside academe. For many professors, that makes their status within the academy ultra-important to their own self-esteem.
Freddie, face it, you're functionally unemployed. Wander over to the physics or the chemistry department (you probably won't find those guys out throwing frisbees). Some chemistry groups are notorious for the number of suicides they've had; a kid commited suicide in the lab next to mine (not my group), as did one of my former colleagues, and another attempted it.
Check out Derek Lowe's blog
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/graduate_school/
for some perspective on this.
Those studying rhetoric and comp theory (!) feel no pressure because, to be blunt, the next career move is the drive-up window, pretty regardless of what they do now, so they might as well enjoy themselves.
Based on my experience (I have a PhD in astronomy and did a two-year postdoc after finishing grad school before leaving for the "real" world, which in my case is IT at a hospital), academia tends to attract a very specific type of person. In order to be successful, at least in the sciences, you have to be willing to work long hours and tackle genuinely difficult research projects. If you don't enjoy doing that, then you will likely leave.
That said, the lifestyle of academia is fabulous. I think just the implicit respect granted to faculty (and postdocs, and in some cases, grad students) in terms of setting your own hours and doing projects on your own, is very difficult to leave behind. I think some of the unhappy academics are those who don't want to turn their back on this lifestyle but also want the more tangible benefits that non-academic jobs provide.
Freddie: You're usually quite rational. This is really, really close to your heart.
Occam: How many chemists read this blog, anyway?
Yancey, care to field this one? /g
I know, I know. Lowe also reads this blog, too.
Besides which, don't chemistry professors count as professors now?
Dunno, Occam. When was the last time you saw a chemistry professor running a reaction in their hood? (snerk)
About the last time I saw an economist balance his checkbook.
Yes, but economists use checkbooks, Occam! Chemistry professors own hoods, but they don't use them.
Hey! That's another feudalism/academic chemistry comparison! Lord = professor, tenant farmer = graduate student!
Close.
Lord = professor, but graduate student = peasant.
Update One commenter makes an important point: it's all terribly zero sum. Any article a colleague gets into a good journal is one less slot for your articles; any good tenure-track job secured by a friend is one less job you an apply to. All industries involve competition for market share, of course, but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers.
This is completely wrong.
Just as improvements in the automobile industry made the market for automobiles bigger, successful academics make academia a more in-demand business. There are more universities than there used to be. There are more academic journals than there used to be. It is no more "zero sum" than any other profession.
While another's success generally diminishes your chances (like any field), it is certainly far from zero sum. There are even instances where that doesn't hold - where a significant success can have the effect of broadening interest in a field. I remember years back, when big advances were made in high-temperature superconductors, that increased demand for more work to be done on them, not less.
Posted by Njorl | April 22, 2008 1:26 PM
X2 no kidding, good of you to point that out Njorl
"but few have such a fixed supply of both jobs and customers." nice case of Polaroidism, MM.
I don't understand the reaction of some people here:
If someone wants to challenge Volokh's numbers, or to present additional data, fine. But merely asserting something over and over in the face of contrary evidence? Like:
Which replaces one questionable assumption (heck, I'll say it, a falsified assumption) with another. Who are these academics, and what sort of venting is the poster referring to?
Myself - yes, job satisfaction seems quite high where I'm working. There are some bitter types, true, but these are also the people wasting time being bitter and dropping by your office talkig about politics and not spending any time doing any productive research. The guys working, they seem to be okay with the situation.
I think someone up above nailed it:
I think this also speaks to supposed lack of 'conservative' representation in academia. If you have the right mindset, it's great, if you don't, it's not, and you'd best get out while you can.
This isn't just a math/science thing, btw; back in the day, I knew plenty of Art Dudes who liked the life of the bohemian artist - the iconic rebel status, the adoring chicks, the transgressive drugs, the freedom from taking boring classes. The trouble is, to be an actual Art Dude, you've got to produce some art occasionally, and this was something they were tempramentally incapable of doing (Check out Sedairus's "Barrel Fever" sometime for the performance artist schtick.) It was the quiet types off in the corner who actually did up over one hundred canvases in a year who were the real deal.
Rubbish.
Who are these academics, and what sort of venting is the poster referring to?
1)You and rickm, and your many, many posts.
But it was a snarky joke, so if you ask for links, I'll ignore you.
Right. Because everyone knows that conservatives only offer conclusions after much research, and then those conclusions are most often conditional. You can see it in the exhaustive and detailed cites they give . . . why, all the time I'm congratulating this or that conservative for the care with which they present an argument.
Nope, whatever else you can say about conservatives, their theories are _not_ ideologically driven, they refer constantly to the scientific method. They'd never, say, stake out the position that blacks are not as intelligent as whites, because they know that concepts like race and intelligence are ill-defined, rendering the question meaningless.
Do you want it Piled Higher and Deeper, Occam[1]?
It seems that _by_definition_ conclusions reached by ideology and conclusions reached by actually collecting data, formulating hypotheses and testing them are methods that are diametrically opposed to one another.
[1]Weren't you the chemist who didn't know any math?
Given your touchiness about respect, and your vitriolic and incredulous reaction to the accomplishments of others, I'd pegged you a faculty wannabe: namely, a loser hanging on a department, such as an adjunct professor/instructor/lecturer/grad student emeritus, scouring the chairman's face for approval, and some nourishment for hope that you'll actually get a proper faculty position, hoping against hope.
Would I be wrong in thinking that?
Tell me the truth.
Or have I divined it already?
If I recall correctly, the left-wingers predominate in the arts and humanities fields by far -- particularly infamous are the fields of women's studies and African-American studies -- in comparison to their relative representation in schools of business, law, and natural sciences faculties. In the case of the relative outlier fields women's and African-American studies, it sort of makes sense since the Democratic party bases chunks of its ideological orthodoxy on identity group membership.
Ph.D. in theoretical physics here. Did a post-doc, then started on the ping-pong journey that has been the rest of my life.
Got out because it was absolutely impossible to have a balanced life. Grew up in academia, remember when the competition wasn't quite so fierce. But by the time I entered the field it was like picking over old mine diggings to find something new.
Other fact: if you're in research, 85% of the time you'll be running up blind alleys. Very hard for a lot of people to deal with.
And finally, the US has become more and more unappreciative of intellectuals and the life of the mind. Which is why the Chinese and Europeans will be eating our lunch a few years from now because their culture appreciates education and hard work. Oh well...
And of course, you've got cites for all that, eh? Shouldn't be hard to do, just use the search function in the upper right on this page. Or is this the usual 'how dare you fight back when I attack you' that seems to be endemic among your kind? Whatever, let's see what you've got.
It seems that what you've got is the usual thundering case of projection.
I'd pegged you a faculty wannabe: namely, a loser hanging on a department, such as an adjunct professor/instructor/lecturer/grad student emeritus, scouring the chairman's face for approval, and some nourishment for hope that you'll actually get a proper faculty position, hoping against hope.
Would I be wrong in thinking that?
Tell me the truth.
Or have I divined it already?
Posted by Occam's Beard
Chuckle. You'd be very, very wrong. Just like you were very, very wrong in your last posting. In fact, I'm an instructor/grad student; I've taught for a number of years, everything from order of operations to unique factorization domains, and then decided to go back for my PhD. And my prospects so far are _excellent_ thank you very much.
But do go on some more about how conservatives with ideologically-based conclusions do such a bang-up job in research, that in fact, they're temperamentally suited for it.
Instructor/grad student. Thought so.
The defensiveness and touchiness about status/respect were diagnostic.
Your career prospects involve Burger King. Since you're in the math/physics community, look hard at progamming.
If you've taught for a number of years already, which I'm prepared to believe, you're already past your sell-by date. If you haven't received your first tenure-track faculty position by age 30, you're done. Toast. Dog meat. Your department is tooling you by getting you to teach courses and - implicitly, I'll wager - holding the hope of a real faculty position.
It won't be forthcoming. Trust me. Move on, while you've got time.
I suspect that the "bitterness" of faculty is probably selection bias, especially given the cite at Volokh about job satisfaction.
I'm going to draw on some conversations I've had with fellow Soldiers. This is, of course, anecdotal and I don't know if even the anecdotes apply to the very different world of academia. However, since the main post is just postulating anyway...
I fairly frequent comment from people who have been in a while is "My first tour, I was sure that I'd do my three years and get out. Then it came time to reenlist, and I thought I'd do just one more tour. Now, 25 years later, I'm thinking of retiring." You see people who complain constantly reenlist, even though they have never apparently put effort into finding a job outside.
It might be that academics complain constantly about their jobs and work environment, but when they actually take stock when asked directly if they are satisfied, they realize that they really are, despite the day-to-day grievances. Meanwhile, everybody hears the day-to-day complaining, and assumes that that is the actual measure of job satisfaction.
I know that some people who listen to me bitch might think that I don't like the Army--it can be extremely frustrating--but thinking back a the end of the day, I really like my job. Could there be a similar phenomenon in universities?
Chuckle. You really have no compunction about lying, do you, even though you know you'll be caught out. In fact, you said:
If your going to lie, please make your lies entertaining. In fact, I taught at another college before my present position, so I was offered an instructor-ship rather than the straight TA position that most grad students are offered(and more money as well: teaching experience) Steps up all the way around.
But now let's look at some diagnostic ignorance here:
I used to be in programming up until the dot-com crash, fool. I went into teaching _afterwards_.
More ignorance. I was well past thirty when the company I worked for went under. I was over forty when I started teaching full time at a private school.
DINGDINGDING! We have a new winner for shear ignirntz folks. As well as a good idea of just what sort of 'chemist' you really are. I'll clue you in: it is usually considered very(very!) bad form to hire on your own Ph.D's as any sort of faculty. No, the usual route is to do a post-doc somewhere else for two to three years, and _then_ start looking for a job as a professor of some sort. And not where you got your graduate degree (though it's not uncommon to end up back where you got your undergraduate degree.) So, no, no one is 'dangling' anything in front of me, nor offering me a faculty position. Nor, to be quite frank, do I wish to live this far south for the rest of my life.
Now, since you didn't know this, and since you apparently don't know any math to speak of, I'm guessing that you don't have a Ph.D(possibly not even an M.S.), and that when you say 'chemist' you mean 'technician'. Pretty obvious that you're rather jealous of the whole academic setup. Also pretty obvious that you're really a rather dull, rather dim-witted, rather reflexive conservative (hence the term knee-jerk.)
Of course, being characterized as such doesn't bother you, I'm sure; quite apart from the accuracy, to take offense at my rather pedestrian remarks would be touchy, right? As well as showing an unseemly concern with the respect you feel you are owed.
Now to bring this back full circle, you also don't do research, in fact, you seem to actively scoff at it. So it's not surprising that you as a conservative wouldn't do very well in a real academic position. That takes real work. Not that it's not enjoyable work, if that's what you've the mind for.
Given the comments from the Usual Suspects here, given the data about job satisfaction that no one is disputing (and is certainly in accord with almost all of our anecdotal experiences), and given that most people complain about their jobs - in fact - more so on average than academics, I'm going to go with the idea that academics being 'bitter' is just more of the same old same old lame conservative psyop: "See, look at those loser liberals; they've got it better than most working stiffs and they still can't tough it out, the whiner babies." I don't think there would be this sort of analysis if the worm turned and it was the case that most faculty members were conservatives. As usual, it's the unstated 'liberal' that seems to be what a lot of these folks are harping on. In the face of contrary evidence, I might add, evidence which no one was under any obligation to put out there(by the way, you're welcome for the research that other people did for you guys. Also, swell job of doing your own research.)
SoV, are you seriously suggesting that you are not exceedingly touchy about respect, vitriolic, and incredulous about the accomplishments of others? Really?
For my part, I've never asserted that academics as a class are bitter. I have no reason to think they are. I merely pointed out--mainly for entertainment purposes--that you (and to a far lesser extent, rickm) are both identified as academics and have a tendency to reach for rudeness and personal attacks rater more quickly than, say, the identified lawyerly population, which includeds Thacker, Nierpont, and Winston (and Madler, as a counterexample). This despite the stereotype of the lawyer as table-pounder and the academic as quiet and studious. If you'd like examples, do a search on your own handle.
What more do you want? I strongly suspect the mouse got my joke; that's good enough for me.
I wonder if a lot of the bitterness/complaining/sense that academics are unhappy could be related to one of two things:
1. The vocal complainers tend to be VERY vocal, and everyone comes to assume we all feel that way.
2. It's a lot worse at high-prestige schools.
I teach at a small, regional university whose main (stated) mission is providing a fairly solid undergraduate education to its students. I took the job mainly because I like teaching and it give me the opportunity to teach classes in my subject area (I am a botanist).
I have to say, the more I hear about the supposed "bitterness" or "80 hour weeks" of folks at Yale or somewhere, the more I am amazed at the incredible good fortune I had in getting a job - and ultimately getting tenure - where I am right now. (And they HIRED me when I was 30; I was nearly 35 when I got tenure. So that's another "truism" out the window).
My colleagues are sane and I consider most of them to be friends. Departmental meetings are very low-politics; most of us are more interested in fixing what needs to be fixed and getting back to our teaching or research. I've never heard anyone express the "zero sum game" concerns - we all have our own "turf," so to speak, being a small department, so if one of my colleagues publishes in a prestigious journal, I'm genuinely happy for him or her and I don't see it as "now they won't accept a paper from ME."
Yeah, the hours can be long sometimes (but as I said - I don't think I've EVER put in an 80 hour week). Sometimes the students fail to live up to my expectations of them and that causes stress. Sometimes there are administrative directives that look more foolish than useful to those of us actually working in the classroom.
But all in all? I cannot think of any other job I'd rather have. I look at more highly-paid, more prestigious careers, and they all have drawbacks more severe than the drawbacks of academe. And benefits that tend to be smaller, as well.
I got it, too. ;)
ScentofViolets,
They'd never, say, stake out the position that blacks are not as intelligent as whites, because they know that concepts like race ... are ill-defined, rendering the question meaningless.
I'm glad to know you oppose race-based affirmative action.
Right? Or is that somehow different?
Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy has added to his series of posts arguing that law professors at least are generally happy.
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_04_20-2008_04_26.shtml#1208928929
"I teach for free. They pay me to grade."
Great quote. I will reuse shamelessly since it captures my feelings to a T.
I don't thinks profs are any more bitter than anyone else. They are as a group almost certainly more socially maladept than average, however. And yes status anxiety at academic meetings is real, but that's a few weeks per year at most for most of us.
I like to educate and inform myself, so I read a lot, and a lot of different things. I'm no longer especially interested in adding to the store of human knowledge via academic style publications but there are lots of other satisfying contributions to make, even if they are not especially valued within the academic community.
Fundamentally, though, the great thing about academic positions is that you get to walk into your office, close the door, ignore the phone, and spend a lot of time in the space between your ears. It may be just another way to jerk off, but some of us enjoy it. And while it may not be deeply socially constructive, it's better than socially destructive activities that have some of the same characteristics, like being a lawyer.
You have got to be kidding me. I see a lot of vitriol, sure. But it sure ain't from me or mine.
Right. This is the part where I ask for cites. No, what typically happens is that 'your side' acts like complete jerk, says something rather offensive, and then others react to it. For example, you yourself produce self-admitted 'snarky' posts, and then expect to get by with the 'it was just a joke' defense. Uh-uh. That don't fly. Look at how some of the posters like Occam, have behaved (quite badly). Bu somehow, they get a pass. You don't see it. Or at least choose not to comment on it.
This is just too funny. You make a claim, then ask me to prove it. Well . . . done. Nope. Didn't see anything there to support your claim at all.
Willing to admit you were wrong?
Matt B.
Well, I'm abandoning my Ph.D. in history 3 years in...at an elite institution. Why? So I can do just what you said. No, I'm not joining the Peace Corp but am going to pursue writing full-time...and I promise it will be 100% NON-ACADEMIC writing!
Kling's observations are not new, and are true for some academics in some parts of academia, but let me offer a differnet perspective. First, the notion that one's happiness derives mainly from one's occupational situation is not supported by evidence. more than anything, happiness is a temperamental tendency. so if academics are unhappy, it is not because they are academics. they are people prone to unhappiness and perhaps they self selsect into academia for various reasons. tongue in chick, i think the whole unhappiness story and the constant complaining done by some academics may be a smokescreen, an attempt to prevent outsiders from realizing the kind of cushy deal academia actually is.
let me take myself as case in point. i am atenured psych prof at a small private liberal arts college. i got the job at 40 (started college late) and got tenured in 4 years. i basically work 7 months a year (summer off, spring break, winter break). my day never starts before 9:30 and never ends after 3:30, which means i can pick my daughter up from school every day and actually raise her. i have essentially complete freedom with structuring my day, and daily activities as i see fit. i teach what i want how i want, (and college teachign has the added advantage over elementary or highschool in that you don't need to deal with discipline issues). i do research on what interests me, write and publish at a leisurely pace. i dress how i want-no dress code or uniforms. my job is secure and i can't be fired. the campus is beautiful and filled with high quality young people and interesting coleagues. my department is small and friendly and we look out for each other. every 3.5 years i get a quarter sabbatical (which can be turned, as it is right now, into six months off if you add the summer months before or after it). because i'm a clinical psychologist,the college helped me get licensed and i worked a deal with them to do clinical work 2 days a week, which along with teaching overload and summer, if i choose, supplament my base income to the point that it exceeds that of full time clinical psychologists in the private sector. i don't complain about money when i'm sitting by my pool in the afternoon (smaller city, lower real estate prices...). but my measure of quality is more units of time than units of cash. and academia, at least the liberal arts college route, provides ample time. i travel widely, professionally and privately. i spend every summer in Israel, where i'm from, with family and friends. my work is meaningful to me (and, to judge by students' comments and letters over the years, for them too). my days are varied and in my hands. stress is minimal. my daughter will get free college education through the consortium tuition exchange agreement my college has with 200 others around the nation. academic life, for those with the right temperament, outlook, and tools, cannot be beat.
Noam.
Chuckle. Do stay on topic, there's a good fellow. Wouldn't want it to be said of you that you were intentionally ducking the issue.
Are conservatives the ones advancing this as an academic theory? Yes.
Does anyone in academia take it seriously? No.
Is this proof that academia 'discriminates against conservatives'? No again.
My point is that there seem to be a number of cherished theories held by conservatives that aren't taken seriously in academia, primarily because no research has shown that they are true. The conclusion precedes the discovery process in other words.
It's the same here: conservatives are trying to press the meme that 'academics are bitter' with absolutely zero supporting evidence. Indeed, they have made no attempt to present evidence of any kind other than 'I know this guy . . .', and what evidence that has been presented . . . has been presented by an academic who, of all things, did a bit of research.
Now, in general, research is tough. It takes sitzfleish. You can go for years unrewarded. It's not for everybody. And if you have a conclusion and you're looking for confirming evidence, well, let's just say that academia is probably not for you.
So...you're now a grad student in your forties?
Good God.
On the contrary, that's the normal timescale. Hired in late 20s, tenured in mid-30s.
Willing to admit you were wrong?
This is the part where I raise my eyebrows, open my eyes wide, and look directly at the jury, while gesturing vaguely in SoV's direction with palms up and shrugging shoulders.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your service. I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Speaking of evidence, do you happen to have any serious studies showing that "conservatives" suffer the congnative biases you attribute to them more than "liberals," or is that just based on your observations here? :)
I know I shouldn't do this, but I really can't help myself: Nothing should set off one's BS detector like hearing "conservatives" or "liberals" tossed about as though these terms meaningfully identified any specific individuals, personalities, or beliefs. I'm not saying they can never be meaningfully employed, but scanning these comments reminds me of a lousy 1980's standup comic routine along the lines of "Black people are like this . . . white people are like that . . ."
Because the classes denoted by these terms are so amorphous, it's essentially impossible to identify any specific members, so you're having what amounts to a content-free debate, i.e., arguing for the sake of arguing.
You all should knock it off. There have been a couple of interesting comments (e.g., Noam's) that I think shed light on the question Meagan posed; the rest of this back-and-forth is really just irritating.
And Scott, I apologise for coming down too hard on you yesterday.
With all due respect, Noam, this sounds more like a high school teacher than a professor, certainly a professor in the sciences. No one in the big leagues works those hours and gets tenure. Not a chance. (Summer and Easter and Christmas breaks are when faculty can focus 100% on research without teaching or most administrative duties, and so are prized periods of productivity.)
Also, there is no mention of grad students, lab space, or grant writing.
So what you describe sounds idyllic, but it is like comparing a drive to the grocery store with a Formula I race.
"Look academics for some reason have a very poor public image in this country."
The poster seems surprised that academics have a poor reputation...
Get out of the Ivory tower periodically...you people have lost your minds...
If you would like to know why academia is in the dumpster next to the trial lawyers, Start with a tour of Duke Lacross on one side of the country, quick detour to yale to view abortion as art, and end up at Berkeley on the other, ...if you're still confused try opening a small business and staff it with academics. Then come back to me.
Any organization populated solely by Liberals is bound to be disfunctional. Sure you need San Fran as an angine of creativity, but too much of that crap...
Chuckle. Yes, Yes I am. What has that got to do with your blatant lying and your misrepresentations? A 'chemist' who doesn't know any math? A guy who makes allusions to having a PhD, but doesn't know that as a general rule, schools don't hire their graduates as professors? That immediately reverses himself from '30 is not okay' to '30 is fine'. That has spouted 'fact' after 'fact' and then been immediately corrected?
Somehow I think I'll live in spite of your withering criticisms ;-)
I thought my days of saying this were over, but I guess not.
Quit screwing around and write your @#$%^& dissertation!
Just what cognitive biases have I attributed to conservatives in particular?
Exhibit A:
I'm going to go with the idea that academics being 'bitter' is just more of the same old same old lame conservative psyop: "See, look at those loser liberals; they've got it better than most working stiffs and they still can't tough it out, the whiner babies." I don't think there would be this sort of analysis if the worm turned and it was the case that most faculty members were conservatives. As usual, it's the unstated 'liberal' that seems to be what a lot of these folks are harping on.
Now, this isn't strictly speaking, a cognative bias, it's psychobabble about conservative motives and guess about what they would do if the worm turned offered...without evidence.
This, on the other hand, accuses conservatives of confirmation bias:
The conclusion precedes the discovery process in other words.
Now, I think there is little doubt that conservatives are guilty of this, but unless you can show that liberals don't also have problems with confirmation bias, then you've identified not a conservative characteristic, but a human one.
And I'll readily conceded that I haven't offered evidence in this thread of your vitriol, rudeness, or spleen. This does not mean that such evidence does not exist; I'm not worried about where the chips fall among those who are familiar with your work. The fact that I can't make you admit it does not make me wrong.
And yet another ignirnt remark; I've been a grad student for three years.
So, you're not really a 'chemist', at least not a research chemist with a Ph.D as you've tried to intimate, you know very little math, you have little familiarity with graduate programs, or how universities conduct their hires, you have a rather ignorant view of how fully tenured professors spend their time, or the freedoms they enjoy, you turn on a dime, somehow believing that no one can see through your incredibly obvious lies . . .
No, Occam, I think we've established just how credible you are at this point, on this subject ;-)
The hours of the professor that you've laid out are quite relaxed compared to the professors and graduate students who work in chemistry.
I know you like evidence, SoV, so here's a little quote from one of my least favorite literature reviews:
"One of us (K.C.N.) will never forget the scene in the laboratory on that day in January 1998, who upon arrival at 8:00 a.m. found the author (P.S.B.) fast asleep on his desk with a clean NMR spectrum of compound 64 by his side. It was classic brilliance and characteristic dedication from the team working on this project! Angew Chem. Int. Ed. 2002, 41, 2678-2720.
This passage always irritates me, because these sorts of working hours are quite common for both professors (esp. pre-tenure), graduate students and post-docs. Most don't get to brag about it in the pages of one of the most august journals in chemistry.
For fully tenured professors, there's obviously more of a range. Nevertheless, it's quite common for professors to work weekends and late nights to 'encourage' their students as well. There's a Harvard chemistry professor who's famous for making 8 am, 12 pm, 8 pm and 12 am rounds through his lab.
By the way, SoV, your teasing of Occam for not being a chemist nor having a PhD is pretty funny. For those in the know, it's pretty clear from his suicide post where Occam went to grad school.
Klug (appropriate name), imagine someone rolling into the group we're both talking about at 10 am and leaving at 3 pm on a day other than Christmas. Shudder.
That may or may not be true, but the claim was that:
As I've just demonstrated, this is simply wrong. (In fact, a lot of our professors, tenured and otherwise do this; so I imagine it's rather common.) That's not to say that all work ceases after 3:00. What I'm guessing happens, since I do the same thing, is that I'm with my daughter until her mother comes home, or until she's off at reheasel or dance or voice. Then I put in another hour or three or four. I also work on the weekends either at the office or at my house.
Math is funny that way :-)
But I'm guessing you're not going to acknowledge that. In fact, this is very strange. First you say:
But then you go on to say:
Um, where is the evidence, other than your say-so? Not that I care one way or the other, but Occam's claim was ludicrous, and that was what I was answering.
Again, whether that is true or not is irrelevant; the claim was that no one keeping those hours would ever make tenure. Not true.
What does one have to do with the other? I'm not making the connection. Further, for someone who likes to hint around that he has some sort of graduate degree (I think he's been careful not to come right out and say it), he sure doesn't know much about the process. A university that directly hires one of it's own Ph.D. candidates right out of grad school - and as a professor at that! Uh, that's really not done. A lack of realization that the normal track in academia is graduate school, post doc, assistant/associate professor, full professor. Nor has he indicated that he has the smallest scrap of mathematics. Really, a chemist who doesn't know, say, the diffusion equation, or the linear transport equation, or the scalar reaction-diffusion equation? No hint of any modelling expertise?
That's getting real old school. Old old school. Oh, I suppose it's possible he's been in some sort of graduate program, but if so, I'd say the odds are that he didn't make it all the way through.
How else to explain those peculiar gaps?
So, he can claim he's a 'chemist' all he wants, but that would cover everything from the guy who tests soil samples for acidity to someone who actually does research, writes grants, supervises students, etc.
If you'll notice, btw, I've never made the slightest pretention to being a professor; I aver that I teach math, or that I'm an instructor. Nothing more. Much better to speak softly and carry a big stick than to speak loudly and carry a little stick, eh?
Really, a chemist who doesn't know, say, the diffusion equation, or the linear transport equation, or the scalar reaction-diffusion equation? No hint of any modelling expertise?
SoV, I am a chemist. I am standing at my bench, with my reactions stirring in the hood behind me. I do not know any of these equations. Am I not a chemist, since I don't know these?
I'm not old, old school, either. I got my degree last year; we covered lots and lots of things in grad school. We covered reaction kinetics, sterics, electronics and basic organometallic chemistry. We did not cover any of your precious equations.
I'm not going to say anything of my own. I'm going to quote.
"As I've just demonstrated, [the claim that someone works relaxed hours can't get tenure] is simply wrong."
To which the appropriate response is:
"Um, where is the evidence, other than your say-so?"
BTW, if you're looking for someone who washed out of grad school, that would be me.
Am I the only one wondering if they paroled Ted Kaczynski? /g
Good luck with your reaction, Klug. But how do we really know you're a chemist? Have you got any cites? How about an affidavit from KCN? (I just realized how ironic those initials are.)
Thanks, Occam. It's a scale-up of a reaction I've done before, but having my back to 9.5 grams of sodium hydride still makes me nervous, even with a hood sash between me and it. No cites, but I might be able to get a affidavit from KCN -- we live in the same town.
Hey, I live in that town too! It took me a long time to get back here, where I'm from originally, but I made it.
On the good side, at least you've got your back to the NaH. Always a good idea.
I trust you're not scaling up too much. He of whom we inferentially spoke before advised me against scaling up more than 3X in any step, because of ChemE issues (surface area/volume ratios, heat dissipation, that sort of thing). Good advice.
Funny, Occam. I've heard a similar thing -- that scaling up any more than 4X means reworking the conditions. I have an internal thermocouple, so that makes me feel better.
Does all this shop talk convince SoV that we're both actually chemists?
Who cares?
He's an utnay objay in any case, obviously. At least we chemists have the excuse of inhaling solvent vapors!
That reminds me of one of my favorite undergrad stories: I had a lab/classmate who (apart from being really smart and completely amoral) loved drugs. One time he was snorting ether from the little 50 ml bottles we got in the teaching labs; the TA looked at him doing this and said:
"I didn't just see that" and walked away.
Back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and folks were planning Stonehenge, I knew a guy who used to inject 95% ethanol, as crazy as that sounds. (True story, AFAIK.) The logic, such as it was, was that a few mL would do the job. (Since he did virtually every other drug known to man or beast, and there were a lot of them then, I tended to believe the story was more likely than not.)
He's a successful MD today.
"A university that directly hires one of it's own Ph.D. candidates right out of grad school - and as a professor at that! Uh, that's really not done. A lack of realization that the normal track in academia is graduate school, post doc, assistant/associate professor, full professor"
Hiring one's own students is done, at times, although it gets a school a bad reputation. And in my area, post docs are virtually unheard of, at least in the US, so this progression is not as universal as you imply (yet I'm not going to question whether you're in academia, simply because you said something that's flatly wrong for many departments and schools).
You all seem to be arguing past each other to some extent - it's not surprising that there are differences between math and chemistry and liberal arts. In chemistry, someone actually has to run the experiments, which seems to take quite a bit of time. Not every area is like that.
In my area, business, pay has gone up steadily for decades (thanks in part to people like Art that leave for Wall Street), but the pressure - both for research and for teaching - has also risen steadily. One big source of job dissatisfaction is teaching MBAs. They're wonderful people to be around, very personable, until they don't get the grade they want. There are usually only one or two difficult/nasty ones per class, but that's enough to sour the experience, especially given the enormous pressure to get glowing evaluations while resisting grade inflation. I certainly can relate to this quote:
"I teach for free. They pay me to grade."
I'm an assistant professor and I love my job.
What do I plan to do after tenure?
1) Put aside all the safe research projects that are guaranteed to yield papers, and chase after a holy grail. If I fail, you'll never know. If I succeed, you'll see my picture in the newspaper.
1b) Take time away from the holy grail to dig into whatever project a clever student comes up with.
2) Keep trying different things in my teaching, keep refining my feel for the subject and the students. Keep tinkering in response to student feedback.
3) Send scornful form letters to anybody who tries to get me to serve on a committee.
That's what I plan to do. Until the day I die.
"I teach for free. They pay me to grade."
Amen.
Sigh. You say you covered reaction kinetics, but you didn't use any math, eh? No Arrhenius equation, no reaction rates?
But you're a chemist? How, pray tell, did you do reaction kinetics without any math then?
Or are you just being reflexively disagreeable? Until you admit that Occam has told a few whoppers, said some things that Just Ain't So, I can't regard you as anything less than a pure partisan.
Sadly, that seems to be just about the only thing conservatives have going for them these days.
ScentOfViolets-
He said he didn't know anything about transport theory. He didn't say anything about kinetics. If he's an organic chemist doing solution chemistry in well-stirred solutions, he could probably go his whole life without needing to solve any transport equations.
Sigh. I'll be explicit, since you can't seem to grasp very simple ideas: if all you have is your say-so, why cite an article as 'evidence' that does nothing in the way of providing evidence? Why not just say that 'in my experience', or 'from what I've seen', and leave it at that? Not a difficult concept, nor one that was buried in indecipherable text.
And that, Rob, this is why I could care less what you think: at least with 'liberals', some critical factor in your brain just shuts down. You've been accusing me of the very behaviour you're engaging in, and seem completely oblivious to this. When I say that conservatives seem to have a habit of coming up with a conclusion before the evidence is in, the last thing you need to be doing is agitatedly making accusations of an inflammatory sort, and then refusing to back them up, over and over again:
"Oh, I'm posting my evidence right now, except that what I'm posting isn't, really."
But the big thing to take away here is what I have indicated in bold: that you are dividing the world into two groups, liberals and conservatives.
That Just Ain't So. There are, dispute your protestations to the contrary, at least three groups: Liberals, Moderates, and Conservatives. You trying to frame these disagreements as a pitched battle between opposing forces simply isn't true.
No, what you guys really are, are the equivalent of all those weird left-wing groups from the 60's - Marxist groups spouting trash about dialectic analysis, the SDS, radical feminists, et al. To make a cultural reference, the Peoples Front of Judea.
_That's_ how me, and a lot of people perceive you guys: the right equivalent of the far left (and rest assured, I detest, or did detest, these groups every bit as much if not more as their current analogues on the right, and for pretty much the same reasons.) So don't try to pretend there is some sort of parity here. I'm firmly ensconced in the middle. I'm a moderate. I'm a pragmatist. Even my own family tells me I'm stingy with a dollar. I'm a look at the numbers sort of guy - I don't "buy 'Merican", I look at Consumers Digest, do comparison shopping, talk with other people before I so much as buy a new coffee machine. I don't even have a coherent political philosophy, and what there is of it owes mainly to the Republicanism of my family circa 1957 or so. Heck, I was named after the 34th President! No, I'm part of the vast amorphous middle, and whenever your kind want to do something radical, like 'reform' Social Security or institute school vouchers, you have to seek our approval, not vice versa (why certain people conclude that if you hold the majority opinions of being against the occupation of Iraq, or for preserving Social Security, or against vouchers - voted down _every_ time it comes up! - that you must be a 'liberal' strikes me as bordering on the pathological.)
You, otoh, are definitely off to the right. And you habitually associate with people who will make statements like 'academics are bitter' without bothering to check the facts first, and who will cling to that notion regardless of what the evidence says.
That last italicized bit says it all.
That may be true. But I didn't say that he had to know those particular equations. I held them out as examples. Look:
So it's quite clear that it could have been anything, I just threw out a few possibilities (probably those, come to think of it, because that's what one of the guys down the hall happened to mention a few days ago.)
But the big thing to take away here is what I have indicated in bold: that you are dividing the world into two groups, liberals and conservatives.
SoV, this is the great difficulty in carrying on a conversation with you: you have totally misinterpreted what I said, and gone off on a bizarre tangent about Consumers Digest and school vouchers based on your own unreasonable misinterpretation.
My point is not to divide the world into two warring camps. My point is that it's dumb to criticize "conservatives" for suffering from human frailties. All humans suffer from confirmation bias. All humans--yes, even you--have some fairly fixed beliefs which are not well-grounded in evidence, and indeed may well be contradicted by available evidence.
Just go read the John Yoo threads and count the number of (usually liberal, sometimes libertarian) Yoo critics who offer actual substantive criticism of Yoo's legal conclusions, as opposed to simpleminded calls for his disbarrment or imprisonment. Or, if you find it more convenient, read your own account of conservative motives which I quoted: it's your belief, and just as well-sourced as the belief that academics are "bitter." Sure, you know some dumb conservatives. OB knows some bitter academics. If his anecdotes aren't evidence, then neither are yours.
In other words, while I may well associate with people who make unfounded statements, you are a person who makes unfounded statements--all the while insisting that you are vastly superior to the rest of us.
Rob, you said it right here:
". . . but unless you can show that liberals don't also have problems with confirmation bias, then you've identified not a conservative characteristic, but a human one."
You have said nothing to indicate that there are large numbers of middle-of-the road types. And that is not a misinterpretation of what you have said, in no way shape or form.
If you want to say that you misspoke, fine, I do it all the time. But you know, I admit it, rephrase, and move on. Is that what you are going to do? Are you going to amend your phrasing to:
". . . but unless you can show that liberals and moderates don't also have problems with confirmation bias, then you've identified not a conservative characteristic, but a human one."
If you're going to insist on a reinterpretation, you're going to have to admit that moderates exist. That seems to be something of a problem with a lot of people on your side of the isle ;-)
Further: I have never intimated that people can have pre-conceived notions regardless of the facts. That's a red herring. I do say that holding to those preconceived notionsin a field of rational inquiry, believing in the scientific method is not a good idea if you want to remain in that field for very long.
Finally: while I may make unfounded statements, I'll cheerfully cop to them as 'imho', or 'anecdotally', etc. I will not make unfounded statements and insist in the absence of evidence, or evidence to the contrary that they must be true.
But - of course - I'm sure you have cites for precisely where I've done this, right?
Oh, and one last thing - my 'belief' about motives are a theory to designed to fit the facts - actually part of a larger theory. And nothing more. Note the beginning where I said "I think . . ." Kinda indicative, eh?
So let's hear your counter-theory about why conservatives would insist academics are 'bitter', despite the evidence to the contrary.
You have said nothing to indicate that there are large numbers of middle-of-the road types.
That's because their existence or non-existence is irrelevant to my point, which is that the errors you accuse conservatives of making are natural human errors, common to everyone. But if you insist, I'll rephrase thusly: "unless you can show that non-conservatives don't also have problems with confirmation bias..." Happy now?
OK, so, having rephrased to satisfy your absurd insistence on linguistic hyperprecision and defeat your drawing of unjustified inferences, let's see the (systematic, non-anecdotal) evidence that conservatives as a group are more prone to confirmation bias or similar cognitive errors than non-conservatives.
Incidentially, I agree that clinging to preconceived notions in the face of contrary evidence is foolish.
Note the beginning where I said "I think . . ." Kinda indicative, eh?
I suppose. I'm not in the habit of reading comments on a blog with the kind of hair-splitting precision normally reserved for patent claims. If you say "X is true," I'm not necessarily more inclined to demand evidence than if you say "I think X is true." To me, the sentences mean basically the same thing and the difference is too minor to start jumping up and down over. If that's your rule, though, we can all start saying "I think..." a lot more and save ourselves the trouble.
So let's hear your counter-theory about why conservatives would insist academics are 'bitter', despite the evidence to the contrary.
Well, maybe conservatives are more likely to know conservative academics. And maybe conservative academics are more likely to be bitter because they have to put up with people like you telling them how stupid they are all the time. :)
Maybe there's a correlation between exit options and happiness in the profession.
It makes sense that in a field like engineering or law, where there are plenty of lucrative options available outside the field, those unhappy with academia would simply leave. The exit options for some humanities professors would be more constrained, and those that were unhappy would be less likely and/or able to leave.
Do you have any actual evidence for the argument that academics are bitter? I'm a tenured English professor at a major research university. I'm not consumed by bitterness about not teaching at Harvard. I feel lucky that I get paid to write and think about ideas and books that interest me, that I have intelligent colleagues I enjoy talking to and spending time with, and that I don't have a boss telling me what to do. Sure I could have made more money had I gone to law school, but I wouldn't enjoy my work as much. The academic job market *is* brutal. But for those who survive and land good jobs, the life is really quite wonderful.