Oh yea, i noticed that to in some areas like certain PI are very protective of their reputation even compromising thier professionalism over it, like i had one that is very against giving any “references” to people unless you met his nebelous circumstances. most of its stems of himb eing in his native american heritege. in his mind he thinks people will “Tarnish” him in some way or his research or steal his credit somehow,etc.
alot of these tenures prevent people from applying to faculty positions too, because they will never leave til they die.
dint realize how much fluff pieces a phd produces just to get noticed on thier CV. writing dozens of papers, that likely arnt very good quality has irked people who is into the research field.
academia is not an enterprise that is about usefulness. one of the reasons it’s collapsing so poory, and education more broadly, is the narrow minded insistence that it must be useful in terms of economic productivity.
it can and does have many uses, the question is to whom and for what, and oftentimes those are politically loaded.
What I mean is that most of these people are self interested fools who are nowhere near as knowledgeable as they believe themselves to be.
Most in that category are also not very good at their jobs, which leads to administrative bloat, torturously ineffective bureaucracy, and teaching positions going to whoever is best at politicking rather than the person who is better at teaching.
I’m not arrogant enough to assume I know what other people know and don’t know. Every prof I had always had lots of knowledge of things I had no knowledge of. But that’s what it means when everyone is specialized.
I wanted to pursue academia until I met academics. I realized it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling. To get ahead you to understand the unspoken and political rules. It was a very disheartening realization. I didn’t have the heart to stomach it so I ended up pursuing a different career path
I wanted to get into academia for the pursuit of knowledge/love of wisdom and all that jazz. But I noticed some of the same stuff as you.
Curiosity and inquiry were not the main priority. There’s a lot of red tape, faux pas, hoops to jump through, and you end up needing to do a lot of kowtowing, self-aggrandizing, and following the established narrative. And if you didn’t intuitively know the social norms of academic culture, you were basically shunned as a hopelessly backwards outsider.
Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume). Grant writing and acquiring funding shouldn’t be an exercise in marketing yourself as a product, but it is. Universities shouldn’t be run like a business, faculty shouldn’t be treated like labor, students shouldn’t be treated like customers, and degrees shouldn’t be treated like products, but they are. It’s a serious problem and it degrades the value of education.
Another part is the gatekeeping in the peer-review system. I understand the desire to keep the nonsense out, and there’s a way to do that without filtering out novel ideas and unpopular opinions. People tend to think that’s an anti-science dogwhistle, but that’s not how I mean it. A truly scientific mindset should keep an open mind about things that are unconfirmed, but a lot of scientific journals commit the fallacy of negating the antecedent: “there is not enough evidence to establish this, so it must not be true.” There’s never enough evidence to establish a new hypothesis at first, but that doesn’t mean we should discourage formulating new hypotheses. A lot of scientific breakthroughs were initially viewed as crackpot theories.
I’m not talking about “do essential oils cure meningitis,” I’m talking about “can a Big Crunch result in a cyclical universe?” Or “Can taichi improve health outcomes by exercising the circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and nervous systems?”
Stuff that there’s already enough scientific groundwork to demonstrate the validity of, but are still likely to get you dismissed as a crackpot if you bring it up in an academic setting.
There’s also a lot of office politics to navigate. Which is easy if you’re from a traditionally disenfranchised minority group. As much as they’ll argue to the contrary, women, LGBTQ+, and people of color are privileged within the ivory tower of academia. I’ve been to honors conferences where I was only one of a few white dudes, and likely the only one who was hetero, and yet I had to sit through a key note speaker about underrepresentation of minorities in academia. I felt like I was being gaslit.
But if you’re a white man and you try to claim something like “ecosystems deserve recognition of intrinsic value just like humans do,” everyone will jump down your throat as if you’re trying to reduce minorities to the ontological position of animals, rather than trying to raise the environment up ontologically to the position of humanity. As if everything is a zero-sum game. They view everything through the paradigm of capitalistic systems, even when trying to deconstruct them through some lofty armchair exercise in mental masturbation.
But if you try discussing the merits of collaboration towards common goals over self-serving competition, they’ll think you’re trying to take something away from minorities. They think everything is some shaded attempt at a dogwhistle, so you either have to walk on eggshells or just stay silent. Unless you’re mindlessly parroting the established narrative.
And if you’re competing for grants or a research position and you want to study the intersections of social ecology, deep ecology, and the land ethic, they’ll easily take the brown woman who wants to study media depictions over you. Even though the field is saturated with papers on how minorities are depicted in the media, yet hardly anyone writes about social ecology. You really have to stick to the favored topics, and if you diverge at all then you’d better have some serious connections or otherwise be well-established in your field already.
And if you raise the slightest structural critique of academia, everyone thinks you’re some anti-intellectual, anti-science, worm-brained right-winger. Even if your critique is that the structures of academia themselves are anti-intellectual and in some cases anti-science.
Oh but you also have to be careful about mentioning intellectualism, or they might think you’re elitist! God forbid an outsider believes intelligence should get you farther in academia than emotional appeals do…
Oh yea they need to focus on stem that does research providing resources for volunteering in labs or what not. the school i used to got o was so stingy about it, most dont get the experience they need before they graduate, a very small subset do
Brave to this comment man. This relates to so much of my own experience and what is so fucked up and self-destructive about academic life these.
God forbid you just want to do good research and teach your students factual knowledge and skills. Now it’s just consumerism qua intellectualism and everyone is copying each other chasing ‘success’.
I remember when I was in grad school a blogger/professor ran some stats on admissions in my field basic on public data and it showed clear and obviously biases and trends in PhD admissions and he was basically ousted from the field. Bea cause it didn’t fit the narrative that somehow PhD admissions was this ‘objective measure’ of quality of a student’s work and potential… when all it was was a measurement how famous your advisors were.
To be honest, I’m surprised it has 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
People will gaslight you about your experience not being real, that all your qualms are really just white supremacist dogwhistles or brainwashed into you by manosphere influencers, but ultimately all your problems are imaginary because you’re a privileged white man who’s been handed everything in life and has never had to suffer or struggle to get by in life, and the only reason you haven’t done more with that privilege to simultaneously be successful and liberate everyone beneath you on the oppression scale (without being a white savior, of course) is because you’re a selfish, self-serving, racist, sexist, chauvinist bigot.
The outright dismissal of the challenges you’ve faced with no option for appeal is just an extension of the same “men don’t have feelings” and “be a man, suck it up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that’s so prevalent and harmful in society. But it comes from both sides: the side that actually believes it and wants you to conform to toxic, patriarchal standards of masculinity; and the side that only wants to weaponize that structural misandry against you because “you’re a man so you deserve to be scorned,” and they love an easy target to take out their ire on, because someone who was actually born into wealth, status, and privilege is too difficult to tear down so they go for someone more vulnerable like you and me whose maleness and whiteness is undeniable, but whose (lack of) social status, economic class, and the associated privileges get swept under the rug when you’re reduced to biological factors beyond your control.
But if you raise a concern about how you’re being treated they’ll just accuse you of being a white supremacist or a misogynist because they view life as a zero-sum game, and they believe that in order to lift up and liberate/empower marginalized/disenfranchised minorities, they need to tear down individual white men regardless of their actual position on the food chain (starting with the lowest rungs, though, because low-hanging fruit).
And then they’ll tell you that you have it wrong because “social justice isn’t about that!!!” When yes, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not supposed to be. But in practice, that’s how many people treat it, and your response gets categorically invalidated. It’s like you’re being beaten up for something that someone else did, and if you even so much as put your hands up to defend yourself everyone watching calls you a violent asshole and says “Nobody is hitting you!!! And if they are, you deserve it!”
There is no chance of class solidarity when everyone is so focused on external factors and campism. But you’re not even allowed to respect yourself when someone else wants to treat you like a doormat.
Beautifully said. Felt like I was reading a journal entry.
Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume).
I’m from Canada. We commodify education but not nearly as much as the US. We still do have competition for grants of course. Personally I think the issues run deeper than this though.
A journal would never publish the opinions I stated above. Also I was formulating my language more colloquially than I would have if I was trying to publish.
I’m from Canada. We commodify education but not nearly as much as the US.
The anglosphere needs to stop following the US example, because it’s a death spiral…
A journal would never publish the opinions I stated above.
I mean a personal journal entry, though I understand given the context why there’d be confusion there. I was just saying that I relate a lot to what you were saying. Wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.
That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.
a lot of your TAs didn’t have that debt. They had trust funds.
I was in grad school and one of the reason I left is I learned I was basically the only person in my program who was paying my own way… and that most of my professors… also came from money. And they were all shocked that I actually lived entirely on my stipend.
And you can find stats on this. The majority of med students, for example, come from upper income homes. Just like the majority of students at elite schools, also do, and the majority of admits to med schools come from better schools…
It is yeah, I just feel like its especially pronounced in academia. It also sucks because, naively, I thought that the pursuit of knowledge was this pure thing untouched by petty human politics, but I was wrong.
my undergrad experience was awesome, but my grad experience was bad.
really good schools/programs can isolate you from the shitshow and actually are very professional. but they are rare.
it could also have been you meshed with the politics of your school. i very much meshed with the politics of my undergrad dept, but was a pariah in my grad program for those very same politics/values.
I ran a lab at my school for about 10 years so I feel like my take might be a little more holistic. I’m not at all discounting you but the politics of a university are pretty layered.
it’s also the culture. some schools are more inclusive and others are exclusive. my undergrad was a more inclusive place than my grad school. my grad school was like 95% white.
Somewhere around the majority of people employed in academia are absolutely useless.
I say this as an academic.
I thought this was common knowledge lol
Oh yea, i noticed that to in some areas like certain PI are very protective of their reputation even compromising thier professionalism over it, like i had one that is very against giving any “references” to people unless you met his nebelous circumstances. most of its stems of himb eing in his native american heritege. in his mind he thinks people will “Tarnish” him in some way or his research or steal his credit somehow,etc.
alot of these tenures prevent people from applying to faculty positions too, because they will never leave til they die.
dint realize how much fluff pieces a phd produces just to get noticed on thier CV. writing dozens of papers, that likely arnt very good quality has irked people who is into the research field.
useless to who? You?
academia is not an enterprise that is about usefulness. one of the reasons it’s collapsing so poory, and education more broadly, is the narrow minded insistence that it must be useful in terms of economic productivity.
it can and does have many uses, the question is to whom and for what, and oftentimes those are politically loaded.
What I mean is that most of these people are self interested fools who are nowhere near as knowledgeable as they believe themselves to be.
Most in that category are also not very good at their jobs, which leads to administrative bloat, torturously ineffective bureaucracy, and teaching positions going to whoever is best at politicking rather than the person who is better at teaching.
I don’t care at all about economic usefulness.
I’m not arrogant enough to assume I know what other people know and don’t know. Every prof I had always had lots of knowledge of things I had no knowledge of. But that’s what it means when everyone is specialized.
I wanted to pursue academia until I met academics. I realized it was all dick measuring contests and covert social signalling. To get ahead you to understand the unspoken and political rules. It was a very disheartening realization. I didn’t have the heart to stomach it so I ended up pursuing a different career path
I wanted to get into academia for the pursuit of knowledge/love of wisdom and all that jazz. But I noticed some of the same stuff as you.
Curiosity and inquiry were not the main priority. There’s a lot of red tape, faux pas, hoops to jump through, and you end up needing to do a lot of kowtowing, self-aggrandizing, and following the established narrative. And if you didn’t intuitively know the social norms of academic culture, you were basically shunned as a hopelessly backwards outsider.
Part of the problem is the commodification of education (specific to the US, I presume). Grant writing and acquiring funding shouldn’t be an exercise in marketing yourself as a product, but it is. Universities shouldn’t be run like a business, faculty shouldn’t be treated like labor, students shouldn’t be treated like customers, and degrees shouldn’t be treated like products, but they are. It’s a serious problem and it degrades the value of education.
Another part is the gatekeeping in the peer-review system. I understand the desire to keep the nonsense out, and there’s a way to do that without filtering out novel ideas and unpopular opinions. People tend to think that’s an anti-science dogwhistle, but that’s not how I mean it. A truly scientific mindset should keep an open mind about things that are unconfirmed, but a lot of scientific journals commit the fallacy of negating the antecedent: “there is not enough evidence to establish this, so it must not be true.” There’s never enough evidence to establish a new hypothesis at first, but that doesn’t mean we should discourage formulating new hypotheses. A lot of scientific breakthroughs were initially viewed as crackpot theories.
I’m not talking about “do essential oils cure meningitis,” I’m talking about “can a Big Crunch result in a cyclical universe?” Or “Can taichi improve health outcomes by exercising the circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and nervous systems?”
Stuff that there’s already enough scientific groundwork to demonstrate the validity of, but are still likely to get you dismissed as a crackpot if you bring it up in an academic setting.
There’s also a lot of office politics to navigate. Which is easy if you’re from a traditionally disenfranchised minority group. As much as they’ll argue to the contrary, women, LGBTQ+, and people of color are privileged within the ivory tower of academia. I’ve been to honors conferences where I was only one of a few white dudes, and likely the only one who was hetero, and yet I had to sit through a key note speaker about underrepresentation of minorities in academia. I felt like I was being gaslit.
But if you’re a white man and you try to claim something like “ecosystems deserve recognition of intrinsic value just like humans do,” everyone will jump down your throat as if you’re trying to reduce minorities to the ontological position of animals, rather than trying to raise the environment up ontologically to the position of humanity. As if everything is a zero-sum game. They view everything through the paradigm of capitalistic systems, even when trying to deconstruct them through some lofty armchair exercise in mental masturbation.
But if you try discussing the merits of collaboration towards common goals over self-serving competition, they’ll think you’re trying to take something away from minorities. They think everything is some shaded attempt at a dogwhistle, so you either have to walk on eggshells or just stay silent. Unless you’re mindlessly parroting the established narrative.
And if you’re competing for grants or a research position and you want to study the intersections of social ecology, deep ecology, and the land ethic, they’ll easily take the brown woman who wants to study media depictions over you. Even though the field is saturated with papers on how minorities are depicted in the media, yet hardly anyone writes about social ecology. You really have to stick to the favored topics, and if you diverge at all then you’d better have some serious connections or otherwise be well-established in your field already.
And if you raise the slightest structural critique of academia, everyone thinks you’re some anti-intellectual, anti-science, worm-brained right-winger. Even if your critique is that the structures of academia themselves are anti-intellectual and in some cases anti-science.
Oh but you also have to be careful about mentioning intellectualism, or they might think you’re elitist! God forbid an outsider believes intelligence should get you farther in academia than emotional appeals do…
Oh yea they need to focus on stem that does research providing resources for volunteering in labs or what not. the school i used to got o was so stingy about it, most dont get the experience they need before they graduate, a very small subset do
Brave to this comment man. This relates to so much of my own experience and what is so fucked up and self-destructive about academic life these.
God forbid you just want to do good research and teach your students factual knowledge and skills. Now it’s just consumerism qua intellectualism and everyone is copying each other chasing ‘success’.
I remember when I was in grad school a blogger/professor ran some stats on admissions in my field basic on public data and it showed clear and obviously biases and trends in PhD admissions and he was basically ousted from the field. Bea cause it didn’t fit the narrative that somehow PhD admissions was this ‘objective measure’ of quality of a student’s work and potential… when all it was was a measurement how famous your advisors were.
To be honest, I’m surprised it has 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
People will gaslight you about your experience not being real, that all your qualms are really just white supremacist dogwhistles or brainwashed into you by manosphere influencers, but ultimately all your problems are imaginary because you’re a privileged white man who’s been handed everything in life and has never had to suffer or struggle to get by in life, and the only reason you haven’t done more with that privilege to simultaneously be successful and liberate everyone beneath you on the oppression scale (without being a white savior, of course) is because you’re a selfish, self-serving, racist, sexist, chauvinist bigot.
The outright dismissal of the challenges you’ve faced with no option for appeal is just an extension of the same “men don’t have feelings” and “be a man, suck it up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that’s so prevalent and harmful in society. But it comes from both sides: the side that actually believes it and wants you to conform to toxic, patriarchal standards of masculinity; and the side that only wants to weaponize that structural misandry against you because “you’re a man so you deserve to be scorned,” and they love an easy target to take out their ire on, because someone who was actually born into wealth, status, and privilege is too difficult to tear down so they go for someone more vulnerable like you and me whose maleness and whiteness is undeniable, but whose (lack of) social status, economic class, and the associated privileges get swept under the rug when you’re reduced to biological factors beyond your control.
But if you raise a concern about how you’re being treated they’ll just accuse you of being a white supremacist or a misogynist because they view life as a zero-sum game, and they believe that in order to lift up and liberate/empower marginalized/disenfranchised minorities, they need to tear down individual white men regardless of their actual position on the food chain (starting with the lowest rungs, though, because low-hanging fruit).
And then they’ll tell you that you have it wrong because “social justice isn’t about that!!!” When yes, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not supposed to be. But in practice, that’s how many people treat it, and your response gets categorically invalidated. It’s like you’re being beaten up for something that someone else did, and if you even so much as put your hands up to defend yourself everyone watching calls you a violent asshole and says “Nobody is hitting you!!! And if they are, you deserve it!”
There is no chance of class solidarity when everyone is so focused on external factors and campism. But you’re not even allowed to respect yourself when someone else wants to treat you like a doormat.
Beautifully said. Felt like I was reading a journal entry.
I’m from Canada. We commodify education but not nearly as much as the US. We still do have competition for grants of course. Personally I think the issues run deeper than this though.
A journal would never publish the opinions I stated above. Also I was formulating my language more colloquially than I would have if I was trying to publish.
The anglosphere needs to stop following the US example, because it’s a death spiral…
I mean a personal journal entry, though I understand given the context why there’d be confusion there. I was just saying that I relate a lot to what you were saying. Wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
Oh, I see. That makes more sense.
When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.
That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.
a lot of your TAs didn’t have that debt. They had trust funds.
I was in grad school and one of the reason I left is I learned I was basically the only person in my program who was paying my own way… and that most of my professors… also came from money. And they were all shocked that I actually lived entirely on my stipend.
And you can find stats on this. The majority of med students, for example, come from upper income homes. Just like the majority of students at elite schools, also do, and the majority of admits to med schools come from better schools…
this exists in most professions.
It is yeah, I just feel like its especially pronounced in academia. It also sucks because, naively, I thought that the pursuit of knowledge was this pure thing untouched by petty human politics, but I was wrong.
It aint just academia.
I had the opposite experience before I left, but it sure pays like shit. Could be a little university dependent I suppose.
my undergrad experience was awesome, but my grad experience was bad.
really good schools/programs can isolate you from the shitshow and actually are very professional. but they are rare.
it could also have been you meshed with the politics of your school. i very much meshed with the politics of my undergrad dept, but was a pariah in my grad program for those very same politics/values.
Maybe?
I ran a lab at my school for about 10 years so I feel like my take might be a little more holistic. I’m not at all discounting you but the politics of a university are pretty layered.
it’s also the culture. some schools are more inclusive and others are exclusive. my undergrad was a more inclusive place than my grad school. my grad school was like 95% white.