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Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than

• eurekin 1y ago
  Same here. I think it's one of those fields that feel polar opposite to, what they advertise to be.
• Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
  • coderatlarge 1y ago
    as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      The viscous politics is often carried out by those who already have tenure, probably even more so because they have that protection.
      • odyssey7 1y ago
        Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
        • coderatlarge 1y ago
          the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
          • odyssey7 1y ago
            There are so many more ways than that to starve and sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never take root.
          • philwelch 1y ago
            Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
            • coderatlarge 1y ago
              sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
      • coderatlarge 1y ago
        fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about how to remove others’ tenure; which is their most prized and valuable possession.
      • Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
        Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
        • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
          I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
          • coderatlarge 1y ago
            i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
      • triceratops 1y ago
        You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too, funnily. Username checks out.
        • ryandrake 1y ago
          I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
    • aaronbaugher 1y ago
      Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
      • 77pt77 1y ago
        The "real world" is far from meritorious.
        • fuzzfactor 1y ago
          Yes, but it functionally allows a different kind of meritlessness.
    • odyssey7 1y ago
      I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
      • coderatlarge 1y ago
        in my experience, teaching quality does benefit from repetition (it is also harmed by it!).
        • dagw 1y ago
          The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
          • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
            >The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
            • SJC_Hacker 1y ago
              No, even ignoring tuition and fees a huge chunk of the endowment comes from alumni donations. Mostly former undergrads. There are pure grad institutions, such as UCSF and Baylor College of Medicine
          • 1y ago
    • hnthrow90348765 1y ago
      Tenure should be more widespread.
    • ocschwar 1y ago
      Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.
  • butlike 1y ago
    It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived intelligence."
    • gus_massa 1y ago
      Citation numbers, weighted by impact factor, h-index, number of Ph.D. students... that are bad proxies for "perceived intelligence".
• the-mitr 1y ago
  in academia many times it matters whom you know rather than what you know,
• lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  Academia is a petty place. No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people. Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within. To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    >To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
    • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good. Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
  • avoutos 1y ago
    I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.
• gchamonlive 1y ago
  I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong. You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages. Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates? Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something. > If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate. This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • code_for_monkey 1y ago
      animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand. But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
• tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
  Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia: A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable. I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world. There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
  • physicsguy 1y ago
    > I become un-fireable That's not been true in most countries for a long time
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      Depends what you do. Yes you can get fired, but you have to do some really nasty things (embezzlement, sexual assault, etc) to get fired.
      • storus 1y ago
        Or when your department gets disbanded.
        • aoki 1y ago
          Ah, the “financial exigency” escape hatch
    • labcomputer 1y ago
      You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people outside academia worry about being fired. Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
• 77pt77 1y ago
  > Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. If there's more than one human, you have politics.
• gonzobonzo 1y ago
  One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
    Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating. One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
• nick486 1y ago
  I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists... It just wasn't my thing.
  • Fomite 1y ago
    Two notes: - Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't. - Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
    • nick486 1y ago
      I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier. your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2. a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for. Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field. so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener. i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here. but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no". all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
• pixl97 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu... Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.
• gmd63 1y ago
  Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.
• SecretDreams 1y ago
  Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
  • moregrist 1y ago
    The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies. Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
    • SecretDreams 1y ago
      Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care. Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
  • Fomite 1y ago
    My schedule, while more flexible, is not better than any one of my colleagues who went into industry.
    • SecretDreams 1y ago
      Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
• at-fates-hands 1y ago
  I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job. I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government. These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
• neilv 1y ago
  I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that. I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud. Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
  • daymanstep 1y ago
    How is it better than the tech industry?
    • BrenBarn 1y ago
      Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
  • timkam 1y ago
    > That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall. I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
    • neilv 1y ago
      I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures. One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor. Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
• TimTheTinker 1y ago
  It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition. If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0] then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there. [0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees. [1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students. But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
  • Fomite 1y ago
    Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments. It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration). Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
• epolanski 1y ago
  Former solar researcher here, had the same experience. I'll summarize it like this: - join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world - be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher - can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing - randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point. - ask why this happens - she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid - she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding - only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved. And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around. I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits. I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
  • TheBigSalad 1y ago
    And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.
    • epolanski 1y ago
      I wouldn't say they all quit, but they ultimately have to settle in less prestigious and less funded labs/universities. I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as scientists. I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist, there's no overlap at all.
• zevon 1y ago
  Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense. I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).