sophie wrote:
I wonder if you've seen the same side that I have. Yes I am in the sciences which is more challenging, but has less of the issues you're pointing out. Comments and clarifications below....ok really long post but I just want to make sure that no one is dissuading their kids or neighbors from this particular career path, without knowing what it really involves.
Paid vacation: 5 weeks, but no one ever takes that much. I haven't had any real vacation in years, combination of being too busy and having the parental care situation. However - see below comment about conferences.
Oh I wasn't even including paid vacation days; I was just talking about the combination of summer vacation, winter break, and spring break. Yes, I know in theory those aren't
technically vacations for the professors, since they're preparing for next year's classes, attending committees, etc, but these are low-intensity activities, and once you've got tenure, you can more or less blow them off with no consequences!
sophie wrote:
Great pay & benefits: Huh??? Not sure where you got that idea, but academia is famous for low pay. You only do this when you wouldn't be happy anywhere else.
You must not be 60.
Apparently the median college professor salary is $86k (
citation) and the mean is $117k (
citation)
Tenured full professors make a lot of money. You don't have tenure yet; wait and see. If medicine and the sciences are anything like the humanities, your salary will rise dramatically in the first few years after you get tenure.
I expect these figures to drop over the coming decades, though. Professor salaries and benefits constitute a crazy bubble that is contributing to bankrupting public university systems all over the country, which is why administrators are clamping down on tenure-track positions and hiring more adjuncts.
sophie wrote:
Commercially dead-end side projects: Do you mean writing papers & book chapters? That all comes with the territory. The activities are not directly paid but they are not dead-end, they pay off in very important ways, i.e. grants & industry consulting positions.
Grants for "fun side projects amounting to money thrown away": That's quite a statement! Do you really believe that all federal scientific funding is money thrown away, or that all federally funded research amounts to "fun side projects"? Undoubtedly you can find examples of poorly conceived projects, but there's an awful lot of good work being done that really couldn't be funded any other way. In any case, grants are the bread and butter of academic research. It's how you stay employed. If you don't get grants, you get asked to either leave or find some other way to pay your salary. This is a serious amount of pressure that is one of the downsides of this career, in that it can keep you awake at night wondering if your job is sustainable. It's a big reason why I got interested in becoming financially independent.
I must stress that I have the most experience with the humanities, not the sciences or medicine. I firmly believe that scientific and medical research have the potential to be orders of magnitude more useful than any of the tripe that humanities professors publish. It can be used to create new materials, new products, new medical procedures, etc. It makes humanity aware of interesting technical things that were not known before, and it is this knowledge that I believe is most directly responsible for the advancement of humanity from barbarism to civilization.
A lot of this research is personally fulfilling to the researchers, and as you point out, there's a lot of pressure to supplement your salary with phony research money, which leads to a lot of marginal projects that serve as the veneer for a windfall, especially in the humanities. On that side, an enormous amount of the publications consist of "critical analysis" that is either completely obvious or completely pointless, research on a topic that is of no use to anyone, or advocacy for the author's far-left political agenda. The results are reams of pages that nobody will ever read except for the poor saps that the author gets to peer-review them or write generic blurbs for them.
IMHO there is a
huge disconnect between the output and the value to society in the humanities: dissertations that nobody reads, papers published in journals nobody reads, books published that nobody reads--all of this stuff is created for the single selfish purpose of advancing one's career, not expanding the boundaries of humanity's collective store of useful knowledge. Once written, this stuff is ignored forever because it is un-useful, un-commercializable, uninteresting to anyone except the writer and their half-dozen academic peers; it's pure make-work. It could cease with no real negative impact to anybody but the people whose careers have been built on churning it out. It's a giant circle jerk where people write useless nonsense in order to impress other people with political power over their careers who pretend to care because they themselves only write useless nonsense and know they must go through the same process. It is insular, self-serving, and it hurts the country for so many resources and so much time to be wasted on the academic equivalent of digging ditches and filling them back in again.
sophie wrote:
Job security: Yes, younger than 60. I am going up for tenure next year with very enthusiastic backing from my dept chair.
Good for you for your tenure prospects! Believe me, the world of academia changes dramatically once you have tenure. You start to realize that you really don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Some people let this get to their heads and they become horrible ogres. I've personally seen it happen on multiple occasions. I don't imagine this will be you, but academia looks very different from the different sides of the "tenure" line.
sophie wrote:
Job security is definitely a function of your accomplishments primarily, which is turn is a function of your own hard work, intelligence and creativity - which sounds reasonable to me! Yes teaching is a lot of work but I would never want to give that up. I often hear back from residents and fellows who have graduated and moved on, with questions on things like scientific issues, clinical management, and career advice. 6 courses a year sounds nasty though...I do clinical teaching rather than courses but I think standard course load here is only 2-3/year.
Academic politics: There are always people who have nothing better to do than engage in vicious little power games. Is any job truly safe from this? I've noticed that there is an inverse relationship of this behavior with productivity, so one way to minimize it is to make sure you're in a place with lots of highly accomplished people - which means, a very high quality institution where the jobs are competitive, and where you have to work hard to establish yourself. Ignore the game-players except to be extra nice to them when you do have to interact - a very effective technique I learned years ago from a friend. Otherwise focus on your own work, and spend your time with colleagues who are successful, intelligent, and fun to work with.
In my experience--which seems to be largely mirrored by your own--institutional politics are most attractive to those who produce the least amount of value. This is why there's less politics in the sciences (and medicine apparently)--
these fields produce value for society! Your academic credentials get to sit alongside all the cool things you've published, your students who have gone on to change the world, all your collaborations with NASA and Pfizer and 3M that led to cool new products, etc.
In the humanities, very little value gets produced. On average, you publish things that nobody reads or cares about. You teach students who go on to become starving artists, broke unemployed washouts, neurotic far left political agitators, and occasionally bitter humanities professors themselves. Your work is not used to do anything interesting, create anything interesting, or really advance humanity in any meaningful manner. It gets lost among the scads of people doing the exact same thing, desperate for a little money by writing pointless gobbledygook to appease the masters of the perverse system they find themselves in.
The less value is being produced, the more people engage in politics to paper over it and look important and busy.
In conclusion, if you want to go into academia, don't enter the humanities! Go hang out with Sophie and save people's lives, or invent some cool new ways for people to do things they couldn't do before. Just don't make a career out of writing things like this:
Wendy Brown, PhD PoliSci, UC Berkley wrote:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8306.html
These aims require an appreciation of tolerance as not only protean in meaning but also historically and politically discursive in character. They require surrendering an understanding of tolerance as a transcendent or universal concept, principle, doctrine, or virtue so that it can be considered instead as a political discourse and practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects. As a consortium of para-legal and para-statist practices in modern constitutional liberalism—practices that are associated with the liberal state and liberal legalism but are not precisely codified by it—tolerance is exemplary of Foucault’s account of governmentality as that which organizes “the conduct of conduct”? at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political. Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities.
This is probably negative value since I'm sure more than one student has been driven to suicide after being forced to read a whole book of this toxic waste (she has written seven of them). Here, have some more of her!
[img width=550]
https://i.imgur.com/n7Pcj5i.jpg[/img]
This is the kind of stuff you encounter on a daily basis in the humanities.
Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan