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.
From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.
If the pool grows at the same rate as the academics who need money from the pool, it's zero-sum. If the pool were ever to grow more slowly, then it's a negative-sum game. That's when all hell breaks loose -- by many accounts, this is unfolding now.
In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through their own actions, as in private business. They are forever reliant on the kindness of strangers.
That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool through public outreach and demonstrating value to companies which lobby the government to fund them, but since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company, where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and your career is determined by the beliefs of the people around you about your impacts on them.
Negative sum is the worst outcome. Only the cheaters win in that scenario and they slowly eat the legitimate players, then the weak cheats so only the biggest cheaters remain. The entire pool is then tainted.
We have acquired a couple such companies and the people that survived that environment are some of the most toxic players you ever meet. They are also really good at the game so they immediately rise to power and begin to devour their next victim.
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.
That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone at any time for no reason. Universities then overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured faculty.
In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the same job security as a teenager in their first real job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom, but they are mostly about the substance of the work rather than the performance in it. And other independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil engineers, often have similar exceptions.
They are, but extremely infrequently and when they are it is minor numbers, at least at the largest universities. And when they are laid off it is for financial reasons not performance.
Look up "rubber rooms". They sequester teachers and professors accused of sexual harassment of children, and keep paying them, because they cannot be fired.
Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and the contracts they have in place to keep them from being fired.
There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
At the state university in my smaller city, an actual professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG standards, but for many people outside of tech that sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige, though that's on offer too.
Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
I do not have set hours, but I do have obligations. When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
> When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
> Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
> My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
The curriculum meetings are because we're starting a new program, and my entire department is on 12 month contracts, not 9 month ones. Honestly, those meetings are rather fun, because it's a chance to talk about what I think we should be teaching people in my discipline - it's just an example of something that can't be "pawned off on a grad student".
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
maybe those who fight for it have better information.
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
My workload has only steadily increased once I got tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.
i’ve personally known a number of tenured professors who’ve systematically shirked all responsibility after their tenure event. they’ve been willing to live as semi-pariahs within their peer group though.
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
fwiw, i agree with most of the points in @Fomite’s response below. the people i’ve known fall into a perverse version of his “ego” point.
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
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.