I was fortunate to learn this lesson as an undergrad. My then-advisor, who could only be described as somewhere between "monster" and "disaster", who could not teach, could not lead a research team, and most certainly could not mentor (except as an anti-example!) somehow got promoted to full professor. Our group was shocked, and I learned something important about academia.
You can't flee from "Office politics", it is everywhere in life. In fact, I consider it a talent for a person to be able to judge someone's merits fairly if they dislike them. Academia seems to be very extreme on this though, because a lot of professor and admin jobs are "islands with a king" where merit is much harder to define than in a department of a company for example.
I don't know. I make a point of refusing to do office politics and being purposely fact-oriented, honest and "naive". It probably blocks some career possibilities but enables me to get things done where others can't, and I like to think also gain my colleagues' trust.
I found inside a given university job, lets say a PhD or postdoc, it is easy to just do your thing and ignore politics. There is almost no consequences for anything, as opposed to in industy. The kicker is only when you switch jobs. You need to have connections, and goodwill.
So, once you have a permanent position and are the king of the island, you can basically do whatever you want. You only have to play politics with the university leadership and funding agencies, but otherwise you can just do your thing. Of course, for the less priviliged people under you, this feels like politicking.
In a non-academic setting though I have not seen the extremely brilliant person get anything other than the promotions they deserve.
The problem I have seen is that a huge percent of the average thinks they are that brilliant person when they simply are not. I know I surely am not.
Academia though is a completely different animal. The whole system is completely broken beyond repair. Like trying to keep a 1992 Ford Taurus on the road in 2022. We are just setting money on fire to drive a piece of shit instead of investing in a new car.
Why does this person think they need to give him a reason? That’s not how hiring or promotions or tenure works. If you don’t get the job there is no obligation to tell you why.
The usual reason is if you give a reason, then they'll argue with you about it and perhaps even sue that the reason is unfair. The safest course is to not give a reason.
Then I guess you same logic applies if you go to the store to buy some groceries, and one day they say "you, you right there, TedShiller, you're not allowed to buy apples from this establishment!"
They have no obligation to tell you why, but society agrees that they owe you an explanation. Apparently you don't?
(I have an extended family member who is currently a research assistant at MIT).
Different faculty have different areas of expertise and research. Let's say you've got a handful of professors in the economics department. Each one has a thing (or two) that they're currently all about. One might be about international fraud, another about comparative economics, maybe another is into the whole basic income thing, so on and so forth. Each vies to attract other talent to the university that is complimentary or congruent to their own. They tend to want to see that grown into a larger "program" at the university, a sort of cabal. Academic merit is valuable as a second tier priority. You won't people that further your area of passionate research, and you want the people that do it best. And so those climbing the ladder, have to choose research that appeals to the people they want to retain them.
It's extraordinary to imagine that someone published books and papers in major journals without noticing the framework in which they did so.
> one of the reasons why I choose academia is because I believed in the power of ideas & hard work.
MIT is an organisation, a body corporate; it is not the reification of some Platonic ideal of academe; and organisations are inevitably about resourcing, and teamwork.
If you want recognition for individual merit, become an Olympic athlete. But of course, you'll then discover, that's about resourcing, and teamwork, too.
Well, not all organizations need to be strict bureaucracies. Bell Labs didn't work that way.
You could certainly argue that the giant bureaucracy model hasn't worked very well for science.
Even if you think it has worked well, I think you could see why some people may not like being an ever smaller cog in an ever-growing soul-crushing machine.
That's pretty rich coming from a 2,200-year-old Roman consul who commanded thousands and literally wrote the first how-to guide of abusive labor practices in the mass agricultural sector.
> It's extraordinary to imagine that someone published books and papers in major journals without noticing the framework in which they did so.
When I was doing my PhD I found departments varied wildly, even within the same university.
One of my colleagues, a PhD student in the biological sciences, was expected to come in 7 days a week, including christmas day, and regularly worked 10+ hours a day. His professor did have papers in science and nature though.
Another colleague, a PhD student in the math department, estimated he got about 3 hours of useful math done in a day, spent the rest of his time in recreation, and completed his PhD a year ahead of schedule.
An academic who took the norms of one department and tried to apply them in the other might find themselves unpopular in their new department, no matter which direction they went.
I agree that different departments can vary wildly within a school, and I would go even further to say that different research groups can vary wildly too even within a department. Office culture and politics can be multi-layered and different at different scales, in other words.
Yes, he is leading the reader to the conclusion he drew by illustrating first his otherness and then his high performance.
I don't see how this would serve as a counter-example to the claim "merit doesn't matter as much as <being in the in-group>" or whatever he claims supplants merit.
Minor nitpick: Hispanic is really not a race, even in the American world where Caucasian (which is always hilarious to me because, you know, the Caucasus is a real place) and "black" are ( and they aren't).
Scientifically, "Black" is probably less of a race than "Hispanic" in a global context, possibly that's reversed if you focus just on USA though.
And neither are really races as science says were all the human race, just if you were going to say genetic similarity is 'race' that would be the case because of the vast diversity in African genetics that happen to have dark skin (which isnt even necessary to be 'black' in the usa.)
Race is a social construct invented by colonizers (whites) as a way to categorize and other-ize everyone else. It has no biological or ethnic or cultural meaning. Race is not an inherent thing, but a complex relationship between groups of people with unequal power and privileges.
Put in a scientific context, it's correct to say that people whose genetic history is derived entirely from african ancestors are biologically distinct from people whose ancestor left africa a long time ago and then evolved in the regions they resided for long periods. We see this from genomic sequences as well as visible phenotypes (which is what most racial classifications are based on).
Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
>Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
How is it any less meaningful than "black" that comprises ethnicities and mixes of ethnicities that vary far more than all(!) people outside of sub-Saharan Africa (in pre-globalization sense) taken together.
>Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
They also distinguish brown from black, African-American from black and god knows what else.
What, I thought that was just South Africa (under Apartheid)?
> African-American from black
I thought those were synonyms?
> and god knows what else.
Yeah, for a country ostensibly attempting to get away from its old racist ways, the USA seems remarkably fixated on the minutiae of distinguishing and registering "race".
No, despite what the staff of my then-college’s newspaper apparently were thinking when writing about a visit by Winnie Mandela to the US, “African-American” and “black” are not synonyms.
Duh, true, of course. I've seen (and laughed at) the same thing, "African-American" being used about immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Sweden, people who had never been near America.
But what I (must have) meant to write was, "African-American" is pretty much the mandatory term to use for American Blacks, right? (<-- And should "Blacks" really be capitalised there?)
Sure, race and ethnicity refer to heritage. But "hispanic" apparently means only... Well, les'see: A heritage from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Countries which contain different races and ethnicities. So that leaves only a heritage of... the Spanish language, AFAICS. A linguistic heritage, not a racial or ethnic one.
It's a race as much as "person from English speaking coubtry" is a race. It encompasses white Spaniards, black Dominicans, and indigenous people from Central and South America who don't necessarily speak Spanish themselves.
There are two dictionary definitions of race: people sharing common biological features, and people in the same ethnic group. The biological features one clearly doesn't work.
An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common cultural background or descent, but the cultures and descents of these people are very different.
At the very least, representation in government. People who share my ethnicity have unique social problems that don't apply to any other "race". I don't need a race, but the people who share my background need to be discernible on a census.
But you just said "people who share my ethnicity", which has nothing to do with race. People of any race can share your ethnicity. Is a black Mexican closer in culture to a Nigerian or to a Mexican?
I'm not sure you understand how governments work. That's ok. On a census, there's no box to check off every strain that makes up my ethnicity. There's a box that says "Hispanic". I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive.
You're right. My comment was uncharitable and US-centric. Sorry. I found it hard to not react because of the personal stake I feel I have in this sort of conversation. I'll try to do better.
And why can't an arbitrary set of genetic and cultural traits have a name? Everything else in this universe can be broken down to an arbitrary set of something. Why for e.g. call somebody an American when it's only a person living withing arbitrary lines on map?
I'm sorry but that is a really weird argument. Who are those groups of people who want us to pretend there are no similarities or differences between them and other groups of people?
Calling it "pretend" is both dismissive and begs the question. The people you want to call "Hispanics" are ethnically rather diverse, far from homogeneous. The similarities you see originate in ignorance. Mexicans aren't Columbians, Brazillians aren't Portuguese and all of these countries are home to many different ethnic groups with their own histories, languages, cultures and genetics.
I'm not calling anyone anything. The GP of this post claims to be of Hispanic race. You claim he is not entitled to call himself that. Are you the the arbiter of what he is allowed to call him self? I'm must admit I do find it ironic when you simultaneously claim groups of people don't want to be named and then at the same time are trying to prevent somebody from such a group to call himself that.
It seems like you just want to be argumentative for the sake of it. If you review our comments, you'll find where you called it pretending and you'll not find where I said he couldn't call himself whatever he wants.
In the meantime, consider why many people don't want to be lumped in with people they have nothing in common with. If you take that thought seriously, you might learn to see the world somewhat differently.
Maybe I would learn something if you could actually provide some evidence besides being needlessly patronizing. Who are those people? What do their feelings have to do with a fact that there exist a set of traits which which could be used to subdivide us into groups?
That's mostly down to a weird quirk of English, which uses the word "race" for both ~"breed" and "species", so you can say "There are no 'races', we're all just the Human Race!". In most other languages, where "race" means only ~"breed" and not "species", that's as silly as saying "There are no 'breeds', all dogs are just the Dog Species!" Yeah, sure, but a Dachshund is quite different from a Great Dane in many ways (and, yes, of course quite similar in many more), so the statement is nonsense. They're both the Dog species, but different breeds.
Limit the word to mean only ~"breed" and it does kind of make sense for humans, too: There are definitely sub-groups of us, the members of which share many similar physical characteristics within the group and differ in these characteristics between the groups, because of long genetic isolation. If you look at it calmly you realise that's not a big problem in and of itself -- the problems come when you start claiming some of these groups are inherently superior or inferior to each other: One can admit that an African differs from an Asian, while still realising that a blanket statement saying an African is "better" than an Asian or vice versa is as silly as a blanket statement saying a Dachshund is "better" than a Great Dane or vice versa.
I'm not sure, but it often feels like this linguistic oddity makes the whole subject so much more inflamed and harder to discuss in the English-speaking world.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History (77–79 AD) derives the name of the Caucasus from Scythian kroy-khasis ("ice-shining, white with snow").[9] German linguist Paul Kretschmer notes that the Latvian word Kruvesis also means "ice".[10][11]
In the Tale of Past Years (1113 AD), it is stated that Old East Slavic Кавкасийскыѣ горы (Kavkasijskyě gory) came from Ancient Greek Καύκασος (Kaúkasos; later Greek pronunciation Káfkasos)),[12] which, according to M. A. Yuyukin, is a compound word that can be interpreted as the "Seagull's Mountain" (καύ-: καύαξ, καύηξ, ηκος ο, κήξ, κηϋξ "a kind of seagull" + the reconstructed \*κάσος η "mountain" or "rock" richly attested both in place and personal names).[13]
In Georgian tradition, the term Caucasus is derived from Caucas (Georgian: კავკასოსი Kawḳasosi), the son of the Biblical Togarmah and legendary forefather of Nakh peoples.[14][15]
According to German philologists Otto Schrader and Alfons A. Nehring, the Ancient Greek word Καύκασος (Kaukasos) is connected to Gothic Hauhs ("high") as well as Lithuanian Kaũkas ("hillock") and Kaukarà ("hill, top").[12][16] British linguist Adrian Room points out that Kau- also means "mountain" in Pelasgian.[17]
Appropriately for your pun, the guy who came up with the term caucasian did so because he thought the perfect specimens of young male beauty came from the caucauses.
It’s actually a very funny term if you are from Russia. Because in Russia Caucasian means someone from Caucasian mountains and they are often considered “black” as opposed to Europeans and Asians by the general xenophobic wisdom.
There are no human races. The very practice of talking about human races as if they exist is itself already racist. It always boggles my mind how talking about race seems to be completely normal and acceptable in the US...
Does it not depend on the intent? The word "racism" implies some kind of bad intent if I am not mistaken. You might have a useless or uninformed piece of conversation around race (whatever the word "race" is supposed to mean; I really do not exactly know nor do I care) but this does not imply that there is racism involved.
The problem is that using the term “race“ affirmatively legitimizes the concept of human race. Not only does it have no basis in reality, it can be extremely harmful, as history has shown.
It could be argued that doing all of that despite being a member of an oppressed group would be more meritorious than not. Swimming a mile is one thing, swimming a mile upstream is another.
Is this really a good faith question? Like all other Hispanics in white dominated environments they face everything from casual racism to outright discrimination.
Yes, being a Hispanic at MIT is soooo tough. After all, when he got a meeting with the president:
"We had our conversation in Spanish, and I think that afforded some candor that would not have been there otherwise."
Being able to talk to the Hispanic President of MIT in his own native language and getting benefits from that is not exactly screaming discrimination, is it.
Imagine if anti-racist activists weren't themselves horribly racist. Their entire creed prizes skin colour above the individual, and treats them as members of groups first, people second.
Hell, a lot of those activists trying to get merit-based admissions out of schools? It's to get schools to be less Asian. San Fran just recalled a bunch of activist types from school boards, and I'd bet money that vote was in good part driven by the Asian population realizing the activist faculty were out to screw them over.
Does "casual racism" include believing that people of specific ethnicities are swimming upstream if they get involved in academics? Are Chinese, Japanese, and Indian academics swimming upstream too?
> But one of the reasons why I choose academia is because I believed in the power of ideas & hardwork.
Yeah sorry about the disappointment. But no. Academia is very far removed from that. And probably even before you think. I might say we got good ideas from there not because Academia favours ideas and hard work (it doesn't), but despite of that.
> “Look Cesar, the truth is that, if you are a mediocre researcher, but your department wants to keep you, they’ll find a way to keep you. And if you are a strong researcher, and your department wants to get rid of you, they’ll find a way to get rid of you.”
Having seen people go through the tenure process at peer institution, this sounds right. Your department writes up an internal assessment of you and solicits letters from faculty at other institutions. They can stack the deck in your favor, and to some extent against you, by choosing favorable or unfavorable letter-writers. The people who review a tenure file that the department writes up can push back or ask questions, but it would be difficult for them to undo the effect of a department's framing — if the department worked hard to shade it one way or the other.
> I finally got “an answer.” The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research, productivity, or merit. It was about office politics & being liked by your department.
I don't think conclusion is warranted. Even if the people in a department don't want you around, if you have outside interest they would look like fools to have not tenured you. If you are sufficiently excellent to get outside interest from peer institutions, your home institution will be pressured to grant you tenure as well. They might not make you the most compelling offer to stay, but you will get tenure.
"From what I understand (second-hand info), personality not productivity drove this decision. He ran an unhappy lab, and he was arrogant even for MIT. I can definitely see that in the way he presents himself, so I can give credence to that explanation. Don’t know personally so he could be a great guy and I’m wrong, but there are valid reasons someone can be denied tenure even with research that goes above and beyond, and it isn’t hard to imagine that being the case here."
It does sound plausible, but I wouldn't put too much weight on such Reddit chatter, nor spread such gossiping rumors. That level of indirection ("reddit guy who knows a friend but isn't sure") is worse than "my aunt's neighbor's nephew". Imagine somebody did this about you, that'd suck.
> your home institution will be pressured to grant you tenure as well
Well, let me tell you that the day I got a somewhat prestigious fellowship, one which comes with years of extra funding on the condition that the department gives you tenure, the secretary of the faculty came over and said "congratulations, but there won't be tenure for you". Next year, someone down the hall got the same fellowship, and they did promise her tenure immediately. It's terribly political, at least over here, and I've heard the same from other countries.
I'm not so sure anymore: there's no consequences to institutions anymore because of the surplus of talented candidates. At most what happens is the junior person moves, and there's a brief scandal, but the department replaces the person with another talented person, and everyone forgets and moves on.
This is a topic very close to me and I could have responded to any one of a number of comments. I'm a little dismayed by some of the responses here; I think the comments speak as much in some ways to problems with academics and our vocational culture as much as anything.
I don't know the details of this case, and I'll acknowledge that there are slivers of the storytelling that strike me as odd. But what I can definitely say is that reading it, it seems very realistic to me in a way where it can be taken at face value.
In my former department, there were many cases like this, only with gender, and the department was sued. The university settled out of court for large sums of money, and faculty won tenure on appeal. Their cases sounded exactly like his.
Years afterward there were other problems that sounded very similar to this individual's situation, not involving gender. I've been on many promotion and tenure committees, and some outcomes were reasonable and some were absurdly biased and hypocritical. More problematic was the way people were treated after tenure. Over 1/3 of the faculty left, and 90% of the people in my area left. Another area basically vanished completely because they all chose to leave.
All of the people who were denied tenure and/or who left were very good, conscientious, socially skilled, cooperative people. In fact, as a whole, they were more reasonable, cooperative, and so forth than the department they left. That was the problem.
One of the things that's bothered me the most is in that time there have basically been zero consequences to the department. The university just chalks it up to internal squabbling, and wants to see the department do well, and assumes however they define that will be best. Hires are certainly not an issue because there's such an oversupply of very talented people that they can pick and choose, and people will go just because it's a tenure-track position finally. There's almost certainly a group outside the university who sees it as becoming a better department, because they are similar to those left behind.
What bothers me about some of the comments is this weird assumption many still have -- and I'm aware of this because it's how I used to see the world -- that it must be this person denied tenure who's the problem. That they're not cooperative, that they didn't do good enough research, and so forth and so on. And that might be the case. But sometimes departments are just ridiculously dysfunctional, so much so that basic assumptions you have about how workplaces should work just don't apply anymore. A lot of the responses here strike me as this typical case of "my life experiences have been that departments on the whole have been reasonable, so therefore everywhere is like this, and if anything suggests the contrary, it's a threat to my worldview so I'll just choose to reject it."
Maybe this happens everywhere, but I still feel like we haven't absorbed it into our vocational culture, that institutional environment matters. With academics in particular, I think the problem is amplified 100-fold, that the whole structure is based on these completely incorrect assumptions about what's going on, based on what was happening in the 1990s or something, and everyone has their heads in the sand about everything.
I'm not even sure where to go with my comments, because there's so many directions. Academics is so completely broken and dysfunctional I don't even know where to start.
> In my former department, there were many cases like this, only with gender, and the department was sued. The university settled out of court for large sums of money, and faculty won tenure on appeal. Their cases sounded exactly like his.
Did the faculty member decide to stay, or go elsewhere? Most people would probably feel very uncomfortable about the lawsuit and outcome, even if it was ultimately vindicating.
Out of curiosity, what was the settlement in terms of multiples of annual salary? Are we talking 5x or 20x?
I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird. People are strung along for years, and then you are suddenly either out or you have tenure for life. (A friend compared a professorship it to being the pope, which I think is fitting.)
You need to have a perfect track record. You have to have worked in a couple of different places, with no gaps, you need a lot of publications and "visibility". And even then, in my experience about 50% of positions are given on merit, and 50% are given seemingly randomly. Even if you are incredibly self-confident and count yourself among the top 5%, it is still a gamble.
Academia works like a guild, or maybe like the military (up or out). But it seems everybody would benefit if hiring was changed to be more like outside academia. No more temporary positions vs unfireable professors, but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts. Don't insist on an unbroken career and years of travelling journeymanship, but value broad experiences and career changers. I know a lot of people who are considered academic failures but were welcomed in industry "with kisses".
I don't think the cause is just resistance from entrenched people, or ideology. There is a lot of neoliberal pressure to run universities more like companies. And I guess hiring is one of the few areas where this would not be a bad thing. Is it just shortsightedness then? Or lack of funding, and scarcity of jobs?
Academia is extremely competitive (in terms of applicants per post), which probably explains most of it. Show business, or generally arts and performance, which are similar (not great working conditions but huge supply of labour relative to demand) seem similarly pathological.
What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce.
Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior.
I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.
I’m sure this is true, but I’m curious if you have any experience with this in another country? The one European country in which I’ve been in a university setting seemed to have similar tenure-pressure dynamics as in the US.
The UK doesn't have Tenure. I think it's true that the academic pressures are similar, there's still not enough secure jobs for those who want them. But it does at least mean that professors have to continue performing to a reasonable standard if they expect to keep their jobs, and this frees up space for new people if they don't.
Yes - formal tenure was abolished under Thatcher's government in the 80s. The academic job market here is also brutal, but it's brutal on admission to lectureships (tenure-track assistant professorships in the US). Once appointed on a 'permanent' contract there's no race for tenure: it's like an ordinary public-sector job where you can have a reasonable expectation of continuing employment but aren't immune from redundancy (==layoff) or dismissal for poor performance (which is quite rare).
It's a better system for early-mid career academics than the US, IMO, and I'm glad I'm here. Other systems are better for other career stages: some European countries give PhD students actual employment protections and a salary, while life as a tenured full prof in Germany or the US is sweeter than the British equivalent.
Doesn't stop the other grim employment aspects of modern academia, either: exploitation of hourly-paid PhD students for most of the teaching, far fewer posts than qualified applicants, eternal postdocry etc.
Most universities in The Netherlands do not have a tenure-track system (no automatic promotion). It is not uncommon for faculty to retain the rank of assistant or associate professor until retirement, without ever becoming full professor.
It's also common in the U.S. to have such faculty positions. Non-tenure-track positions that teach and keep up with their field but don't have "publish or perish" pressures.
At least in the US, an "associate professor" is already tenured -- you don't have to be a full professor to be tenured -- you just have to get out of the assistant professor stage. There are of course non-tenure track positions such as "adjunct professors" which are generally hired on a year to year (or even semester to semester) basis.
It depends on the university. Even in the same university (eg Stanford) it is possible to have associate professors with and without tenure, depending on department/school.
If you can't get a tenure at MIT, you can try at a second tier university. If that fails, you can try at t third tier university. You will get a lower pay and less money for research projects and travel, and the students will be not as brilliant. Also, you may have to teach more courses and have less research time.
Hiring in academia is weired because of freedom and essentially a life-time paychecks without any real commitment you have to make. So they need to make sure the person have an internal drive aka intrinsic motivation and has energy to go for long time rather than one-hit wonders.
Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.
Traditional universities were structured like guilds. After you completed your studies in liberal arts, you got the rank of master and the license to teach at any university. The members (masters) of the university made decisions by vote. The idea that universities should have bosses and that the faculty are employees is rather new.
These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there.
Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.
While I don't dispute the accuracy of your description, there are some conclusions that I wish we as a society would revisit. By your logic that the researchers only work for the university in a very technical sense (and often retain the commercial rights to their work), I honestly don't see how they're underpaid. If anything I question what value they bring to universities at all, and question how much of the inflation of college tuition is driven by this operating model (I know administration is a large part of the increase, but many administrative jobs are tied to the procurement and management of grants).
It depends on the grant. Most grants do not let you take ownership of the research. Nearly all publicly funded research contracts require the results to be public domain.
researchers do not retain commercial rights to their work, the university does. Sometimes the university allows the researcher a pittance of the license royalties, or make it easier for the researcher to start a company that licenses the technology.
Bringing value to the university does not really make sense as a concept.
A university is fundamentally a community of scholars. The services the wider society expects from the community vary from generation to generation, but some things remain constant. The university as an organization does not have any goals apart from survival and prestige. It's the least important part of the university. The assumption is that the scholars deal with such highly specialized matters that generalist administrators have no competence in setting the actual goals.
Universities educate a lot of people these days, because the society believes that learning specialized topics from scholars and researchers is more prestigious than learning them from teachers or industry professionals. The society also gives plenty of research funding to the scholars, even though it's questionable whether the results actually benefit the society providing the funds, especially in smaller countries. It's just that you need research to have a community of scholars these days, and such communities tend to generate a lot of activity around them, with clear cultural and economic benefits in the long term.
Whether a person is underpaid or whether their salary is competitive does not depend on the job they do but on the other jobs they could do. If you want to hire a person who could make $500k somewhere else, the competitive salary is $500k. If you can't pay that (maybe the job only creates $300k of value), you have to offer something else if you want to hire them. Universities have traditionally offered stable positions in a community of independent professionals.
> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird.
Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job.
I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult.
At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.
Well, the post was written by someone who clearly doesn't understand their friends motives, yeah? Perhaps they don't want to work in ad-tech because that would not give them satisfaction.
I specifically said that the situation in CS was better, because industry does such a good job competing for PhDs. When I was finishing my PhD in CS 15 years ago, doing a post-doc before applying for a tenure-track position was pretty rare, and only done if you felt that you'd benefit from it in some way.
My friends are in the sciences, which has far fewer opportunities in industry. They're not going to end up in ad-tech either way.
One is that they see it as a kind of failure -- like, for them to pursue a job in industry is to admit that they just weren't good enough for academia. This is part of the "cult" aspect I was talking about.
Another is the unknown -- they feel like they have a reasonable amount of freedom to choose what to do when they're in academia, and fear that when moving to industry they'll just have to do whatever they're told; not knowing that at their level, they'd have more freedom in industry (and they have more restrictions in academia) than they realize.
Another I think is the "almost there" aspect: a combination of the sunk costs fallacy and optimism. If you'd told my friend at the age of 30 that he'd still be on 2-year contracts at the age of 50, he probably would have chosen a different career path. But at each stage, it always seems like getting something permanent might be 3-5 years away.
Related to this is the known: one friend genuinely likes and respects his PE, and feels a loyalty to him. How can I tell him that in my opinion, if his PE actually cared about him, he would be shoving him out the door and telling him to go into industry, rather than making noises about possibly finding money for him to keep working for him for another 2-3 years (at which point he'll again have the prospect of losing his job)? I mean, I'm sure his PE actually is a good person and just hasn't thought seriously about the situation; but that doesn't really excuse him.
I do try to hint at these things, but how do you tell someone that you think this thing that they are passionate about and in love with -- something they've invested decades of their life in -- is actually toxic and abusive?
I took the attitude that moving to industry was just a phase in my academic career; in my case it opened up many new doors for my research. But this is not common.
Also, the real reason to move it industry is better work life balance. If you choose your employer wisely you can work about 20% of a day and make 50% above market, then retire 5-10 years earlier.
Industry tends to have differing ideologies than academia. Generally academia is about open knowledge while industry is about closed knowledge driven by profits and greed.
Not saying there aren't some greedy administrators in universities, it's definitely a growing problem, but in industry it's the defining characteristic.
wonder if you’d be willing to share what company that you joined was? I gather an academic would readily give away the name of the institution that looked after them, hopefully the same would be true for those who make it in industry?
At the time, google was very open to its software engineers doing interesting 20% projects that led to scientific papers, but I wasn't ever able to join the research org fulltime and be a researcher.
Because industry runs on profits. The dream is to have resources given to you to push forward human intellect without having to answer to short term profits.
The most useful math today had limited applications when it was invented. Society doesn't highly value these highly valuable contributions, so there is a scarcity in research resources while having the most alluring work. The result? Highly talented people living in apartments with no prospect of affording a family.
Academia spends 13% of society's overall basic research money yet produces 48% of the overall performance.
I don't think tripling public research funding should triple public research output. I think it would give some breathing room for the fantastical "meritocracy" belief to be closer to reality in one sector of society. Also, academia needs to cut the g&a chuff.
That math applies to literally every other profession.
What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.
> That math applies to literally every other profession.
Um, not really? A single mechanical engineering prof trains thousands of mechanical engineering grads in his career because there are thousands more ME jobs than tenured professorships.
> What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.
As long as those jobs were proper jobs, with appropriate pay, job security, and genuine opportunities for advancement, yes. I wouldn't even mind if they all got PhDs if people were honest ahead of time about typical career progressions.
As the sibling comment says, the 999 mechanical engineers will not train anybody. So it is still: one person trained replaces one person working.
People with PhDs can already work on more than just scientific positions, so it is not a huge problem that we are producing too many. As you say, we should be more honest about career changes. I don't think we need hugely many professorships either. But we should open up the hiring pool. If professors do more and more admin work anyway as their career progresses, why do you need 15+ years experience and personal connections to do that job? In industry, you have the other extreme: MBAs with no knowledge about the subject matter get hired as managers.
And if most of the labor is done by master and PhD students, why not open up the scientific hiring pool to people from other specializations or from outside academia? I would say my postdoc and research time was maximally 10% thinking about physics, 30% coding, 30% writing papers, 30% data analysis (and 20 bonus % meetings and people skill). You could easily train a good developer or engineer in a year to do this, about the same time I needed to get up to speed with the topic.
So yeah, there is a shortage of positions. But to fix that, you need a lot more funding (and honestly I'm not sure it makes sense if society allocates too much more resources to research. A bit, certainly, but I'd allocate more to health care, primary education, etc. first.)
But the second problem is the baroque way to get a career in science. To fix that, you'd need to start hiring like a tech company. And this could actually make the competition worse, but you would be selecting for the best, and not for the people who make the most personal concessions for their career.
> I don't understand why hiring in academia is so weird.
You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common.
As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat!
Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed.
A lot of good answers have dealt with various individual problems.
I want to address the meta-problem:
Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration.
To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model.
Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds.
The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department.
Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.
That is because academia have access to government loan aka free money. There isn't any real competition to their students. If we make 1. Penalizing failed students, 2. Easily retransferable any students to different college, 3. Warranty as in stuff they teach must allow the students to get relevant jobs within 4 years of graduating, all their prices are fixed and non inflationable and displayed in comparisons to other schoola like newegg, you will see them behave differently. Right now they are just a protected racket that can do what they want even racism and biasism on "corporate scale".
The author is probably much smarter than me, but at the same time, I cannot imagine what kind of immature manchild he must be, to write such a banal article.
Like, of course you have to develop and maintain a good relationship with your prospective coworkers if you hope to get handed a lifetime position working with them.
Considering this amount of immaturity, I can extrapolate a few reasons why they were not keen on keeping him around forever.
The corollary here is, and it is one I strongly support, that it doesn't matter how good you're in your job if you're a douche.
I don't know the author, and it may totally be the case that, in a faculty that is anything but homogenous, there is a specific bias against Hispanics (that is not shared by above proportionally represented other minorities).
But there's equally and probably more prevalently, a case to be made for the "decency is optional" culture in academia.
We're essentially used to the eccentrics and outright incompatible with social life figures that wander our halls. The guy who never showers and seems to bathe in cat urine every morning, but it kept on because he once was fifth author on a paper written by a Nobel laureate. The professor who never shows up but gets all offended if you ask for help or presence at a faculty meeting. The prima donna who stormed out of a disciplinary meeting against them because the water they were served was not sparkly and did not have the right temperature.
MIT's Media Lab seems to have taken strides to break this mold. Before his ties with Epstein came to light, Joi Ito was the director, he is followed by Dava Newmann. It hosts labs such as "Poetic Justice: exploring new forms of social justice through art," and more.
There are always two sides to a story, and the other side might very well be one of "yeah, you're a decent researcher but your behavior does not fit into the changing landscape of our academic climate."
One thing that can make you immediately unpopular in a community is implicitly accusing the community of racism when that's not actually the case, or, perversely, if it's a relatively small issue.
A minority individual trying to gain the approval of the majority is in a bad Nash equilibrium spot and cannot openly confront latent racist attitudes without triggering an imediate community defense.
The world of academia is neither meritocratic nor fair. Everything from start to finish is based on mere politics, boot licking and any shenanigan known to man. There's are lots and lots of spoiled apples anywhere, no matter the country or institution.
>“I am sorry, I am not going to be able to simply talk about research. I just learned that my tenure case was denied.” He looked at me & said instantly: “But if your case had been approved, who in the senior faculty would have won?” He understood the game. My mistake was thinking I was a player when I was a pawn.
I don't get it, the entire piece is a man old enough to qualify for tenure discovering that politics exists in academia? Written in the prose style of a Dan Brown novel? Could have at least given us the meat of the story here about what actually transpired because I honestly can't take that at face value
A meritocracy might not be based on what you consider to be merit-worthy. Maybe politics and fundraising is the ability/achievement that advancement is based on.
A longtime friend of mine wanted to go into academics instead of business because academics was meritocratic and pure and free of the taint of profit seeking. Years of academia disabused him of that notion, and he decided to go into government service because that was meritocratic and pure and free of profit-seeking and the ills that afflicted academia.
He discovered to his chagrin that government service was all politics.
It was kinda brutal to his notions of meritocracy.
The thing about business, though, is that failure to make a profit has a way of clearing out the deadwood and "purifying" the behavior of the business.
I seem to be reading this differently from most people here. To me, this post reads like someone who's hard to work with. He listed his race first, coloring the entire rest of the story, and then he went on to air the seemingly confidential advice his president gave him in good faith.
It's also a bit puzzling that he didn't realize that "being liked" is a valuable skill, and dismisses it as "I thought it would only be on merit, rather than any other pesky things like working well with people", as if that doesn't factor into merit.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was his personality that lost him the position, instead of his race.
Do you prefer bad research because the researcher is liked? Because this is what it ultimately boils down to. Ideally, meritocracy would be the most important factor. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be treated by the least competent but most liked surgeon. Why should it be any different in other professions?
If nobody wants to work with you, you won't be able to get research done. You shouldn't get tenure if you're so toxic that you make N other researchers quit.
I prefer three good researchers to a great one. The exchange rate is not even close.
Have you ever seen how many authors are on a research paper? Research in most disciplines is not some lone person at a bench doing experiments, it's a collection of people looking at previous work, generating new ideas, and testing them. People like to downplay effective teamwork as "office politics" but the best research comes not only from intelligence or "merit" but also from the ability to work effectively with others.
Would you like to be treated by a surgeon who doesn't get along well with the nurses and the other staff that's in the operating room? And because of this the performance of the whole team is impacted?
While I understand the lens this is coming from, I don’t think it’s realistic.
Faculty, in general, don’t operate as a team like in a more traditional business. One or two or five might collaborate on a project but they typically operate very independently of one another.
Words like “collegiality” are frequently used in the academic hiring and promotion process to speak to issues that are seen as outside or parallel to merit. The problem being that the historical evidence shows that concerns about collegiality have frequently been used to disrupt actual evaluation of meritocracy in ways that specifically harm URM faculty.
Collegiality gets used because there is no real expectation that faculty act like a team, just that they aren’t active assholes to do heir peers in committee meetings.
Being difficult to work with is not a generalized negative in academia. It only is seen as a problem when someone has some other problem with you. Many faculty, in my experience/opinion, who are fantastic researchers have the emotional maturity of small children. There is a trend against that but it is far from disqualifying.
Academia, like many things, is a meritocracy until it’s not.
I would ask if you really understand the organization of lines at a university. If you do not, then you're missing more than can be explained in a few sentences.
There are substantial duties outside of teaching and research. Tenure obligates faculty to some of these (eg- committee work) and frees them from others.
Additionally, many pillars are required to build stable colleges. A tenured faculty member has to have some measure of generalized aptitude and capability in addition to deep specialty and institutional knowledge. Many spend increasing time fighting their "other duties" and neglecting others as they approach retirement, placing burdens on their peers who have their own obligations or have taken on additional responsibilities in the college to juggle time for pay.
Good deans understand and attempt to manage this so they don't lose the faculty they would like to keep before an opportunity arises for the productive contributors to become tenured or tenure tracked. They stewards, past and present, who rely on information not available to the faculty at large.
Not being tenured doesn't necessarily mean you're poorly compensated or not highly valued, but it's a point of pride some can't swallow when they've given many years to an institution and have stalled in trajectory because their university couldn't justify adding a new line to their department. It's not about them, they know it, and the type of people who can't accept that, knowingly and incorrectly assign blame, and take everyone down with them like the author above are exactly who you want to protect the college from ever entering a tenured role.
But medical residency, fellowship, and faculty selection processes are carried out in much the same way as the tenure selection process is portrayed here. Your surgeon has been granted their position based on a variety of factors, including but definitely not limited to technical competence.
What I am reading is that it's still about merit. It's just that part of that merit is being a good team member. Understanding other's motivations, helping them when you can, not standing in their way, etc. You don't have to be a people pleaser or a yes-man, but you must behave in a way that makes people want to have you around. Of course that includes providing good results in the more technical parts of the work.
The fact that the author choose to name that "office politics" and "being liked by your department" (as if that was a bad thing?) seems to imply that maybe they have not yet fully understood that.
That's not what's being said here - you've missed the last line. The question is who stands to gain politically if this person is promoted? If the answer is no one, then it is in no ones interest to push the case for tenure. Frequently politics and 'being liked' are very different.
Academia's biggest problem is a severe lack of people willing to say, "that is wrong and you aren't doing real science". When you read the academic literature what you see is endless oceans of pseudo-scientific garbage, whole fields that evaporate when carefully examined by outsiders. This is correctly destroying people's confidence in science, and all the institutions that have implicitly hitched their own authority to that of "science" (e.g. public health, governments, legacy media).
It shows just how far academia has decayed that tenure is now being restricted to people who others like to have around when the whole point of ideas like tenure and academic freedom was to empower people who are not good team members, and who can thus advance science in big ways by challenging the orthodoxy of the day. That sort of distinction is the justification for academia's existence. If they're only going to recruit people pleasing yes-men a.k.a. team players who they like to be around, why bother with academia at all? The results from corporate science labs are more relevant and don't need subsidies, after all.
It’s funny that you mention pseudoscientific garbage here.
Apparently, Cesar Hildalgo’s phd advisor was Barabasi, the ardent promoter of the “scale-free network” concept. Which, while hot last decade, has (to put it charitably) gone out of fashion:
Huh, how interesting. My reaction to reading the definition of network science was that this didn't sound like a genuine thing you could study at all. No surprise that it turned out you couldn't.
It's also quite intriguing that the originators of this claim came from physics. It seems like quite a few bad ideas in recent years trace back to people who left physics. Neil Ferguson studied physics before switching to epidemiology. Perhaps the general level of rigor required in modern physics pushes out the wooly thinkers and they end up undermining other fields instead.
It's going to take a lot of years for people to realize merit doesn't exist.
I wish people would read more Bourdieu.
Merit is some fictional carrot you give to children so they can study at school.
The whole concept of the degree is also quite pointless. Why grade the work of students? Why introduce competition in learning? What's the point of filtering students when they apply? Why would one school be prestigious and not another?
People go to school to learn, so why put a limit on learning by measuring performance?
Just look at this one simple fact: if merit does exist, then why are we still doing interviews? Because in the end, we want group homogeneity. People want to "feel" each other, they don't really care about competence or skill, they want other metrics that are far, far away from merit: politics, culture, identity, etc.
191 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] thread¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
I found inside a given university job, lets say a PhD or postdoc, it is easy to just do your thing and ignore politics. There is almost no consequences for anything, as opposed to in industy. The kicker is only when you switch jobs. You need to have connections, and goodwill.
So, once you have a permanent position and are the king of the island, you can basically do whatever you want. You only have to play politics with the university leadership and funding agencies, but otherwise you can just do your thing. Of course, for the less priviliged people under you, this feels like politicking.
The problem I have seen is that a huge percent of the average thinks they are that brilliant person when they simply are not. I know I surely am not.
Academia though is a completely different animal. The whole system is completely broken beyond repair. Like trying to keep a 1992 Ford Taurus on the road in 2022. We are just setting money on fire to drive a piece of shit instead of investing in a new car.
When it comes to promotions it's a shitty employer that doesn't tell their people how to improve.
They have no obligation to tell you why, but society agrees that they owe you an explanation. Apparently you don't?
I am not from academia, but can someone explain the "game" to me? Why do senior faculty win or lose based on who gets tenure?
Different faculty have different areas of expertise and research. Let's say you've got a handful of professors in the economics department. Each one has a thing (or two) that they're currently all about. One might be about international fraud, another about comparative economics, maybe another is into the whole basic income thing, so on and so forth. Each vies to attract other talent to the university that is complimentary or congruent to their own. They tend to want to see that grown into a larger "program" at the university, a sort of cabal. Academic merit is valuable as a second tier priority. You won't people that further your area of passionate research, and you want the people that do it best. And so those climbing the ladder, have to choose research that appeals to the people they want to retain them.
> one of the reasons why I choose academia is because I believed in the power of ideas & hard work.
MIT is an organisation, a body corporate; it is not the reification of some Platonic ideal of academe; and organisations are inevitably about resourcing, and teamwork.
If you want recognition for individual merit, become an Olympic athlete. But of course, you'll then discover, that's about resourcing, and teamwork, too.
You could certainly argue that the giant bureaucracy model hasn't worked very well for science.
Even if you think it has worked well, I think you could see why some people may not like being an ever smaller cog in an ever-growing soul-crushing machine.
When I was doing my PhD I found departments varied wildly, even within the same university.
One of my colleagues, a PhD student in the biological sciences, was expected to come in 7 days a week, including christmas day, and regularly worked 10+ hours a day. His professor did have papers in science and nature though.
Another colleague, a PhD student in the math department, estimated he got about 3 hours of useful math done in a day, spent the rest of his time in recreation, and completed his PhD a year ahead of schedule.
An academic who took the norms of one department and tried to apply them in the other might find themselves unpopular in their new department, no matter which direction they went.
I believe this is a quote from GH Hardy; that not just your friend but anybody does about 3 good hours of creative mathematics in a day.
Author complains about merit, but list his race BEFORE his credentials.
I don't see how this would serve as a counter-example to the claim "merit doesn't matter as much as <being in the in-group>" or whatever he claims supplants merit.
And neither are really races as science says were all the human race, just if you were going to say genetic similarity is 'race' that would be the case because of the vast diversity in African genetics that happen to have dark skin (which isnt even necessary to be 'black' in the usa.)
Put in a scientific context, it's correct to say that people whose genetic history is derived entirely from african ancestors are biologically distinct from people whose ancestor left africa a long time ago and then evolved in the regions they resided for long periods. We see this from genomic sequences as well as visible phenotypes (which is what most racial classifications are based on).
Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
How is it any less meaningful than "black" that comprises ethnicities and mixes of ethnicities that vary far more than all(!) people outside of sub-Saharan Africa (in pre-globalization sense) taken together.
>Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
They also distinguish brown from black, African-American from black and god knows what else.
What, I thought that was just South Africa (under Apartheid)?
> African-American from black
I thought those were synonyms?
> and god knows what else.
Yeah, for a country ostensibly attempting to get away from its old racist ways, the USA seems remarkably fixated on the minutiae of distinguishing and registering "race".
> I thought those were synonyms?
No, despite what the staff of my then-college’s newspaper apparently were thinking when writing about a visit by Winnie Mandela to the US, “African-American” and “black” are not synonyms.
But what I (must have) meant to write was, "African-American" is pretty much the mandatory term to use for American Blacks, right? (<-- And should "Blacks" really be capitalised there?)
The term Hispanic just refers to anyone with heritage from a Spanish speaking country in the Americas. It is neither a race nor an ethnicity.
>It is neither a race nor an ethnicity.
I wonder what you think race and ethnicity refer to if not heritage.
There are two dictionary definitions of race: people sharing common biological features, and people in the same ethnic group. The biological features one clearly doesn't work.
An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common cultural background or descent, but the cultures and descents of these people are very different.
In the meantime, consider why many people don't want to be lumped in with people they have nothing in common with. If you take that thought seriously, you might learn to see the world somewhat differently.
Yeah. Like, often, Americans -- but we still have a name for those.
Yes, you don't have a race. There are no human races.
That's mostly down to a weird quirk of English, which uses the word "race" for both ~"breed" and "species", so you can say "There are no 'races', we're all just the Human Race!". In most other languages, where "race" means only ~"breed" and not "species", that's as silly as saying "There are no 'breeds', all dogs are just the Dog Species!" Yeah, sure, but a Dachshund is quite different from a Great Dane in many ways (and, yes, of course quite similar in many more), so the statement is nonsense. They're both the Dog species, but different breeds.
Limit the word to mean only ~"breed" and it does kind of make sense for humans, too: There are definitely sub-groups of us, the members of which share many similar physical characteristics within the group and differ in these characteristics between the groups, because of long genetic isolation. If you look at it calmly you realise that's not a big problem in and of itself -- the problems come when you start claiming some of these groups are inherently superior or inferior to each other: One can admit that an African differs from an Asian, while still realising that a blanket statement saying an African is "better" than an Asian or vice versa is as silly as a blanket statement saying a Dachshund is "better" than a Great Dane or vice versa.
I'm not sure, but it often feels like this linguistic oddity makes the whole subject so much more inflamed and harder to discuss in the English-speaking world.
I always laugh at the term cockasian. Hehe. Who comes up with this stuff?
Does it not depend on the intent? The word "racism" implies some kind of bad intent if I am not mistaken. You might have a useless or uninformed piece of conversation around race (whatever the word "race" is supposed to mean; I really do not exactly know nor do I care) but this does not imply that there is racism involved.
This US racial categories are pure madness, quite useless in fact, and they do more harm than good.
Without him, I would have likely flunked out.
"We had our conversation in Spanish, and I think that afforded some candor that would not have been there otherwise."
Being able to talk to the Hispanic President of MIT in his own native language and getting benefits from that is not exactly screaming discrimination, is it.
These should theoretically be the people who do not engage in casual racism or outright discrimination against Hispanics.
Hell, a lot of those activists trying to get merit-based admissions out of schools? It's to get schools to be less Asian. San Fran just recalled a bunch of activist types from school boards, and I'd bet money that vote was in good part driven by the Asian population realizing the activist faculty were out to screw them over.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Yeah sorry about the disappointment. But no. Academia is very far removed from that. And probably even before you think. I might say we got good ideas from there not because Academia favours ideas and hard work (it doesn't), but despite of that.
Having seen people go through the tenure process at peer institution, this sounds right. Your department writes up an internal assessment of you and solicits letters from faculty at other institutions. They can stack the deck in your favor, and to some extent against you, by choosing favorable or unfavorable letter-writers. The people who review a tenure file that the department writes up can push back or ask questions, but it would be difficult for them to undo the effect of a department's framing — if the department worked hard to shade it one way or the other.
> I finally got “an answer.” The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research, productivity, or merit. It was about office politics & being liked by your department.
I don't think conclusion is warranted. Even if the people in a department don't want you around, if you have outside interest they would look like fools to have not tenured you. If you are sufficiently excellent to get outside interest from peer institutions, your home institution will be pressured to grant you tenure as well. They might not make you the most compelling offer to stay, but you will get tenure.
"From what I understand (second-hand info), personality not productivity drove this decision. He ran an unhappy lab, and he was arrogant even for MIT. I can definitely see that in the way he presents himself, so I can give credence to that explanation. Don’t know personally so he could be a great guy and I’m wrong, but there are valid reasons someone can be denied tenure even with research that goes above and beyond, and it isn’t hard to imagine that being the case here."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/sv34ez/tenure_d...
Well, let me tell you that the day I got a somewhat prestigious fellowship, one which comes with years of extra funding on the condition that the department gives you tenure, the secretary of the faculty came over and said "congratulations, but there won't be tenure for you". Next year, someone down the hall got the same fellowship, and they did promise her tenure immediately. It's terribly political, at least over here, and I've heard the same from other countries.
This is a topic very close to me and I could have responded to any one of a number of comments. I'm a little dismayed by some of the responses here; I think the comments speak as much in some ways to problems with academics and our vocational culture as much as anything.
I don't know the details of this case, and I'll acknowledge that there are slivers of the storytelling that strike me as odd. But what I can definitely say is that reading it, it seems very realistic to me in a way where it can be taken at face value.
In my former department, there were many cases like this, only with gender, and the department was sued. The university settled out of court for large sums of money, and faculty won tenure on appeal. Their cases sounded exactly like his.
Years afterward there were other problems that sounded very similar to this individual's situation, not involving gender. I've been on many promotion and tenure committees, and some outcomes were reasonable and some were absurdly biased and hypocritical. More problematic was the way people were treated after tenure. Over 1/3 of the faculty left, and 90% of the people in my area left. Another area basically vanished completely because they all chose to leave.
All of the people who were denied tenure and/or who left were very good, conscientious, socially skilled, cooperative people. In fact, as a whole, they were more reasonable, cooperative, and so forth than the department they left. That was the problem.
One of the things that's bothered me the most is in that time there have basically been zero consequences to the department. The university just chalks it up to internal squabbling, and wants to see the department do well, and assumes however they define that will be best. Hires are certainly not an issue because there's such an oversupply of very talented people that they can pick and choose, and people will go just because it's a tenure-track position finally. There's almost certainly a group outside the university who sees it as becoming a better department, because they are similar to those left behind.
What bothers me about some of the comments is this weird assumption many still have -- and I'm aware of this because it's how I used to see the world -- that it must be this person denied tenure who's the problem. That they're not cooperative, that they didn't do good enough research, and so forth and so on. And that might be the case. But sometimes departments are just ridiculously dysfunctional, so much so that basic assumptions you have about how workplaces should work just don't apply anymore. A lot of the responses here strike me as this typical case of "my life experiences have been that departments on the whole have been reasonable, so therefore everywhere is like this, and if anything suggests the contrary, it's a threat to my worldview so I'll just choose to reject it."
Maybe this happens everywhere, but I still feel like we haven't absorbed it into our vocational culture, that institutional environment matters. With academics in particular, I think the problem is amplified 100-fold, that the whole structure is based on these completely incorrect assumptions about what's going on, based on what was happening in the 1990s or something, and everyone has their heads in the sand about everything.
I'm not even sure where to go with my comments, because there's so many directions. Academics is so completely broken and dysfunctional I don't even know where to start.
Did the faculty member decide to stay, or go elsewhere? Most people would probably feel very uncomfortable about the lawsuit and outcome, even if it was ultimately vindicating.
Out of curiosity, what was the settlement in terms of multiples of annual salary? Are we talking 5x or 20x?
You need to have a perfect track record. You have to have worked in a couple of different places, with no gaps, you need a lot of publications and "visibility". And even then, in my experience about 50% of positions are given on merit, and 50% are given seemingly randomly. Even if you are incredibly self-confident and count yourself among the top 5%, it is still a gamble.
Academia works like a guild, or maybe like the military (up or out). But it seems everybody would benefit if hiring was changed to be more like outside academia. No more temporary positions vs unfireable professors, but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts. Don't insist on an unbroken career and years of travelling journeymanship, but value broad experiences and career changers. I know a lot of people who are considered academic failures but were welcomed in industry "with kisses".
I don't think the cause is just resistance from entrenched people, or ideology. There is a lot of neoliberal pressure to run universities more like companies. And I guess hiring is one of the few areas where this would not be a bad thing. Is it just shortsightedness then? Or lack of funding, and scarcity of jobs?
What keeps “normal” jobs in check is that people can leave and join elsewhere, but that’s not really the case with academia - jobs are scarce.
Also, in any workplace, ruthless or narcissistic people are better at navigating career progression - and in academia they are harder to fire once they become senior.
I think once you correct for these factors, it’s not qualitatively different from other “industries”.
It's a better system for early-mid career academics than the US, IMO, and I'm glad I'm here. Other systems are better for other career stages: some European countries give PhD students actual employment protections and a salary, while life as a tenured full prof in Germany or the US is sweeter than the British equivalent.
Doesn't stop the other grim employment aspects of modern academia, either: exploitation of hourly-paid PhD students for most of the teaching, far fewer posts than qualified applicants, eternal postdocry etc.
https://cesarhidalgo.com/
Ah, the eternal post-doc. That surely will shake things up for the better.
And I'd rather be eternal post-doc, than time-limited post-doc and suddenly 40 years old and having to find a new career.
Ok, so that's what should happen in ideal world. In real world, things are very political and one would be lucky to have even quater of these ideals materialize.
These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That's because universities don't do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office/lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won't try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there.
Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don't hire people to do research, because they don't do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and/or tuition fees, they can't pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that "something else" is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.
A university is fundamentally a community of scholars. The services the wider society expects from the community vary from generation to generation, but some things remain constant. The university as an organization does not have any goals apart from survival and prestige. It's the least important part of the university. The assumption is that the scholars deal with such highly specialized matters that generalist administrators have no competence in setting the actual goals.
Universities educate a lot of people these days, because the society believes that learning specialized topics from scholars and researchers is more prestigious than learning them from teachers or industry professionals. The society also gives plenty of research funding to the scholars, even though it's questionable whether the results actually benefit the society providing the funds, especially in smaller countries. It's just that you need research to have a community of scholars these days, and such communities tend to generate a lot of activity around them, with clear cultural and economic benefits in the long term.
Whether a person is underpaid or whether their salary is competitive does not depend on the job they do but on the other jobs they could do. If you want to hire a person who could make $500k somewhere else, the competitive salary is $500k. If you can't pay that (maybe the job only creates $300k of value), you have to offer something else if you want to hire them. Universities have traditionally offered stable positions in a community of independent professionals.
Well do the math. In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career. OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition. But most professors are churning out far more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for. Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a "tenure" job.
I have two close friends, one in their 40's, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it's absolutely shameful. Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job. There's no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they're going to support their families every few years. It's really like some kind of a cult.
At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you're in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs. If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work/life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.
My friends are in the sciences, which has far fewer opportunities in industry. They're not going to end up in ad-tech either way.
One is that they see it as a kind of failure -- like, for them to pursue a job in industry is to admit that they just weren't good enough for academia. This is part of the "cult" aspect I was talking about.
Another is the unknown -- they feel like they have a reasonable amount of freedom to choose what to do when they're in academia, and fear that when moving to industry they'll just have to do whatever they're told; not knowing that at their level, they'd have more freedom in industry (and they have more restrictions in academia) than they realize.
Another I think is the "almost there" aspect: a combination of the sunk costs fallacy and optimism. If you'd told my friend at the age of 30 that he'd still be on 2-year contracts at the age of 50, he probably would have chosen a different career path. But at each stage, it always seems like getting something permanent might be 3-5 years away.
Related to this is the known: one friend genuinely likes and respects his PE, and feels a loyalty to him. How can I tell him that in my opinion, if his PE actually cared about him, he would be shoving him out the door and telling him to go into industry, rather than making noises about possibly finding money for him to keep working for him for another 2-3 years (at which point he'll again have the prospect of losing his job)? I mean, I'm sure his PE actually is a good person and just hasn't thought seriously about the situation; but that doesn't really excuse him.
I do try to hint at these things, but how do you tell someone that you think this thing that they are passionate about and in love with -- something they've invested decades of their life in -- is actually toxic and abusive?
Also, the real reason to move it industry is better work life balance. If you choose your employer wisely you can work about 20% of a day and make 50% above market, then retire 5-10 years earlier.
Not saying there aren't some greedy administrators in universities, it's definitely a growing problem, but in industry it's the defining characteristic.
At the time, google was very open to its software engineers doing interesting 20% projects that led to scientific papers, but I wasn't ever able to join the research org fulltime and be a researcher.
The most useful math today had limited applications when it was invented. Society doesn't highly value these highly valuable contributions, so there is a scarcity in research resources while having the most alluring work. The result? Highly talented people living in apartments with no prospect of affording a family.
In support of my point:
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20201/figure/18
Academia spends 13% of society's overall basic research money yet produces 48% of the overall performance.
I don't think tripling public research funding should triple public research output. I think it would give some breathing room for the fantastical "meritocracy" belief to be closer to reality in one sector of society. Also, academia needs to cut the g&a chuff.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014
Basically going into industry would be removing themselves from the Brahmin caste and trying to go into the Merchant caste and that just wont do.
What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.
Um, not really? A single mechanical engineering prof trains thousands of mechanical engineering grads in his career because there are thousands more ME jobs than tenured professorships.
> What one would need to do is to train less PhD students and have more scientific staff instead. Maybe one should even get rid of the current structure altogether, and just hire people as "scientists" and/or "lecturers" after their master's.
As long as those jobs were proper jobs, with appropriate pay, job security, and genuine opportunities for advancement, yes. I wouldn't even mind if they all got PhDs if people were honest ahead of time about typical career progressions.
People with PhDs can already work on more than just scientific positions, so it is not a huge problem that we are producing too many. As you say, we should be more honest about career changes. I don't think we need hugely many professorships either. But we should open up the hiring pool. If professors do more and more admin work anyway as their career progresses, why do you need 15+ years experience and personal connections to do that job? In industry, you have the other extreme: MBAs with no knowledge about the subject matter get hired as managers.
And if most of the labor is done by master and PhD students, why not open up the scientific hiring pool to people from other specializations or from outside academia? I would say my postdoc and research time was maximally 10% thinking about physics, 30% coding, 30% writing papers, 30% data analysis (and 20 bonus % meetings and people skill). You could easily train a good developer or engineer in a year to do this, about the same time I needed to get up to speed with the topic.
So yeah, there is a shortage of positions. But to fix that, you need a lot more funding (and honestly I'm not sure it makes sense if society allocates too much more resources to research. A bit, certainly, but I'd allocate more to health care, primary education, etc. first.)
But the second problem is the baroque way to get a career in science. To fix that, you'd need to start hiring like a tech company. And this could actually make the competition worse, but you would be selecting for the best, and not for the people who make the most personal concessions for their career.
You were "discriminated" against too? Oh wow, we have something in common.
As a bonus researchers, we can discuss the hidden costs the bitterness this breeds on those around us. Neat!
Or everytime a topic like this comes up, we make a conscious effort not to engage. We put in real cognitive time to search for alternative discussion avenues. Dang, each of those precious minutes adds up. It's a real cost. Because these issues come up every fucking day, and some don't have to put in that real time. There could have been an alternate world where this wasn't needed.
What's today's hot topic?
I want to address the meta-problem:
Academia, as an institution, does not have a close connection between the factors that make it money (students paying $$$) and high quality university administration.
To put it another way, there are systemic economic or market based forces driving institutional change in academia's leadership model.
Individual deans and department heads may or may not run their faculties well. But there is no external enforcement mechanism that pushes said deans and department heads to do a good job. Much less the mushrooming number of non-academic staff in most universities. Where increasingly lay administration is absorbing 20-40% of the overall institutional budget or more, with excuses of various kinds.
The students keep coming, and keep paying. Change only happens when political will accumulates to the point that top down governance is imposed on the academic department.
Usually however, this only occurs (in an academic department) when the research output causes a drop in the university's rankings. And the time between bad leadership, and it impacting research output, is enormous.
(No, I don't think "the medium is the message".)
Ideas and hard work are extremely powerful, so of course they are weaponized in service to internal politics and power plays.
So, what scores you points is working hard to further others' ideas and making them more powerful.
I don't know the author, and it may totally be the case that, in a faculty that is anything but homogenous, there is a specific bias against Hispanics (that is not shared by above proportionally represented other minorities).
But there's equally and probably more prevalently, a case to be made for the "decency is optional" culture in academia.
We're essentially used to the eccentrics and outright incompatible with social life figures that wander our halls. The guy who never showers and seems to bathe in cat urine every morning, but it kept on because he once was fifth author on a paper written by a Nobel laureate. The professor who never shows up but gets all offended if you ask for help or presence at a faculty meeting. The prima donna who stormed out of a disciplinary meeting against them because the water they were served was not sparkly and did not have the right temperature.
MIT's Media Lab seems to have taken strides to break this mold. Before his ties with Epstein came to light, Joi Ito was the director, he is followed by Dava Newmann. It hosts labs such as "Poetic Justice: exploring new forms of social justice through art," and more.
There are always two sides to a story, and the other side might very well be one of "yeah, you're a decent researcher but your behavior does not fit into the changing landscape of our academic climate."
A minority individual trying to gain the approval of the majority is in a bad Nash equilibrium spot and cannot openly confront latent racist attitudes without triggering an imediate community defense.
I don't get it, the entire piece is a man old enough to qualify for tenure discovering that politics exists in academia? Written in the prose style of a Dan Brown novel? Could have at least given us the meat of the story here about what actually transpired because I honestly can't take that at face value
You don't get the biggest house through "merit" of being the best person. You get it via the "merit" of competing along all axes in the best way.
He discovered to his chagrin that government service was all politics.
It was kinda brutal to his notions of meritocracy.
The thing about business, though, is that failure to make a profit has a way of clearing out the deadwood and "purifying" the behavior of the business.
Human limits (communication, understanding, trust) cause politics everywhere.
It's also a bit puzzling that he didn't realize that "being liked" is a valuable skill, and dismisses it as "I thought it would only be on merit, rather than any other pesky things like working well with people", as if that doesn't factor into merit.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was his personality that lost him the position, instead of his race.
I prefer three good researchers to a great one. The exchange rate is not even close.
Faculty, in general, don’t operate as a team like in a more traditional business. One or two or five might collaborate on a project but they typically operate very independently of one another.
Words like “collegiality” are frequently used in the academic hiring and promotion process to speak to issues that are seen as outside or parallel to merit. The problem being that the historical evidence shows that concerns about collegiality have frequently been used to disrupt actual evaluation of meritocracy in ways that specifically harm URM faculty.
Collegiality gets used because there is no real expectation that faculty act like a team, just that they aren’t active assholes to do heir peers in committee meetings.
Being difficult to work with is not a generalized negative in academia. It only is seen as a problem when someone has some other problem with you. Many faculty, in my experience/opinion, who are fantastic researchers have the emotional maturity of small children. There is a trend against that but it is far from disqualifying.
Academia, like many things, is a meritocracy until it’s not.
There are substantial duties outside of teaching and research. Tenure obligates faculty to some of these (eg- committee work) and frees them from others.
Additionally, many pillars are required to build stable colleges. A tenured faculty member has to have some measure of generalized aptitude and capability in addition to deep specialty and institutional knowledge. Many spend increasing time fighting their "other duties" and neglecting others as they approach retirement, placing burdens on their peers who have their own obligations or have taken on additional responsibilities in the college to juggle time for pay.
Good deans understand and attempt to manage this so they don't lose the faculty they would like to keep before an opportunity arises for the productive contributors to become tenured or tenure tracked. They stewards, past and present, who rely on information not available to the faculty at large.
Not being tenured doesn't necessarily mean you're poorly compensated or not highly valued, but it's a point of pride some can't swallow when they've given many years to an institution and have stalled in trajectory because their university couldn't justify adding a new line to their department. It's not about them, they know it, and the type of people who can't accept that, knowingly and incorrectly assign blame, and take everyone down with them like the author above are exactly who you want to protect the college from ever entering a tenured role.
The fact that the author choose to name that "office politics" and "being liked by your department" (as if that was a bad thing?) seems to imply that maybe they have not yet fully understood that.
Academia's biggest problem is a severe lack of people willing to say, "that is wrong and you aren't doing real science". When you read the academic literature what you see is endless oceans of pseudo-scientific garbage, whole fields that evaporate when carefully examined by outsiders. This is correctly destroying people's confidence in science, and all the institutions that have implicitly hitched their own authority to that of "science" (e.g. public health, governments, legacy media).
It shows just how far academia has decayed that tenure is now being restricted to people who others like to have around when the whole point of ideas like tenure and academic freedom was to empower people who are not good team members, and who can thus advance science in big ways by challenging the orthodoxy of the day. That sort of distinction is the justification for academia's existence. If they're only going to recruit people pleasing yes-men a.k.a. team players who they like to be around, why bother with academia at all? The results from corporate science labs are more relevant and don't need subsidies, after all.
Apparently, Cesar Hildalgo’s phd advisor was Barabasi, the ardent promoter of the “scale-free network” concept. Which, while hot last decade, has (to put it charitably) gone out of fashion:
https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2018/02/scant-...
I wonder if his advisor’s “bad luck” had rubbed off on him.
It's also quite intriguing that the originators of this claim came from physics. It seems like quite a few bad ideas in recent years trace back to people who left physics. Neil Ferguson studied physics before switching to epidemiology. Perhaps the general level of rigor required in modern physics pushes out the wooly thinkers and they end up undermining other fields instead.
I wish people would read more Bourdieu.
Merit is some fictional carrot you give to children so they can study at school.
The whole concept of the degree is also quite pointless. Why grade the work of students? Why introduce competition in learning? What's the point of filtering students when they apply? Why would one school be prestigious and not another?
People go to school to learn, so why put a limit on learning by measuring performance?
Just look at this one simple fact: if merit does exist, then why are we still doing interviews? Because in the end, we want group homogeneity. People want to "feel" each other, they don't really care about competence or skill, they want other metrics that are far, far away from merit: politics, culture, identity, etc.
Any good starting points?
Masculine Domination (2001)
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977)
State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (1998)
He intervened several times on TV and there are audios of him, in french. Maybe youtube does auto subtitles.