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AN ASPIRING SCIENTIST’S FRUSTRATION WITH MODERN-DAY ACADEMIA: A
RESIGNATION09/09/2013PASCAL 246 COMMENTS
actually me.
Here is a mind-blowing text that was sent to all EPFLresearchers
(presumably) by a doctoral student during the week-end. It expresses
feelings that are worth to think about.
Just to be crystal-clear:
· I am not the author of this text.
· I don’t publish the name of his/her author, since I have no proof
that his/her e-mail address was not spoofed.
· I don’t think that the exposed facts are a problematic unique to
EPFL, nor to any other Swiss university: to the contrary, this is probably
a worldwide phenomenon.
· Finally, I would like to make very clear that I did not experience
the same feelings at all during my (very happy) PhD times
at EPFL. So, don’t try to make any parallel with my own experience.
· Like the author, I don’t have any good idea how to change the system
towards a better one.
Still, if you are or have been in the academic world, I think it is
worth to invest 10 minutes to read this text.
Dear EPFL,
I am writing to state that, after
four years of hard but enjoyable PhD work at this school, I am planning to
quit my thesis in January, just a few months shy of completion. Originally,
this was a letter that was intended only for my advisors. However, as I
prepared to write it I realized that the message here may be pertinent to
anyone involved in research across the entire EPFL, and so have extended
its range just a bit. Specifically, this is intended for graduate students,
postdocs, senior researchers, and professors, as well as for the people at
the highest tiers of the school’s management. To those who have gotten this
and are not in those groups, I apologize for the spam.
While I could give a multitude of
reasons for leaving my studies – some more concrete, others more abstract –
the essential motivation stems from my personal conclusion that I’ve lost
faith in today’s academia as being something that brings a positive benefit
to the world/societies we live in. Rather, I’m starting to think of it as a
big money vacuum that takes in grants and spits out nebulous results,
fueled by people whose main concerns are not to advance knowledge and to
effect positive change, though they may talk of such things, but to build
their CVs and to propel/maintain their careers. But more on that later.
Before continuing, I want to be
very clear about two things. First, not everything that I will say here is
from my personal firsthand experience. Much is also based on conversations
I’ve had with my peers, outside the EPFL and in, and reflects their
experiences in addition to my own. Second, any negative statements that I
make in this letter should not be taken to heart by all of its readers. It
is not my intention to demonize anyone, nor to target specific individuals.
I will add that, both here and elsewhere, I have met some excellent people
and would not – not in a hundred years – dare accuse them of what I wrote
in the previous paragraph. However, my fear and suspicion is that these
people are few, and that all but the most successful ones are being
marginalized by a system that, feeding on our innate human weaknesses, is
quickly getting out of control.
I don’t know how many of the PhD students
reading this entered their PhD programs with the desire to actually *learn*
and to somehow contribute to science in a positive manner. Personally, I
did. If you did, too, then you’ve probably shared at least some
of the frustrations that I’m going to describe next.
(1) Academia: It’s Not Science,
It’s Business
I’m going to start with the
supposition that the goal of “science” is to search for truth, to improve
our understanding of the universe around us, and to somehow use this
understanding to move the world towards a better tomorrow. At least, this
is the propaganda that we’ve often been fed while still young, and this is
generally the propaganda that universities that do research use to put
themselves on lofty moral ground, to decorate their websites, and to
recruit naďve youngsters like myself.
I’m also going to suppose that in
order to find truth, the basic prerequisite is that you, as a researcher,
have to be brutally honest – first and foremost, with yourself and about
the quality of your own work. Here one immediately encounters a
contradiction, as such honesty appears to have a very minor role in many
people’s agendas. Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world,
you learn that being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that
stating your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas.
Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”,
and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is
given to good presentation over good content – a priority that, though
understandable at times, has now gone overboard. The “evil” kind of
networking (see, e.g.,http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/networking-good-vs-evil/)
seems to be openly encouraged. With so many business-esque things to worry
about, it’s actually surprising that *any* scientific research still gets
done these days. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely the naďve PhDs, still
new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young
Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny
and frightening that the majority of the world’s academic research is
actually being done by people like me, who don’t even have a PhD degree.
Many advisors, whom you would expect to truly be pushing science forward
with their decades of experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to
manage the PhD students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then
put their names on as a sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read the
document (sometimes, in particularly desperate cases, they may even try to
steal first authorship). Rarely do I hear of advisors who actually go
through their students’ work in full rigor and detail, with many apparently
having adopted the “if it looks fine, we can submit it for publication”
approach.
Apart from feeling the gross
unfairness of the whole thing – the students, who do the real work, are
paid/rewarded amazingly little, while those who manage it, however
superficially, are paid/rewarded amazingly much – the PhD student is often
left wondering if they are only doing science now so that they may
themselves manage later. The worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in
academia accepts this and begins to play on the other side of the table.
Every PhD student reading this will inevitably know someone unlucky enough
to have fallen upon an advisor who has accepted this sort of management and
is now inflicting it on their own students – forcing them to write paper
after paper and to work ridiculous hours so that the advisor may advance
his/her career or, as if often the case, obtain tenure. This is
unacceptable and needs to stop. And yet as I write this I am reminded of
how EPFL has instituted its own tenure-track system not too long ago.
(3) Academia: The Backwards
Mentality
A very saddening aspect of the
whole academic system is the amount of self-deception that goes on, which
is a “skill” that many new recruits are forced to master early on… or
perish. As many PhD students don’t truly get to choose their research
topic, they are forced to adopt what their advisors do and to do “something
original” on it that could one day be turned into a thesis. This is all
fine and good when the topic is genuinely interesting and carries a lot of
potential. Personally, I was lucky to have this be the case for me, but I
also know enough people who, after being given their topic, realized that
the research direction was of marginal importance and not as interesting as
it was hyped up by their advisor to be.
This seems to leave the student
with a nasty ultimatum. Clearly, simply telling the advisor that the
research is not promising/original does not work – the advisor has already
invested too much of his time, reputation, and career into the topic and
will not be convinced by someone half his age that he’s made a mistake. If
the student insists, he/she will be labeled as “stubborn” and, if the
insisting is too strong, may not be able to obtain the PhD. The alternative,
however unpleasant, is to lie to yourself and to find arguments that you’re
morally comfortable with that somehow convince you that what you’re doing
has important scientific value. For those for whom obtaining a PhD is a
*must* (usually for financial reasons), the choice, however tragic, is
obvious.
The real problem is that this
habit can easily carry over into one’s postgraduate studies, until the
student themselves becomes like the professor, with the backwards mentality
of “it is important because I’ve spent too many years working on it”.
(4) Academia: Where Originality
Will Hurt You
The good, healthy mentality would
naturally be to work on research that we believe is important.
Unfortunately, most such research is challenging and difficult to publish,
and the current publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on
the table while working on problems that require at least ten years of
labor before you can report even the most preliminary results. Worse yet,
the results may not be understood, which, in some cases, is tantamount to
them being rejected by the academic community. I acknowledge that this is
difficult, and ultimately cannot criticize the people who choose not to
pursue such “risky” problems.
Ideally, the academic system
would encourage those people who are already well established and trusted
to pursue these challenges, and I’m sure that some already do. However, I
cannot help but get the impression that the majority of us are avoiding the
real issues and pursuing minor, easy problems that we know can be solved
and published. The result is a gigantic literature full of
marginal/repetitive contributions. This, however, is not necessarily a bad
thing if it’s a good CV that you’re after.
(5) Academia: The Black Hole of
Bandwagon Research
Indeed, writing lots of papers of
questionable value about a given popular topic seems to be a very good way
to advance your academic career these days. The advantages are clear: there
is no need to convince anyone that the topic is pertinent and you are very
likely to be cited more since more people are likely to work on similar
things. This will, in turn, raise your impact factor and will help to
establish you as a credible researcher, regardless of whether your work is
actually good/important or not. It also establishes a sort of stable
network, where you pat other (equally opportunistic) researchers on the
back while they pat away at yours.
Unfortunately, not only does this
lead to quantity over quality, but many researchers, having grown dependent
on the bandwagon, then need to find ways to keep it alive even when the
field begins to stagnate. The results are usually disastrous. Either the
researchers begin to think up of creative but completely absurd extensions
of their methods to applications for which they are not appropriate, or
they attempt to suppress other researchers who propose more original
alternatives (usually, they do both). This, in turn, discourages new
researchers from pursuing original alternatives and encourages them to join
the bandwagon, which, though founded on a good idea, has now stagnated and
is maintained by nothing but the pure will of the community that has become
dependent on it. It becomes a giant, money-wasting mess.
(6) Academia: Statistics Galore!
“Professors with papers are like
children,” a professor once told me. And, indeed, there seems to exist an
unhealthy obsession among academics regarding their numbers of citations,
impact factors, and numbers of publications. This leads to all sorts of
nonsense, such as academics making “strategic citations”, writing
“anonymous” peer reviews where they encourage the authors of the reviewed
paper to cite their work, and gently trying to tell their colleagues about
their recent work at conferences or other networking events or sometimes
even trying to slip each other their papers with a
“I’ll-read-yours-if-you-read-mine” wink and nod. No one, when asked if they
care about their citations, will ever admit to it, and yet these same
people will still know the numbers by heart. I admit that I’ve been there
before, and hate myself for it.
At the EPFL, the dean sends us an
e-mail every year saying how the school is doing in the rankings, and we
are usually told that we are doing well. I always ask myself what the point
of these e-mails is. Why should it matter to a scientist if his institution
is ranked tenth or eleventh by such and such committee? Is it to boost our
already overblown egos? Wouldn’t it be nicer for the dean to send us an
annual report showing how EPFL’s work is affecting the world, or how it has
contributed to resolving certain important problems? Instead, we get these
stupid numbers that tell us what universities we can look down on and what
universities we need to surpass.
(7) Academia: The Violent Land of
Giant Egos
I often wonder if many people in
academia come from insecure childhoods where they were never the strongest
or the most popular among their peers, and, having studied more than their
peers, are now out for revenge. I suspect that yes, since it is the only
explanation I can give to explain why certain researchers attack, in the
bad way, other researchers’ work. Perhaps the most common manifestation of
this is via peer reviews, where these people abuse their anonymity to tell
you, in no ambiguous terms, that you are an idiot and that your work isn’t
worth a pile of dung. Occasionally, some have the gall to do the same
during conferences, though I’ve yet to witness this latter manifestation
personally.
More than once I’ve heard leading
researchers in different fields refer to other methods with such beautiful
descriptions as “garbage” or “trash”, sometimes even extending these
qualifiers to pioneering methods whose only crime is that they are several
decades old and which, as scientists, we ought to respect as a man respects
his elders. Sometimes, these people will take a break from saying bad
things about people in their own fields and turn their attention to other
domains – engineering academics, for example, will sometimes make fun of
the research done in the humanities, ridiculing it as ludicrous and
inconsequential, as if what they did was more important.
(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick
It Ever Pulled was Convincing the World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing
question that the people in academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we
really needed?” Year after year, the system takes in tons of money via all
sorts of grants. Much of this money then goes to pay underpaid and
underappreciated PhD students who, with or without the help of their
advisors, produce some results. In many cases, these results are
incomprehensible to all except a small circle, which makes their value
difficult to evaluate in any sort of objective manner. In some rare cases,
the incomprehensibility is actually justified – the result may be very
powerful but may, for example, require a lot of mathematical development
that you really do need a PhD to understand. In many cases, however, the
result, though requiring a lot of very cool math, is close to useless in
application.
This is fine, because real
progress is slow. What’s bothersome, however, is how long a purely theoretical
result can be milked for grants before the researchers decide to produce
something practically useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be
a strong urge for people in academia to go and apply their result, even
when this becomes possible, which most likely stems from the fear of
failure – you are morally comfortable researching your method as long as it
works in theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it and to
learn that it doesn’t work in reality. No one likes to publish papers which
show how their method fails (although, from a scientific perspective,
they’re obliged to).
These are just some examples of
things that, from my humble perspective, are “wrong” with academia. Other
people could probably add others, and we could go and write a book about
it. The problem, as I see it, is that we are not doing very much to remedy
these issues, and that a lot of people have already accepted that “true
science” is simply an ideal that will inevitably disappear with the current
system proceeding along as it is. As such, why risk our careers and
reputations to fight for some noble cause that most of academia won’t
really appreciate anyway?
I’m going to conclude this letter
by saying that I don’t have a solution to these things. Leaving my PhD is
certainly not a solution – it is merely a personal decision – and I don’t
encourage other people to do anything of the sort. What I do encourage is
some sort of awareness and responsibility. I think that there are many of
us, certainly in my generation, who would like to see “academia” be
synonymous with “science”. I know I would, but I’ve given up on this
happening and so will pursue true science by some other path.
While there was a time when I
thought that I would be proud to have the letters “PhD” after my name, this
is unfortunately no longer the case. However, nothing can take away the
knowledge that I’ve gained during these four years, and for that, EPFL, I
remain eternally grateful.
My
sincerest thanks for reading this far
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246 COMMENTS
1. REPLY
09/09/2013
JAN DE RUITER
Everything written here is important and true. Many thanks to the
author for taking the trouble to write it up. I wish the author a
productive and fullfilling life outside of academia.
2. REPLY
09/09/2013
BILL SKAGGS
The word for this is “burnout”. I’ve seen it happen to graduate
students a dozen times in a dozen places. Most commonly it is the result of
people forcing themselves to work very hard for a long time on something
that doesn’t actually interest them or that they don’t understand. The
negativity that that produces spreads like a cancer.
3. REPLY
09/09/2013
CARL
@Bill Skaggs – what’s your point here? Are you denying the things
s/he describes are real our prevalent? If not are you denying that they’re
a problem?
Thus is a really common response to great students who express their
frustrations with how broken academia is. Instead of responding to the
problems, ours thrown back on the student: “he’s a burnout,” “he just can’t
cut it and he’s bitter,” etc. That’s another symptom of what’s wrong-as if
being successful in science requires developing Stockholm syndrome towards
your superiors and cynicism towards your peers and juniors. And *that’s*
the attitude that’s spread like a cancer.
o REPLY
20/07/2015
JESSICA
I
totally agree with your comment, @Carl. Nothing to add.
o REPLY
23/02/2016
UNITED
Good
point, i agree!
Same problems here in Germany, you get ripped off the society if you
research for truth! (i hope i wrote it right)
4. REPLY
09/09/2013
GLENN
Interesting points. 1) yes, it’s a business, because it costs a lot
of money to pay for the people and infrastructure needed to do many forms
of research. Did you think we live off the goodness of our hearts? 2) Good
mentors will start PhD students writing most of the paper themselves (and
with others), and gradually teach you to conceive of and write papers on
your own. Good mentors are hard to find, sadly. And yes, being a senior
researcher means filling out a lot of paperwork (grant applications) and
actively managing junior students and faculty. It’s part of the job. 3) You
sound very bitter that you chose a topic you’re not interested in. Original
research doesn’t mean you’ll cure cancer or win a Nobel Prize. But a
thousand people all doing a little piece of original research does advance
science and occasionally make for some amazing insights. We can’t all be
astronauts. 4) I think this feeds more back into the business side of
research. The need for research grants (or corporate sponsors, in some
cases) makes it harder for abstract basic science research to get funding.
I agree this is a major problem. 5) How you measure something influences
how people will do it. If I teach a class and make participation 90% of the
course grade, you can bet everyone will be in class and pretend to be
attentive. If participation is 0% of the grade, then students will show up
if they value my input and the class discussion. Likewise, academia is
driven by some very odd measurements, such as impact and citation and
number of publications and amount of grant dollars received. How else would
you propose to measure research activities? 6) This is related to #5; in
any social network it’s common to support your peers if it doesn’t take
away from yourself. 7) Academia doesn’t have a monopoly on giant egos. How
much time have you spent in industry? 8) There has been a strong trend in
the last decade to emphasize ‘translational research,’ namely getting ideas
from research labs into practical use more quickly. This also supports the
business case for research, as noted previously. And frankly I don’t know
of anyone who would deliberately block application of their research, so I
don’t know where this point is coming from. Is it an extension of #3?
I’m sorry that your research experience left you so sad and bitter.
5. REPLY
09/09/2013
ANDY
While I understand the author might want to remain anonymous, it
would be nice to know in what branch of science he/she was working.
6. REPLY
09/09/2013
TERRY A. DAVIS
Thomas Edison spent his late years in courtrooms doing legal stuff
instead of the lab. It wasn’t pretty — he fought against AC power with
deception because his was DC. This goes to show making money, getting glory
and power are done by doing what we would rather not do. So much wasted
potential! Academia and law slow things down.
7. REPLY
09/09/2013
SANDY
@ Glenn
1) No one contests the need for science or at least some elements of it to
be treated as a business. In fact I believe that a part of the solution
lies in partially corporatizing academic research. The issue is about
accountability of your science. A business runs on making profits and if
those profits are false it doubles on itself. Now when science deceives
itself in order to appear more slick (to get that paper published, to get a
grant and what not) you can imagine the pitfalls in the future.
2) Managing is and should be a part of the job but it should not become the
only part of your job. I sadly have to admit most of the scientists I have
met are hardly even aware of the literature in what they are doing, let
alone guide someone well. They just “manage” and proofread and sell a lot
of snake oil.
3) Its not about winning the noble prize or curing cancer its about
choosing routes that are never gonna be of any use for anyone or anything.
I can assure you at least in biology a lot of research happens on concepts
that are just fundamentally wrong. SO you solve a very interesting problem
which is publishable but absolutely useless- “sudoku science”
5) Measurements need to happen but when those measurements are not based
purely on merit and include factors such as whose ass you licked the most
last conference its immensely detrimental to the entire organization
6) “any social network”- I think you have forgotten what science is meant
to be its meant to be beyond social networks, its meant to be cold hard
facts without a hint of emotion. So no do not treat it as if its your high
school gang its NOT.
7) The difference is in industry you are expected to have one and nobody
hides it. In science nobody is supposed to have one yet everybody does and
the very basic principles of science are hurt because of it.
8) As to translational research a lot does come out nowadays but you need
to look at it in terms of how much goes in and how much is coming out. The
numbers are pathetic compared to 20-30 years. If we were a business with
taht strike rate we would be share holder/market breakfast.
8. REPLY
10/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
Wow… I didn’t think that this would spread so quickly.
The guy who wrote that piece is actually me, and though I can’t
fight all the wall-of-texts that people will post here, I do want to say
that I enjoyed my time at EPFL tremendously, that this definitely wasn’t a
burning out, and that the problems with academia were not my only reason
for resigning. There are also a number of reasons completely unrelated to
my frustrations, although this is the main one – as I said, I simply don’t
want to accept a degree from a system that I no longer find as being
beneficial.
I’m glad that this is generating discussion though. A number of EPFL
professors have written back to me (students have not officially received
this yet due to moderation), and most replies have been in support of what
is written in the letter. Some have amended certain points or said that
certain things work differently in their departments. No one has really
denied the things in this letter. To be frank, if you’ve been in scientific
academia, I think you’d have to be crazy to, but everyone’s experience is
different.
En tout cas, merci pour le pub, Pascal
9. REPLY
10/09/2013
JACOB
Academia is a business, but it is one that is virtually exempt from
most business taxes and labor laws.
I find it interesting that the ones who heinously defend this system
are the first to pass judgement and jump to the ” burnout” conclusion. I
have had a similar experience, though not at the PhD level, with my
professors. Instead of being able to reason and discuss the state/ problems
of academia, some professors, including ones I really liked as people,
started to view me as a rebel. Interesting, considering I was at the top of
my class. Apparently students should not be encouraged to grow up and think
for themselves!
Thank you for sharing this.
10. REPLY
10/09/2013
MICHAEL TOOMIM
@Glenn, and @Bill Skaggs
I am leaving Academia for the same reasons as this author. I am 8
years into it. I am fully motivated by my thesis topic. I could graduate in
3 months, but I no longer believe in what the PhD degree stands for.
This is not an issue (as Bill Skaggs suggests) of burnout. I am
definitely not burned out. On the contrary, I work on my thesis every
day—even though I have left the academy! Rather than write a dissertation
that hardly anyone will read, my newfound freedom allows me to write up my
research in an accessible form that anyone in the public can read and gain
insights from. This is very motivating!
And I do not suffer from having chosen an uninteresting thesis
topic, as Glenn suggests. I think my topic is very relevant!
To the original author, and others like him: Thank you very much for
writing this! The Academy appears to be in the beginning of a crisis, and
it is very helpful for people like you to draw attention to it. I have some
ideas for a solution. Please contact me if you would like to discuss them!
11. REPLY
10/09/2013
PLAIN AVERAGE MIND
Sadly, there are similar kind of things happening in professional or
tech industry, too. What can you do, since the power is on “one side of the
table”?
12. REPLY
10/09/2013
MARTIN
In response to “Glenn”:
Keep living in the matrix, agent Smith.
13. REPLY
10/09/2013
ALFRED CHARLES
We could pretend that everything is actually okay and that the
author of the letter was just suffering from “burnout.” Or not.
Currently, a huge percentage of grant money goes directly to the
University, to pay for things like the library’s new heating system, the
upkeep of the flowers, and the new swimming pool. That’s why universities
want their professors to be big-time salesmen. It’s expensive to run a
university! Which begs the question: Is the university even needed?
A different model:
1) Separate undergraduate science education from graduate-level
science education. (High school is already separate. It’s not such a
strange idea.) Primarily-undergraduate universities already exist and do
very well for their students. The people teaching undergraduates should be
professional teachers, first and foremost. It’s not necessary for them to
be working scientists: you don’t need a working scientist to teach Newtonian
Mechanics. Nor do you need to be chasing after grants. A salary should
suffice.
Students could also learn the basics from free MOOCs, and can get
tested by certified testing centers. That’s already happening and will only
get more popular: it’s low-cost and it works.
2) Researchers should create their own highly-specialized working /
graduate-training labs *independent* of any University. If they need
something like group medical insurance or access to a library, they can buy
it a la carte, probably through professional organizations like the IEEE or
the ACM. Independent labs already exist, but I’m proposing that they also
assume the responsibility of teaching their new recruits, both through
coursework and apprenticeship. No doubt such labs already exist but none
come to mind.
Governments could easily promote such a model, by making it clear
who will be getting the grants in the future.
14. REPLY
10/09/2013
WAKJOB
Bring in more conmen Indians. That will fix it.
o REPLY
03/07/2016
VIVEK
@wakjob
This is abusive language you used against the Big Nation of the world. You
shouldn’t do this if you really support Science in any way.
15. REPLY
10/09/2013
PASCAL
@FeuDRenais: 51’000+ views in less than 24h. Apparently, I was not
the only one to be shaken by your letter…
16. REPLY
10/09/2013
CHAD
My applause to the author, I feel he makes many excellent points. I
agree, science fails more frequently than it succeeds in providing a
benefit to society. I am earning my Ph.D. in infectious diseases and the
only reason I sought a research career in I.D. was to put myself out of a
job – to find cures. What did I find when I got to graduate school and
started to learn the landscape of the field? That (with only very few
exceptions) the field was doing exactly the opposite – each investigator
only sought to obtain the next grant and establish a “career,” – there was
little or no thought given as to whether or not the research would
positively impact anyone’s life, only whether or not a project would get
funded or provide new funding opportunities in the future. And, as much as
I would like to point the finger at PI’s for leading graduate students and
post-doc’s down this path to the “dark side”, I see it more as symptomatic
of an entire system that is both corrupt and failing. I’ve heard that “the
grant system works” and I’m sure it does – in a nepotistic and masturbatory
fashion, but the pipeline for antibiotic discovery has nearly all but dried
up, HIV is still a menace to the world, and malaria, tuberculosis, and
diarrheal diseases still account for the vast bulk of all human casualties
every year.
17. REPLY
10/09/2013
PAU FERNÁNDEZ
@FeuDRenais Thanks for your letter, and @Pascal thanks for
publishing it. I think it is a very accurate description of the current
situation. I am relieved to learn that other people have similar opinions
and also refuse to comply with the system.
18. REPLY
10/09/2013
MKB
Looks like high school really never ends, eh?
I was looking into a PhD to get out of the popularity contest that
is the independent inventor / kickstarter thing, but… I think I’ll get back
to trying to cure malaria on a budget instead. <= see what I did there?
Jokes aside, interesting post. Seems this stuff always happens when
something gets too institutionalized, the institution becomes more
important than the thing. Parkinsons laws and all that.
19. REPLY
10/09/2013
ROB
Being a PhD student at “the other” EPFL in Zurich, I
completely sympathize with the author. I went through similar thinking a
lot, however I did not decide to leave it – and this is not because I want
those 3 letters and the “financial benefits” (?) coming with it….
I hear this kind of argumentation a lot and everything seems to be
somewhat true. However, to even *see* academia that way requires some kind
of general negative attitude towards the thing – which is, by all the
frustration PhD students suffer often, not very hard to get. I had it
myself, more than once. And of course it becomes worse when you are trapped
in your social bubble, surrounded by other PhD students who feel the same,
reinforcing their thinking.
But here is the thing: the letter suggests that there are only two
real options: a) you choose to be part of this “dirty” game and business or
b) you are consequent and leave academia.
BUT THERE IS ANOTHER OPTION ….
We are the young generation of scientists. We are the ones who will
one day decide how to do and handle things in academia. We are the ones who
can break out of that scheme. And I chose that way. And to be honest, I
would have liked you would have done the same, cause only if we (a critical
mass of critically reflecting scientists) start to rethink the whole
system, to be honest in our paper, to not only sell stuff because we need
another paper to fulfill the project requirements, to take more time to do
research, do more quality research, and publish less, we CAN change how
things are done.
WE ARE THE NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS!
And I don’t mean this as some kind of rebellion or revolution kind
of thing. I just mean that this is what we are. And as such it WILL BE us,
like in every other aspect of society, who WILL decide how things are run.
And I would prefer to have more people like the author to be in academia,
for the good of it.
I chose to fight for it, and not to let them screw it for eternity.
And no, Rob is not my real name. If you want to get in contact with
me, cause you want to meet or talk or whatever, just answer this post.
o REPLY
01/03/2016
MYUNGJI
Thank
you for writing this. I’m also Ph.D student who had the same view as the
author, and your comment is so encouraging Recently I’ve also
decided to stay at the academia, even though these problems still exist.
Research is not perfect, because it is also part of human life. But we can
still hold the essence of science. That’s better choice for academia.
o REPLY
05/03/2016
L
It
is really encouraging to see someone sufficiently optimistic as to believe
that change is still possible. I wonder how your attitude towards this
evolved from the time you wrote this post. Not sure if leaving a reply here
sends an email to you but just writing in case it does. Let me know if you
would like to email/chat. I hold somewhat similar views to the author
(though I am in social sciences) and would like to talk to someone who
actually tries to do research at least partially for idealistic reasons…
o REPLY
18/04/2017
GERAQ
I
used to believe in what you said, but I don’t anymore. I used to think that
my coworkers and I would be able to change things once we have the chance,
if we could wait for 5 or 10 years for that chance. But the system itself
works its way to wear you down, to make you bitter and cynnical. It’s not
worthy. It really doesn’t.
o REPLY
05/03/2018
ANON
“WE
ARE THE NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS! ”
I’m
sure that 30 years ago there were also optimistic young scientists who
could change everything. Why would our generation be better/worse than any
other generation? Evolution doesn’t go that fast. What I have come to
realise is that it is established scientists who sit on all the job and grant
committees and decide who gets to be their successors. So I don’t see how
things will improve in the current system. I think change has to come from
above the top of science: Governments. Young scientists should contact
their elected representatives.
20. REPLY
10/09/2013
RESEARCHNEWBIE
Having recently started a PhD, you might argue I have not been fully
confronted with the vices of the system.
However, I don’t think the arguments presented here are new to anyone in
Academia. I do agree with most of them, but I quite significantly disagree
as to how detrimental and widespread they are. But maybe that is a question
of personal feeling.
I’d simply like to state a few opinions:
– It seems to all boil down to research evaluation. I think people
forget that objective perfect evaluation does not exist. If we use
measurable criteria (citation), then of course people will adapt. If you
ask experts to give opinions, it is subjective and community is so small
that conflict of interests are inevitable. I think experience shows that
relying only on subjective opinions is leaving more space for nepotism
anyway so…
– Nearly everybody seems to think that it was better before: sorry for my
lack of experience, but can someone actually show this to me. I feel like
people actually prefer no evaluation to any evaluation. This creates a lot
less troubles but I do not think this is very satisfactory either.
– I have not met any of these evil minds undermining research by trying to
push their work at all cost and preventing honest scientist to perform
their work properly. We have to realise that practically everyone is
participating in this system and I do not hear people talking about
collective responsibility. It seems to me people tend to exaggerate what
others do while at the same time minimizing their own actions. This is to
my opinion the deepest vice of the system.
– Selling research is part of the job. People might argue it is going too
far and i agree, but if you write revolutionary work but nobody reads it,
then you are not managing that good in the end.
– Researchers are employed by university, this implies they have
obligations towards their employer like any other employee. Research is not
the only thing they are hired for. This is probably detrimental to science
but I think researchers can spend a reasonable amount of time researching
if they want to. So if they don’t, again maybe they not only have to but
also prefer doing other things…
– When hiring a professor, networking skills and social abilities are also
evaluated. Like it or not, these are valuable skills as well, but I think
some people just prefer calling it ass-licking. Of course there are
conflicts of interest and nepotism, that is not my point.
P.S. Being also an EPFL student, I like very much the part on the
email that the dean sent us about the Shangai ranking. It is very well
phrased and to my opinion, this mail was really grotesque.
there are many more things I’d like to say but I guess this is
enough.
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
You
need only one person to read your revolutionary work (the right person) to
make a massive impact.
The
number of citations/readers is often simply an indication of how
inefficient and unoriginal the system is. Having thousands of people
working on the same collections of problems at a surface level (and valuing
that above all else) is highly detrimental to the goal of making true
progress.
21. REPLY
10/09/2013
NAMENAME
@Glenn @Sandy
On items 6) and 7) I absolutely and whole-heartedly agree with
Sandy.
Look at the facts: the majority of research has been and is currently
bankrolled by society as a whole through taxes.
Taxpayers (who for the most part actually work hard and contribute to their
country’s GDP) live with the illusion that the cash they’ve worked so hard
for will go towards ‘fundamental science’ and ‘untangling the mysteries of
the universe for the better of society today and future generations’.
I can only imagine that politicians would have the hardest time ever
convincing their constituencies of the need to bankroll scientific research
if taxpayers knew that most of their money that goes towards ‘science’
really just goes towards fragmented clusters of academics, one cockier than
the next one, that fight each other personally and generally spit on the
basic principles of science and research.
I’ve seen some disgusting stuff in my time as a PhD student: ‘Supervisors’
that brown-nosed their way up to their PI positions without acquiring any
hint of technical expertise on the way up. PIs that do nothing but
cheerleading will be named ‘leaders’ or ‘stars’ in their field — for no
other contribution to ‘science’ than talking enthusiastically and patting
enough fellow ‘academics’ on their backs.
Society doesn’t care about your ego and how well you cheer-lead!
Society bankrolls academia for straight-to-the-point scientific results.
22. REPLY
10/09/2013
ADRIA
Good science for the sake of science/understanding still exists, but
it’s hard to get money to do it. Part of the problem with this IMO is the
ascendance of ‘translational research.’
As for the system, the current pyramid scheme of academia is
unsustainable. The best solution I’ve heard proposed is to make the
equivalent of tenured research positions, sort of permanent postdocs, who
should be paid decently, and can do long-term projects. These should mostly
replace the work force of poorly paid and overly-numerous PhD students.
This would then clear the way for fewer but better and more motivated PhD
students to actually be *trained.*
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
Exactly.
LONG term projects (10 years or so) are the ones which facilitate the
development of mastery.
23. REPLY
10/09/2013
RAPHAEL
@Andy: It seems that the author was doing a PhD in (theoretical)
computer science.
24. REPLY
10/09/2013
SELINA
I feel like crying while reading the letter, everything is so true,
and the whole phd is so painful, especially you know you are doing
something with little value and there are something you really want to work
on, but for the publication, you just have to stick to the marginal
improvement. The more closer to fulfill the requirement for the degree, the
more pain to force yourself to go even closer. To get the finial
certificate of the phd is just like a sentenced man waiting for the execution.
It is a torture.
Thanks for the author to speak it out and write it so well down. The
society should know about the true academia.
25. REPLY
10/09/2013
BOUDAH TALENKA
J’abonde dans le sens de l’auteur “anonyme” de ce texte. Bien que la
plupart des scientifiques soient anglophones, voici sa traduction en
français : http://boudah.pl/frustration-d-un-aspirant-scientifique
26. REPLY
10/09/2013
LEE SMOLIN
Dear ??
As the author of a book about the issues you so eloquently describe,
The Trouble with Physics, I would urge you to stay in academic science, for
exactly the issues you describe. Like so many things important for life the
issues you talk about come down to values. There is to put it simply, an
ongoing fight between those of us who do science to satisfy our curiosity
about nature and increase our knowledge and those who do it for careerist
or egotistical reasons. We need you on our side in this fight. If you do
not stand up for your values, who do you think will do this work for you?
I faced the same crisis at the same point in my career. What kept me
in science was reading Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method which taught me
that a life in science must be both a search for truth and a challenge to
our characters.
In a long career I’ve learned a few things that I would pass on. As
bad as it is-and every word you say is true- a determined individual can
have a career where they spend most of their time doing what they love. In
my experience those who followed their own compass succeeded in their
careers about as often as those who choose what they thought would be good
for their careers. In both cases nothing is guaranteed, life is not fair
and there are good people whose careers failed. But being ready to quit
puts you in the best situation, because you have nothing to loose. You are
free because you are willing to walk. So why not go for it and try for a
scientific career based on love and integrity?
I also learned that when that individual succeeds they can do a
great deal to improve the situation for others. One scientist with the
right values can employ and protect many promising young individuals,
freeing them to pursue their own ideas. There are also fights that can be
won on an organizational level to promote the right values, up to and
including starting new institutions.
Finally, the hardest lesson is that the fight is within each of us.
Few are immune from their own egos and desire for security and status. So
the fight you are about to resign from turns out to be a lifelong struggle
to build your own character.
A final word: where ever you go if you leave science you are likely to
face the same fight, because it is in the nature of modern life and modern
organizations. So why not stay to fight it in a place where the outcome can
be to discover truth?
Respectfully,
Lee Smolin
27. REPLY
10/09/2013
ANON
@Wakjob,
This is exactly what is happening right now, degrees are getting
devalued, students live a miserable and bitter life until they become in
charge of things i.e. become professors and the result would be either
being brutal with their students or something like this: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.single.html
@Glenn,
You’re probably one of those grey-haired nitwits who are certain
that their ridiculous subject is improving something, sadly it does improve
your pocket but nothing else. And by the way, you cant really develop
interest in a topic that you know very well is not improving anything…
@Sandy this is good example of “sudoku science” http://metro.co.uk/2010/07/13/the-chicken-came-first-not-the-egg-scientists-prove-447738/
@TheWriter,
I hope you find a better future, I’m disappointed in academia myself
and I’m glad I haven’t wasted a lot of time.
28. REPLY
10/09/2013
BOJANA
BRAVO!
BRAVO!
BRAVO!
EVERY single word is pure reflection of what is going on.
PLUS there are some other issues…
BUT the most ugly thing is that building a reputationa and mainting some
SELF IMAGE within the academia gets in the way of true science…..
I went to do the PhD because of the worst reason: got the opportunity and
did not give much of the tought to the topic at hand BUT had a strong inner
feeling of making something important….
For a while I thought I was crazy and stupid to be thinking same thoughts
as the author of the text BUT today I see a lot of BSing going around where
there is not place for TRUE motivation, inspiration and meaningful
activities….
HOWEVER thanks to Univers there are still people who are doing AWERSOME ,
WORLD CHANGING stuff such as Elon Musk with his 3 fantastic companies:
1) Tesla Motors
2) SpaceX
3) Solar City
THESE stuff MAKE CHANGE…
And here is a story about TRUE practical engineer, scientist and
entrepreneur:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTJt547–AM
WHO ever wrote this I LOVE YOU!
Good luck!
World needs people like you!
29. REPLY
10/09/2013
JAY
@Wakjob – your name (user handle) fits your comment perfectly.
As if there aren’t any non-Indian academic/research conmen.
30. REPLY
10/09/2013
LUCA BENAZZI
Professor Lee Smolin, thank you for your insightful reply. I found
it touching, and a life lesson.
I read your books and I know that your words have real value, because you
are among those who really gave a huge contribution in reminding us what
are the values that a scientist can not forget.
31. REPLY
10/09/2013
KYLE GUSTAFSON
Hello … (FeuDRenais?)
I’m also at EPFL, having come from American academia and changed fields
as a response to my specific frustrations. Surely most of us can see where
you are coming from with your lucid manifesto against the system. I’m
especially impressed to see what appears to be the real Lee Smolin
commenting on this post. Mostly I would second his advice and sentiments.
I will add something that a great mentor once told me: “every job
has a bit of job-ness in it,” which means that no matter what you do, no
matter how much you love it, we will all have to deal with all of the
frustrations you outlined. There’s always going to be a business aspect of
anything you do – academia is not a sacred exception, no matter how much
you want it to be. It’s competitive out there, and it always will be.
Academics are probably less cutthroat and greedy on average than most other
people. Maybe the egos are big – especially when young students believe
they know the “real issues” of “important scientific value.” But go check
out the egos in the worlds of banking, commodities trading or Silicon
Valley and report back.
As for tenure-track and statistics-based evaluations of career
success and subsequent allotment of resources: this is the best bad
solution out there. The leading alternative is a good-old boys (yes, boys)
network where all that nasty “networking” and a silver tongue are the only
things that matter. Tenure-track is much more effective than whatever they
used to do.
Maybe the most revealing thing I see in your open, anonymous, letter
is how you put yourself up against those who would let “true science”
disappear in the face of competition and human frailty. One might submit
that a sacred conception of “true science” should be replaced by a more
mature understanding of scientific research as an imperfect, flawed, but
ultimately wonderful pursuit with no guarantees but a rewarding journey.
Best wishes,
Kyle Gustafson
32. REPLY
10/09/2013
MASHA
I agree with many of the points you make, but none of it explains
why you would leave your PhD a few months before completion.
33. REPLY
10/09/2013
ANON
@Kyle Gustafson
who the hell said that this field should be treated as business in
the first place? the fact that it’s a mistake to treat it as business is
already becoming obvious: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101012270
good luck keeping any university open with such idiotic monetary
system.
34. REPLY
10/09/2013
DAVE FERNIG
Rather depressing, but, as @Glenn comments, it does depend on your
mentoring. A lot of PhD supervisors/advisors are in fact quite different
from that described in the letter.
I would also add that @Rob has hit the nail on the head: The times they are
a changing. Far greater scrutiny of papers and public discussion is
afforded by the internet, which has led to the now abandoned “Abnormal
Science” and “Science Fraud” web sites, and what we could call “Version
2.0” in the form of PubPeer.com. Other sites such as Retraction Watch and
the many individuals blogging, etc., exert growing pressure on the system.
In a very minor way I engage in this too by blogging. I would agree that
the aspirations of science, e.g., to be self-righting, are far from being
met.
To finish. Understanding the natural world (taking Natural Sciences in the
old fashioned, broad sense) is an absolutely critical cultural activity. To
stop doing this brings us back to an age of domination by religion and
superstition, where there are no human rights, where people are enslaved or
murdered by virtue of their skin colour, gender, sexual orientation and so
on. I do not want to live there. So there is work to be done to reduce the
corruption in science, but to throw the towel in (consider, for example,
the words of Pastor Niemoller on this subject), though understandable, is
not an option.
35. REPLY
10/09/2013
CHRIS HABECK
I applaud the author on his decision on his heart-felt and eloquent
words. At one level I totally agree with these words and have thought them
myself many times. However, I think stepping back and reflecting a bit more
what kind of academia is desirable is an enlightening exercise. Criticisms
of academia like the ones voiced by the author are easy and a priori
compelling, and there are indeed many things are wrong with academic. What
would academia -ideally- look like to avoid these problems? How should it
be funded? What would be the performance metrics to judge career success? As
soon as you start reflecting on these questions, you realize how difficult
they are. It’s easy to imagine some kind of golden age of science, but any
golden age possesses features that would be deemed very unpalatable and
untenable today. In the 19th and early 20th century for instance, access to
science education and practice was extremely scarce and mainly limited to
(rich, white) men. (Marie Curie being a very rare exception.) However,
these lucky few scientists could work on substantive issues without care or
worry, and apply themselves fully without distractions of grants, progress
reports etc. Most people would probably agree that we do not want to turn
the clock back to that golden age. So how can you accommodate vastly
increased numbers of scientists and provide them with livelihoods and
meaningful job objectives? I think the answer is far from trivial, and an
uncomfortable realization is that there might be far too many of us. Our
vast numbers in a way dictate performance metrics and ever-increasing
competition for scarce government resources. I am as frustrated as the
author about some of these systemic mis-developments, but then I compare my
academic job against others, and not against some earlier mythical version
of academia. Without getting into the details – what I see is still
compelling and makes me state “This is still the best job one could wish
for.” – Also, concerning the benefits of academia to society (or lack
thereof), I would cast my net for assessing these benefits a little wider,
beyond sense or nonsense of the primary subject matter: (1) government
funds could and have been used in a more destructive way than academic
research, whereas scientific research at least does not cause any net
harms, (2) education almost always has positive side effects and creates
open minds with benefits for society at large, (3) scientific research
brings secondary advances in technology and computing etc. and (4)
simulates the economy at large in form of conferences, travel,
accommodation etc. – Again, I am not saying academia cannot be improved,
far from it. Exploitative practices of overwork and stealing credit, in a
way, are straightforward to fix. But then they are other improvements that
might be harder for consensus formation and implementation. I urge you to
stay on, complete your thesis and contribute to this improvement of
academia in the future! Best wishes – Chris Habeck
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
Hi
Chris. You make a very good point about the number of scientists. One
solution is to spend less money funding massive infrastructure, and
preferentially fund the brains inside the skulls of creative human beings.
Some of the most significant advances made in academia (talking ever) have
been made in mathematics – minimal equipment required. The point is not
that math is superior, but that understanding (when truly invested in) can
take us a long way, without fancy equipment. What we lack in modern science
is an insistence on deep understanding and comprehension of the core
principles underpinning one’s field.
36. REPLY
10/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
Thanks to everyone for their comments. Quick update and some
replies:
– I learned today that EPFL blocked this letter from getting out to
the students, which is unfortunate, since I think most have seen it anyway
(thanks to the few professors who did forward this to their groups).
Thankfully, I’ve got a date with the dean next Friday and suppose that I
can ask him why they chose to censor in a little tęte-ŕ-tęte
– I did not do my PhD in compsci (don’t know where this idea came from),
but in optimization, which is a great topic and of great practical
interest. Those who wrote to say that I’m frustrated because I did not like
my topic… are wrong. I absolutely love what I do. Also, while my field of science
is relevant, it seems that these problems are quite widespread (based on
the replies I’ve received).
– People who want to meet to discuss in person (e.g., “Rob”), or who want
to continue this discussion via other means… Gladly, if time allows (please
don’t write very long e-mails, because it’ll take some time for me to reply
to these). If you are mildly skilled in Google, then you should have no
problem finding my real identity. I’m not going to publicize it, but I
don’t feel particularly compelled to hide it, either (thanks, Pascal, for
doing so, however – I don’t know how you got the letter).
– To people urging me to stay in academia/science (including Lee Smolin!),
I essentially agree with you. However, this is the question of whether you
want to fight the monster from the inside of its belly or from the outside.
Both are valid. What I am essentially leaving is the Western academic
system, and NOT science (the two are not the same, alas). I plan to remain
in science and I plan to be very active in science, and this is not
precluded by leaving academia. Specifically, I hope to promote good
research/science in developing nations, where the local “academia” is not
the academia that I’m writing about here (as they have much more serious
problems than the pure lack of ethics/responsibility that I wrote about
here). I want it to be very clear to people that I’m not simply “giving up”
(i.e., you don’t need to encourage me, though I appreciate it anyway :-)).
– Finally, in looking back at this letter, I realize that it was written in
a very negative tone (well, it is a letter about frustrations, after all… I
could write another about academia’s good points, though it’d be slightly
shorter). I would like to clarify that this was a calm decision made over
the course of several weeks, and that I used three months to reflect on it
before taking a few days to draft the letter. It wasn’t an
“oh-my-God-I-can’t-take-it-anymore!” thing where I snapped and decided to
write something crazy, though I realize that many people could get this
impression (first drafts are never perfect).
Anyway, thanks to everyone for the discussion, which I hope will
spread a bit further. I did not think that this letter would have the
impact that it is already having.
37. REPLY
10/09/2013
ASHUTOSH GUPTA
This letter raises true concerns about the world of academia.
However, analysis in the letter is very week.
If I would think that academia has serious problems then I will stay
and try to lead it to better direction instead of quitting.
May be the author has more balanced view in comparison to the
letter.
38. REPLY
10/09/2013
ANON
@Ashutosh GUPTA
oh man it is very week and a month as well….
Your argument is just invalid… stick with a bunch of mercenaries and
claim that you can change them is just a silly idea. Rather than moving
away and trying to build your own path that truly pushes research stick
around and do the same crap they’re doing while hoping one day things would
be different… as far as I know if he sticks around NO ONE would allow him
to change anything and therefore, the option he chose is quite the best I
believe.
39. REPLY
10/09/2013
FILIP VERCRUYSSE
The chap is really accurate in his analysis. I share his concerns!
Coming up with solutions is important though, of course, creating awareness
is the first step.
What’s the point of the champions league football or to become an
olympic athlete? All these sacrifices, and this to prove you can control a
ball or run at 23 km/h average for 26 min? They do it of course because
they like it, maybe even for the challenge, to see how far they can push
it, to understand the limits of their physical and mental powers. As a
pleasant side effect they might bring joy to other people as well, or to
inspire them for similar positive activities.
To understand how a single cell works, even a single protein is so
incredibly challenging that, no matter which method we use, we will never
understand. We will never be able to run at 27 km/h for 26 minutes, no
matter which training method. In a similar fashion we might never be able
to grasp the complexity of a single cell. So, let’s still run, maybe dream
of that 27 km/h, and enjoy it on the way. Let’s do science, focus on the
fun of the learning experience, enjoy working together with young and
motivated people and as a side effect, I’m sure we’ll be able to bring some
extra life quality to the society.
40. REPLY
10/09/2013
STEPHEN J.
CROTHERS
Dear Pascal (FeuDRenais),
Everything you have said about Academia is true. Vilification aimed at
you in terms of “burnout” and “bitter” etc. are common dishonest methods of
distracting from the facts.
I have experienced similar things as you, at the PhD level. Academia
is just as corrupt as any other club. Society has been duped into the false
belief that scientists are, ipso facto, smart and honest people searching
for truth. Nothing can be further from the truth. The methods of politics
and organised crime are routinely employed by Academia just as in industry
and government. For instance, the people at the LHC at CERN now plan to
build the International Linear Collider, to cost taxpayers somewhere
between $20 and $25 billion US dollars. Add to that the money for
operations. This is sinecure employment for those in the club. No doubt the
industrial and other companies which will get the building contracts are
rubbing their hands together with glee. Vested interest lurks.
Academia has no monopoly on science. Academia however, controls the
major journals, the institutes and universities, and the money. It is money
that is in the end the main objective of Academia. Social status,
reputation and all that comes with it is reinforcement to the main
objective.
Keep doing science. A PhD is not necessary. A fancy office is not
necessary. Lunching with professors is not necessary. Oliver Heaviside had
no need of any of it. Nor do we.
Kind regards,
Stephen J. Crothers
41. REPLY
10/09/2013
THERE IS NO SPOON...
‘So how can you accommodate vastly increased numbers of scientists
and provide them with livelihoods and meaningful job objectives?’
Here are a few thoughts:
*Sack those responsible for the current situation [i.c. current
professors with tenure, managers, editorial members of journals, presidents
of societies, big publisheres, etc.]? (assuming they are partly responsible
for the current situation, sackging them could possibly lead to
improvements in and of itself. Also for instance take into account the pay-check
these professors, or bureaucrats at universities have: seems plausible that
you could hire 3, 4, 5, maybe even more, young scientists for the same
amount of money)
*Sack the tons of bureaucrats that are present in today’s academia?
(so money can be saved to actually hire scientists, and perform research
optimally)
*Decrease no. of students that are taught? (so there will become a
more balanced situation regarding future open positions and applicants)
*Teach things correctly and trythfully? (so students can decide
upfront whether they want to study something given the state of things
which they will encounter once they finish their study)
*Stop fooling the general public, phd students, students, and also
yourself ? (the last part is perhaps most important, but perhaps also most
difficult…)
42. REPLY
10/09/2013
HELENA
Incredibly accurate. This is why I won’t start a PhD project, having
two master’s degrees. Science isn’t objective anymore and we’re losing
objectivity to economic dragons.
We do actually not need a long discussion on it. We only need to
look at the ‘phenonena’ around us. Fellow scientists: take a look at our
audience, the world. It had lost fate in science. Which to me says: we
doing it wrong.
43. REPLY
10/09/2013
NAMENAME
A few comments claim that what the author is encountering in
academia they will encounter equally everywhere else.
Of course that is true and nobody would deny that.
The problem, in my opinion, is that academia – seen as an economy – is
highly unregulated as another commenter has pointed out.
The small (usually young but you also see tons of ‘failed’ ones that
do postdocs well into their 40s) academics have absolutely zero rights nor
labour-style protection whatsoever:
(i) Work hours are completely unregulated.
(ii) Job security is nonexistent: While in the free economy a lot of entry-level
jobs are temporary (by far not all), in academia everything is temporary
right up to the point where you’re awarded tenure (by which time most
academics today will be well over 40).
(iii) Salaries, for the small academics, are a complete and utter joke.
If academia is like any other economy (as some commenters suggest –
oddly enough most of these appear to be senior academics that are likely
quite contend with their income and job security) then where are the labour
unions that will bring absolutely all academia-related activities to a
standstill when administrations don’t deliver hefty wage increases?
Where are the law suits of mistreated workers (small academics) bringing
down entire administrations?
How would some of the more settled (tenured) commenters like their costs of
operating their labs doubled or tripled because their students suddenly
demand higher salaries and regulated working hours?
The big difference between academia and industry (and this is the
major reason for me to quit academia soon – likely after I finish my PhD)
is that the above three points are built into the system.
This is how academia has been designed, this is how it works, and while a
lot of people complain about it, everyone respects and adheres to these
points.
Depending on where I go after my time in academia, I am likely to
encounter some of the points the author laments (after all this is human
nature) but at least – for the majority of economies out there – I will be
protected from the above three points by law.
I will be able to start a proper life, and enjoy the quality of life that I
believe I deserve.
44. REPLY
10/09/2013
EX-GRAD
@Michael Toomim: sorry, but dropping out after YEARS because you
don’t “believe in the degree” anymore (whatever that means) is really lame.
I’ve been there. I was ready to drop out month before my defense because my
supervisor is a huge jerk (and incompetent and has illusions of grandeur)
and I finished. Not because I “believe” in any degree but because it’s
silly to drop out when you are finally at the end. It’s like running a
marathon but refusing to cross the finish line within a meter of it because
you “don’t believe in marathon”. I bet you feel like you are “sticking it
to the man” but you are not. No one cares. Someone else will publish your
research, the world will continue to turn. you are not a hero nor a rebel.
45. REPLY
10/09/2013
LE DUDE
All of what the author describes is true. And there is a very
perverse incentive system in place in current academia.
However, the author also suffers from the backlash of an apparently
once held illusion that Beautiful Superior Academia was so much better than
the little people just earning their daily bread outside of academia, which
is now shattered, as (s)he discovers that, lo and behold, incompetence is
everywhere, and that Academia is not the pond where the Swans of Human
Intelligence gather to create a better world, but instead contains people
that are fallible.
I’ve been there myself, and I call it the Third Depression of the
PhD (the first one being the I Know Nothing, the second one being The Big
Lull, and the last one being the meta one: What Am I Doing This For?)
But like I said, (s)he has a point, and most of the above can be
traced back to (a) wrong incentives, and (b) too many people going through university
and into PhDs – which is perhaps also related to (a). I remember when a
professor had max 1 or 2 PhD students and perhaps a postdoc. And things
were more relaxed and papers more thorough. And all those problems are
well-known (even though they go un-addressed).
But it’s not like all the Old Research was Good Research. Far from
it.
46. REPLY
10/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
One final point, and a very important one as many people seem to
have this misconception:
My advisors were reasonably good, and I don’t want people assuming
that I’m complaining about my own bad experiences with bad advisors. As I
said in the letter, I am not pointing fingers at anyone – these are
conclusions reached after four years of study and conversations, and are
quasi-objective as they reflect a multitude of opinions. I should have
emphasized this in the letter, but didn’t due to lack of foresight.
47. REPLY
10/09/2013
LIFE ISN'T FAIR
Yawn. If you were paying any attention at all, you should have
realized this before you came to graduate school, or at least within the first
couple years. Surprise! All human endeavours are plagued by egoism, greed,
and ambition. And on top of it we get paid badly. Why, then, are so many
people still going to grad school, despite the bleak prospects? For many it
is because it is worth it to obtain the academic freedom to study the
things that you want to study. For still others, it is because they are
naive and delusional and think somehow they deserve better – that academia
has wronged them and their absurd expectations of it. Somehow I think you
fall into the latter group. Academia has it’s problems, but they are
well-known to anyone paying any attention at all. I refuse to believe that
you were mere months away from successfully finishing your Ph.D. and you’re
simply dropping out in protest of the system. You’re either lying, and
there is some other reason you’re not finishing, or you’re just as big an
egoist as everyone else, assuming that your tragic self-sacrifice will
matter to anyone at all. It won’t.
I don’t mean to dismiss the accusation that there are problems with
academia. I mean to dismiss your holier-than-thou attitude where you hold
it up to these ridiculous standards and feel victimized when it doesn’t
meet them.
48. REPLY
11/09/2013
JULIETTE
To the author of this text, if you ever read this:
I have completed a PhD in Genomics in the US and I completely agree
with what you wrote (though I still think that in between all this mess,
there are still some interesting things being produced – but yeah, science
is a huge and heavy system, so, like for any such system, it’s hard to
bring novel things in – reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions
helped me a lot to understand this better and to come to peace with all
this). Shouldn’t we gather people who also think this way and start a
discussion to try to figure out what can be done to improve this? And write
a paper about it, ahah No kidding, something needs to be done!
Contact me if you are interested: juliette.colinas@gmail.com
Best wishes,
Juliette
49. REPLY
11/09/2013
GRANT
Great letter! I have touched on all of these topics in conversations
with the other grad students in my program at one time or another. Many
people feel this way.
To everyone saying “stay and fight the system from within,” who
determines whether you get to a place where you can effect change or not?
The answer is those who have already succeeded in the current system (who
judge you based on their experiences) and administrators who only glance at
your publication list and the amount of grant money you have won them.
This is the problem with so-called “meritocracies.” Who determines
what “merit” is and whether you have it? The ones at the top with merit, of
course. Sure, someone could publish meaningless crap until they get tenure
and then (if the system hasn’t changed them and they remain determined to
change it) embark on a 10-year project and publish their failures, will
they get grants? Will they get students/postdocs? Will they be able to
afford new instrumentation? The chemicals? Labor intensive, original, high
risk/high reward projects are simply not possible without a dedicated
philanthropic or corporate sugar daddy (or mama).
I’m not cut out for academics, I’m “too honest,” not competitive
enough, and I care more about quality of my papers than quantity. Recently,
I’ve been looking into science policy. I’m planning on finishing up in two
years, but we’ll see…. now the only thing motivating me is the opportunities
that come with a PhD, or at least that’s what I tell myself.
50. REPLY
11/09/2013
MICHAEL
The author of this letter makes many valid points. The criticisms
will certainly ring true for many PhD candidates, myself included. I have
worked through my PhD and then spent some years in academia, in industrial
research, and now in a commercial R&D position. In my opinion the
author has in parts confused things that they were “sold on” with
assumptions that the author and many students make about academia.
I think there is a lot in this letter worth debating and trying to
improve. This is a continual process in my experience in institutions in
multiple countries. There is no perfect system.
Additionally, I think this letter is an indication of many failures.
Failure of the advisor(s) to communicate; failure of the system; failure of
the student to understand their own motivations and goals. Putting aside
the funding/management critiques, the author seems to have missed a
fundamental but difficult part of academia and scientific research: it is a
human activity. As such, there is a need to communicate and convince other
people about the merits of your ideas and work. In many technical fields it
is easy for people to fall into the belief that good work, good science
will speak for itself. The truth is that it can only speak for itself if
you can get people to pay attention to the work. This requires
communication, persuasion, education, lobbying, networking, and a whole
raft of interpersonal interactions. These human qualities can be negatively
ascribed, but in my thinking… without communication there would be no
science.
It is also a myth that there was a golden age where grants and
funding were not needed. Scientific work has always required patrons. As
romantic as the image of a lone tinkerer who solves a great problem is, the
reality is that those are very rare stories. The rarity and the greatness
of the achievement is what makes them memorable. Today’s patrons are
universities, grant councils, and the occasional company. In the 1800’s it
was professional societies, grand challenges, and government
prizes/stipends that funded research.
I hope the author finds a path that satisfies their goals.
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
I
think the emphasis which is placed on communicating ideas in
postgraduate-“help” seminars is generally shallow and backward. It teaches
people how to simplify and eliminate substance, rather than actually
communicate with a rigour and clarity that others learned in their field
will respect enough to read twice.
51. REPLY
11/09/2013
UCHICAGO GRAD
I agree with what he has to say. Unless you are into economics or
business management, you won’t be in a position of power in the current
capitalist system. STEM also has stopped making huge leaps and most
research lately has been happening in smaller (and apparently useless)
increments. Thus, academics have been fighting harder to secure what’s left
of scientific research potential. Nevertheless, graduate students are at
the receiving end of this ponzi-scheme-like-PhD-system, where about 15 PhDs
are produced for every faculty position.
52. REPLY
11/09/2013
BIG FAN
@ex-grad Actually, ex-grad, I believe the author is a hero. There is
nothing more important in life that standing up in what you believe. And to
take your analogy, if as you are running a marathon, you realize that the
event is morally corrupt and bankrupt, than not crossing the finish lines
does make you a hero. Maybe the event will keep going but then again maybe
not, maybe some of the other runners will take a long hard look and wonder
why you didn’t cross the finish line, maybe this will spark a discussion
and maybe just maybe, there are enough runners that agree with you and look
up to what you did that the event will be changed one day down the line.
This author refuses to accept an award (the Ph.D degree) from an
institution (academia) that he considers to be bankrupt. I agree with
everything the author said and more. I am just extremely disapointed at
myself for not having seen it all this clearly earlier. It took a Master’s
degree, a Ph.D degree and a post-doc at the best institutions in the world,
until I started to see academia for what it is: a paper publishing business
driven mostly by people who care nothing for the advancement of knowledge.
We have to understand the current crisis in Academia as directly related to
the ever expanding ever pervasive neo-liberal paradygm. It is this paradygm
that has linked grants to numbers of publications that now drives this
relentless pursuit. We have in effect created a currency (papers) that is
simply not tied to any real work-value and most definetely not tied to our
ultimate goal, namely the advancement of knowledge. Dishonest elements are
accumulating wealth by whatever means at their disposal for selfish reasons
and are driving a race to the bottom, even by the most honest elements. At
least the corporate world is honest about its ultimate goal, namely
generating wealth for shareholders. This is a full fledged crisis. The most
discerning already see it.
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
Spot
on. These problems are very much manifestations of a poisonous neo-liberal
agenda, hell-bent on measuring everything trivial, and holding everyone
powerless to account. Sadly, most scientists don’t take the time to learn
about the monetary system, or the (few, and select) coherent economic
theories which make sense of the never ending budget crises. It’s not their
job to do that though, and their job has become somewhat time consuming…
53. REPLY
11/09/2013
H. C.
‘. And to take your analogy, if as you are running a marathon, you
realize that the event is morally corrupt and bankrupt, than not crossing
the finish lines does make you a hero. ‘
I heard from people in the Netherlands (where Didrik Stapel,
infamous social psychologist data-faker is from) that universities receive
a large amount of money over there for every phd student that succesfully
‘crosses the finish line’. If you really want to take a stand, quit while
you’re just about to finish your phd in the Netherlands: that would really
drive the message home over there…
54. REPLY
11/09/2013
PERA DETLIC
Reading about history of molecular biology, one can find that in the
early days (60’s) a mentor was on PhD student’s paper only if (s)he
actually contributed to the work; in other words, advising/mentoring was
done to educate the next generation, not to boost your own career, since
(being a mentor) you should be already established enough. One can think
why are things different today….
Furthermore, imagine how would the authorship of Watson and Crick’s
paper look like in contemporary science:
“Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose
Nucleic Acid”
JD Watson*, FHC Crick*, Max Perutz, John Kendrew and Lawrence Bragg°
*These authors contributed equally
°Corresponding author
55. REPLY
11/09/2013
K. B.
Hello,
I am an ex- research master student from the Netherlands.
The system in the Netherlands is even more money driven, some universities
have almost become PhD factories (due to the arrangement H.C. mentioned).
Publication quotas are also regularly applied. If they are not met, end of
contract.
It is sometimes even the case that bachelor and master students are used
for gathering data, writing parts of publications, or as input for new
ideas as part of their ‘’thesis supervision’’. Often a simple
acknowledgment on the bottom of an article is what they get in return when
their work is published. I have also had courses in my master where I was
taught how to ‘’sell’’ science. My thoughts however always were: I don’t
want to sell science, I want to be a scientist… Furthermore, in my opinion
no personal financial security can be achieved as a scientist unless you
publish, and the way you publish is by doing safe research (as is described
in the wonderfully bold letter above).
Luckily I figured out all this even before I started my PhD, I am
truly very sorry for the author that he or she only found it out after all
these years of hard work.
Keep spreading this message, things will hopefully change! However,
always try to keep in mind the good guys who are still hanging in there to
give academia some glance.
In the words of Albert Einstein:
”science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at
it.”
56. REPLY
11/09/2013
LE DUDE
Another comment. Sorry it’s a bit long:
You can’t only rely on vocation. That is typically what all people
in underpaid parts of the educational system say. You also can’t
over-incentivise, because then you may attract the wrong sort of people.
But the advantages of an academic job are becoming rather limited, apart
from potential tenure, and flexibility. But the truth is, I believe, mainly
the over-influx, creating a true pyramid. When I say to colleagues “it’s a
waste of money to get someone to do a PhD when in the end it just turns out
to have been a very expensive 4-year assessment for a private sector job”,
then they reply that it’s also about educating people, training them to be
independent. Now, apart from the fact that I believe there are many other
ways in which to achieve independence, I think the problem with this is
that *this is not just a project* – this is actual scientific advancement
we’re talking about! Because that scientific advancement is sacrificed to
the “training” of these people, and to people who absolutely need to get
jobs. So in that the author is very much correct.
But (s)he goes through a lot of twists and turns to point out the
core problem, namely that too many people enter academia because it is made
too easy. In Belgium I remember vividly that at one point the Flemish
National Science Foundation decided to get rid of its tenured scientists
(they had to be paid by the universities instead), and invest in young
people. What that means is simply the same as in the private sector: for
the price of 1 old fart we can pay 4 young people. It is the business model
that got put into science. The underlying idea was probably that the cream
would float to the top. But at what cost. There is obviously the personal
and societal, financial cost. But most importantly the cost is in the
scientific quality!
What are the reasons for tenure. The most important one frequently
quoted is that without tenure no senior scientist would have any incentive
to train a good younger one, since it’s one who can take his job. The only
way to get the system to generate excellence is if it poses no threat to
those established. But the other reason is that in principle, tenure should
allow you to research even the most outrageous paths, and thoroughly,
because you don’t have to “prove” yourself, and scientists are supposed to
be in it for the search itself. Having to “proving yourself” is *always*
destined to have people look at how to maximise the output rather than the
process (since the process isn’t measured).
Which bizarrely brings us to money. Frequent evaluations of individuals,
faculties, etc, and obviously the FUNDING that depends on all that, has
meant that scientists have to be continuously on their toes. Your faculty’s
publications (recently Dorothy Bishop showed that for all the complex paper
work, the UK’s REF’s outcomes are surprisingly well predicted by
publication metric alone) will decide what state funding you’ll get (output
per dollar, you know). And obviously with personal grants you’ll only get
them when you have enough publications. Recently a colleague remarked that
perhaps it would be more time-efficient if instead of writing grants for
personnel, a fraction of which gets accepted, we would actually do the
research ourselves and spend the time writing papers, the scientific output
might be higher and more qualitative. And I think he was right.
And indeed, we perhaps need a justification for the tax money we’re
getting. But.
And here comes the evil combo: if you measure scientific output, you
can’t measure scientific “success” only. Which brings us to the bias
towards publishing only novel first-time findings. This seems unrelated,
but it isn’t. If and only IF it would be as easy to get published with
replications or null findings, THEN it would make sense to “count”
publications to get an idea of the amount of work being done, without it
being detrimental to good science.
So in a nutshell: (1) there’s too many people entering academia at
the bottom, and (2) the time spent writing the grants to pay them could
better be spent on research by the senior scientist, who doesn’t have to
learn via mistakes on the back of science, (3) also, with all these young
researchers, both these young people AND the tenured people are under much
more pressure to publish (to get jobs and to get the next grant for
students, respectively), (4) which in itself wouldn’t be a problem, if the
science being done would be the science seeing the light of day, but
instead there’s a publication bias.
The solutions are twofold, and not one is sufficient:
– Remove the publication bias. That way, we might end up with a system
whereby measuring “output” does not conflict with scientific practice.
– Put less emphasis on the ability to secure grants and managing others
(with job insecurity) doing research, and more on research output from the
tenured researchers. (Dorothy Bishop once made this point)
So there it is.
o REPLY
23/03/2016
ANDREW BUCKLEY
While
I don’t entirely agree that those two solutions are together sufficient, I
do think you’re on the money with young people publishing. It is a great
shame that many scientists with decades of experience eventually become so
burnt out, by the constant carnival of self-justification, that they become
managers. Unfortunately though, I fear that the intellect does not develop
as effectively under constant pressure, and so a decade’s experience in
today’s environment counts for less understanding than it used to
57. REPLY
11/09/2013
PHDCANDIDATE1
“(7) Academia: The Violent Land of Giant Egos
I often wonder if many people in academia come from insecure childhoods
where they were never the strongest or the most popular among their peers,
and, having studied more than their peers, are now out for revenge.”
I think this misses the point and is simply a bit nasty. This is
what I think of the Giant Egos: You don’t get much feedback in research.
Especially as a PhD candidate, you are responsible for producing all the
failures in order to have a few successes that are actually a research
outcome. People that are OK with this fact are the ones that either managed
to construct or already have had a giant ego. Hence, professors/advisors
have giant egos. Which then again keeps them from giving feedback, because who
would need it, they themselves didn’t need it, so what. Those with
realistic egos quit academia before or after the PhD.
Most research is not important. Or at least: You never know. It may
become important 2 years later, or 20. There are two strategies to cope
with it: Either, you keep telling yourself, that you are the center of the
universe with your research, turning yourself into a person hardly anybody
from outside academia wants to deal with – I’m sure you can find this in
people surrounding you. Or you accept that what you do is your research job
and that it probably will never change the world for good – but then you’re
on the leave for something already, either before or right after your PhD.
58. REPLY
11/09/2013
SHANKHA
So True. For years, I had this feeling inside me. So great to
finally see someone else resonate the same.
59. REPLY
11/09/2013
SASCHA
10 years ago, a post-doc at our insititute tried to publish the
below “paper” about his view on academia:
“What do astrophysics and the world’s oldest profession have in common?.”
It basically expresses the same thoughts as that letter above. he was a
great guy and we felt pity that he left soon after.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310368
60. REPLY
11/09/2013
BBQ
I am a Professor at the same institution as the author of the letter
– and I received it by email. If forwarded it to my PhD students, who did
not receive it, so as to generate a debate but also to make sure they were
not hiding similar frustration. Some did; we talked it through, as openly
as possible.
When I was a PhD student myself, I never experienced these feelings.
But since I’ve become a Faculty member, and despite the big fat cheque at
the end of month (sorry to be blunt), I got frustrated to a point you
cannot even start to grasp, mostly because of the system described rather accurately
in the letter. I do not agree with all your points, but I certainly follow
on the main aspects.
Yet, I cannot help but thinking that resigning, as I often think I
should do and as you propose, is a good idea. If you spot a problem, you
should solve it. If you turn your back, the problem will stay there.
Another commenter below put it more accurately than I could “You are the
future young professors”. Get your diploma, become a faculty member and do
your work every day making sure you apply the strong sense of ethics you
display in your message. Then educate the next generation until there are
enough smart guys to change this. In the end, the one true value of
Academia, is the passion you put in when you joined. Don’t let others still
that from you, fight for it. It won’t be easy, but it will work.
I guess most PhD students realize that a lot of this negative
pressure falls onto young professors for all the bad reasons. I’ve been the
head of our doctoral program and, lately, I had to moderate many situations
in which a young professor was “milking” PhD students to produce papers. I
want to make it clear to all the young people reading this, that this is
NOT what a PhD is. It is not what you should expect from your advisor. If
this happens to you, there are MANY senior faculty members to whom you can
talk and who will go out of their way to help you. I did, many times. As a
professor I can fell this pressure every day: papers, grants, h-index,
impact factor, quantity over quality, no one cares about my teaching, about
the depth of the problems I solve, it is all superficial. But I always make
sure none of this gets over to my students. And when I get depressed, and
that is too often these days, I take time to think of all the good reasons
that took me to Academia. I go at my whiteboard, pick up a pen and shout
“Fç*%ç*% it! Let me do exactly what I think is worth.” (note: yes, we
Professors do swear ).
I would like to end by stating that if any PhD student (at EPFL or
elsewhere) want to talk it through, I am there to help.
61. REPLY
11/09/2013
STEPHEN J.
CROTHERS
@ Sascha
I note the paper by Martin Lopez Corredoira you have referred to. It
was published in the book, ‘Against the Tide. A Critical Review by
Scientists of How Physics and Astronomy Get Done’, edited by Corredoira and
Carlos Castro-Perelman, of which I have a copy. I wrote a chapter for that
book, at the invitation of Corredoira. Castro-Perelman significantly
altered my chapter without my permission, because he did not like what I
had to say since it had certain impact on his own work. When I discovered
this I protested. Corredoira sided with Castro-Perelman and in doing so
committed offences which he has himself complained about and which the
aforementioned book professes to criticise. No other author for the book
had their chapter altered by anybody. As I would not allow
Castro-Perelman’s alterations to go unchallenged, Corredoira and
Castro-Perelman excluded my chapter from the book. The point is that those
who complain of malfeasance and dishonesty in science often change sides
when they find it to their benefit. They then become part of the problem.
Stephen J. Crothers
62. REPLY
11/09/2013
EMPATHETIC PHD
@FeuDRenais
I’m so sorry to hear about your struggles. You are not alone in this.
Your comments truly capture the terrible side of academia. After completing
my PhD at a top academic institute, publishing highly cited papers in a hot
new field, I too stepped away from academia for the same reasons.
Unfortunately I discovered that no system is perfect, and those of
us who want stay in research (at least in the life sciences) are faced with
a challenge. In my job search, I’ve found these negative attitudes across
all types of research institutes (academic, pharma, biotechs). Perhaps because
all the researchers have been trained in a broken academic system! But more
likely, it seems like an inevitable outcome, when the drive to be creative
(and produce something of value) comes up against the needs to make a
living, and the survival needs win.
I do have hope though.
Your letter is a first step in establishing that hope. By taking the
provocative step by sending it out, you’ve brought awareness to a deep
issue. Admitting the problem is the first step in solving it.
Seeing that we have a choice is another step towards hope. Dear
author, you’ve exercised that choice by telling your story and choosing to
follow another passion. For those who want to stay in academia, there is
still a choice. We may not be able to exercise our choice on the level of
helping patients or receiving grant money, but we can choose to carry
ourselves with integrity and live the academic system the way we believe it
should be. We can choose between writing an honest peer review and writing
a harshly critical one. We can choose to mentor others who are in need,
rather than letting them flounder and have their talents go to waste. By
fostering hope on a small-scale, it will naturally emanate outward to bring
hope to the whole system.
I also believe that academia could thrive with a change in
perspective. It’s false and painful to believe that resources are limiting.
Money is just paper! The resources are there, and if we focus on creating
value for others, the resources will flow in. It likely won’t happen as
cleanly or easily as this sounds, but overall, if there’s something of
value, people will pay. If we engage the public, educate them on the
importance of basic research, and show patient groups how we’re
contributing to their well-being, support for research will be there.
My hope is that all scientists will find their voice and bring to
light their struggles, and share them with each other so that we can become
stronger as a community. And for those without a mentor, know there are
others willing to help. I am.
So dear author, I wish you all the best in your career pursuits.
Your willingness to rock the boat and change the system are admirable.
You’ve listened to your heart, you’ve spoken out, and you will do well.
63. REPLY
11/09/2013
RONALD
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Ordnung_des_Diskurses
very interesting to read about scientific discourse and controll
from michel foucault, as inauguration lecture at the collčge de france 1970
64. REPLY
11/09/2013
-
Blame it on “academia”, when the problem is really extreme
individualism, materialism, lack of solidarity, and anti-societal attitude.
This same cancer is spreading in about every single human activity.
That’s what you get after so many years of ultraliberal capitalism
that doesn’t offer anything to man but material and gadjets.
Try to imagine a context where the very notion of an “economy” would
be as obsolete and abstract, as it really is today due to the technological
advances that we dont want to realize. As religion, the economy is a
man-made notion designed to face the issues of the era it saw it
develloped. It has nothing to do in a context where the original issues
have become irrelevant.
And then imagine your own place and freedom in this world, i hope it
makes you feel better.
65. REPLY
11/09/2013
BARBECUE
@BBQ
I am a Professor at the same institution and I forwarded the letter to my
PhD students as well. I also see your point concerning the pressure passed
on by the “young professors”. Yet, I do not reach the same pessimistic
conclusion. Our institution is still very much in transition and a lot
depends how the dean of the respective school is handling such situations.
As long as I have colleagues like you, who genuinely care about students
and serve as role models for others, I know that I am at the right place.
You are the “future dean”!
66. REPLY
11/09/2013
RESEARCHER
I’m a recent PhD graduate, and I must say I recognized the author’s
complaints only because they’re frequently aired in discussion forums like
this.
During my studies and now my post-doc work, I never felt the same
way the author does. I’m sorry that he got such a bad experience of
academic work. It’s not always and everywhere like that. I love my work
(it’s a huge department), I think my work is somewhat important, I can
focus on publishing only high quality texts and not look at numbers, my
colleagues are fantastic people with quite few ego games, PhD students are
treated as colleagues, good teaching matters, and originality is highly
valued. The only thing I can feel similar about is the “management” part:
too much of professors’ and faculty time goes into administration and
management.
67. REPLY
11/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
@Life isn’t fair:
If you want to live in a world where everything is sh*t and all
those who don’t see/accept that are naive idiots, then you have that right.
But most of us don’t live there and don’t want to live there. So don’t drag
us in.
68. REPLY
11/09/2013
VILLAREJO
I’m in favour of getting something constructive done from this
interesting discussion.
Maybe coordination first?
@Juliette: “juliette.colinas at gmail.com”.
69. REPLY
12/09/2013
DANIEL
“Frustra fit per plura quod potets fieri per pauciora”
70. REPLY
12/09/2013
EWAN CAMERON
This letter is (unfortunately) bang on the money as far as my own
experiences go! What’s even worse is that I’m pretty sure the author is
from a different scientific field to me; that is, these problems are indeed
those of academia in general, not some small part of it.
71. REPLY
12/09/2013
ANDREEA
I am one of those people who loves science but hates the system.
Before starting a PhD I actually considered not doing so because of the system
the letter describes. But then I have thought to myself: nothing will ever
change if the people that hate the system abandon it. And then I entered a
PhD and I am still sucking through it until I will get into the position to
decide otherwise. In the meantime, I am trying to change things as a
student representative. And things are changing. Slowly. I found that
things change faster if enough people stick together and demand change
together. This is why I agree with @Rob, @Dave Fernig, @Lee Smolin, @Julliette
: it is not a solution to throw in the towel, because we need people like
you. But I also understand that you choose to fight from outside the
system. For me it does not matter as long as we are fighting for the same
things But you know, a wise person once said: “Reasonable people
adapt themselves to their environment. Unreasonable people adapt their
environment to themselves. Hence all progress depends on unreasonable
people.” I just believe that you are the right kind of unreasonable person.
BTW: kudos for leaving the system creating such a roar.
72. REPLY
12/09/2013
MICHAEL
“(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May
Manage!”
The wrong conclusion is drawn.
The correct reason for managing prof’s, slaving PHD’s is: Prof’s
know the greater community. They know what questions still exist, and are
best answered now. PHD’s don’t know this. PHD’s know how to find answers.
But they don’t yet know what the important questions are.
73. REPLY
12/09/2013
CYTOPOLIS
Thanks to both you gentlemen for writing and posting this. I believe
that many of us who have touched upon scientific research around the globe can
recognize several of the points raised here.
I agree with the good ideas suggested in the above comment by
@Alfred Charles and I applaud the brave spirit in the comment by @Rob from
ETH Zürich.
We are some that support the following movements as (probably
imperfect) solutions to these well known problems in academia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIYbio
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science
I myself is active in the Copenhagen DIYbio lab: biologigaragen.org/
and in the Copenhagen makerspace: labitat.dk/
In Europe, the DIYbiologists are organized here: http://www.diybio.eu/
74. REPLY
12/09/2013
SOCIOLOGIST
I don’t know where this ideal of high and pure science is coming
from. Sociologists of science have, since the 1970s, shown that science has
never been “pure”, and that the aura of holiness has never existed. I’m
sorry that you had a weird, unrealistic idea of science free of impurities
and flaws, and that you got disappointed. I guess universities are partly
to blame for keeping the tale alive. Science is human activity and in the
baggage comes many “impure” things that you dislike.
75. REPLY
12/09/2013
BEYOND SCIENCE
Any social science/humanities PhDs/Academics out there? Surely the
problems are even worse with these disciplines, where, unlike Science,
there may not be an objective truth to be pursued?
76. REPLY
12/09/2013
BBQ
@barbecue thanks for your kind words. I really didn’t want to blame
young professors, don’t get me wrong. Those on tenure track feel an
incredible pressure and, quite unfortunately, that pressure is often
carried over to students. I think young professors simply need mentors,
coaching. I was myself an assistant professor not so long ago and I made
mistakes: no one ever taught me how to be a thesis advisor. But then I was
lucky to have older colleagues who gave me good advices, and I was clever
enough to listen. It is my time to give advices now – I find it natural and
I am positive we can change things slowly (agonizingly slowly) this way.
77. REPLY
12/09/2013
VSONICV
Do you know what’s the similarity between research and shitting?
First, both need papers. Second, the papers are full of shit~XD
78. REPLY
12/09/2013
SUN KWOK
The system of grants and overheads has greatly corrupted our value
as scientists. The definition of success has changed to being able to
generate the most amount of money, managing the largest number of people,
and having the most power in committees. A true scientist has to be true to
his/her own values and be tough enough to stand in front of a bandwagon.
79. REPLY
12/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
Theorem: BBQ is awesome.
Proof: Above comments. Q.E.D.
80. REPLY
12/09/2013
FERNANDO
This is a cool read, and I can share many of the concerns stated.
But it is really a rant-list and its loss of objectivity is self-evident as
you read further into it. It focuses on the worst aspects of academia and
it tries to portray them as representative of the most, which I think is
very misleading. Problems with academia? Yes, many. What the author seems
to me missing is crucial. Academia compared to what? What other activity
you can devote to (working in government, the private sector, NGOs, others)
that has less (and less serious) problems? Over the last 20 years, I have
worked for industry, academia, and international organizations. I can’t
tell you academia is the bad animal this article portrays it to be. Just
stating my (biased) take on it.
81. REPLY
12/09/2013
M1234
I quit my PhD studies at EPFL a couple of years ago. I came to
Switzerland because I was passionate about science and I really wanted to
learn. After 1.5 years I realized that the topic that was chosen {for me /
by me} was completely pointless and will never be fruitful. My research
direction was mostly chosen because it looked good to get EU money.
At EPFL you are expected to publish papers almost from the the very
start. Moreover your progress is closely monitored and you feel the heat (indirectly)
when you are behind. I lost all self-esteem and all passion. Little by
little I felt worse and worse. You realize that most research that is done
is completely pointless and follow exactly the points mentioned in the
letter above. Very few people are there to advance the field. It is about
selling a topic, not researching them.
After 3 years I finally quit and it was the best decision in my
life! I now do almost exactly what I had hoped my PhD would be like. I have
people around me that help and inspire me. I learn more in half a year at
my current job than I did during my 3 years in Switzerland.
If you don’t like your PhD I strongly recommend you quit. The
industry is a much better place to grow, to learn and to have fun. A PhD
can be a dangerous mix between insane pressure and moments of pure panic.
Life is too short. Unless you love your field unconditionally or need a PhD
to boost you ego, I can promise you that you will learn more, have more
fun, feel mush better, accomplish more, be more proud of your own work in
the industry than in academia. Moreover, I actually think there is better
ethics in some sense, it is harder to bullshit and lie. If the stuff you
are developing don’t work, they don’t work.
If you love science and learning – search for a great company in the
right industry! There are plenty of places you can do science in the
industry.
82. REPLY
12/09/2013
H
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/08/26/23-signs-youre-secretly-a-narcissist-masquerading-as-a-sensitive-introvert/
83. REPLY
12/09/2013
SRIDHAR
For a sidelong look at the same essential debate see the zen pencils
cartoon:
Bill Watterson’s: A cartoonist’s advice
http://zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoonists-advice/
84. REPLY
12/09/2013
KISH
On the DOT! Well said, you have put forth all the points I had in my
mind.
85. REPLY
12/09/2013
DENDE
I agree with the author of the letter. Academia has become another
tool of the “Market”, this entity that nobody fully understands and which
behaves like a monster eating human beings to go on in the Third World as
well as in the Fourth one. In my opinion, the reason why Universities are
becoming emotionally cold factories of professionals formed only on
technical issues is that the “Market” only wants these institutions formed
by this kind of people. There were already meetings in the end of 70’s and
beginning of 80’s where big corporations met in order to discuss about the
future academic models that should be established in order to build a more
competitive society and develop a better world. But the way that these
corps. defend is only one of the possible ways to do it, and I fully
disagree with the extremist Neoliberal ideas that led us to this economical
crisis that everybody is paying, except the big corps.
By the way, when I told my boss at EPFL during my PhD that EPFL didn’t
seem a University from my point of view because we didn’t really make
research, he replied telling me that EPFL is not a University, but a
School…! According to him the differences are clear: a School is more a
tool for Companies, Industry,…. I wondered whether he meant “the Market”.
So apparently for some people it’s clear: if research activity doesn’t
bring short-term benefits isn’t worth to invest in it. Why do you think
that Molecular Biology has so big budgets? In order to better understand where
do we come from, or in order to produce more benefits for pharmaceuticals?
And I think that this is what is making politicians change their opinion
about academic institutions as if they were sinks of money where
researchers, scientists and even students live at the expense of the taxes
of Society.
Therefore, I agree with the contents of the letter, even though I
found it hard to understand in some parts. I am pretty sure that the author
took his time to write it, but I would appreciate clearer messages without
so many appositions and subordinated phrases. On the other hand, I fully
agree with Rob that we are the young generation to change the things, so
here I am as well to change things with my day by day behavior.
I could continue saying so many things, but it’s time to leave it
for the moment and to show all my admiration and my respect to the author
of the letter. I’m sure that we lost in the research community, at least, a
very honest person. And we are lack of them in Science.
86. REPLY
12/09/2013
ERIK P
Anyone working in science must be able to recognise these as valid
points. Science is a pyramid scheme, whereby you get lots of students or
post-docs underneath you to write as many papers as possible. Review
processes are also political and hardly anonymous (you can tell you writes
what!). There are other problems (e.g. when funding is low, people fund
PhDs rather than researchers, as it is cheaper. In the UK there is 1
post-doc position for every 20 PhD graduates, and the UK does well!)
87. REPLY
12/09/2013
BUBBLEWRAP
I’m also a PhD student from EPFL but I work in a research centre in
another Kanton. In general, I have a very supportive PhD supervisor and
encouraging environment.
But ask yourself ….
how often you wonder, how come someone *like that* could get a PhD
just because he/she had been in the system long enough?
How come your supervisor just doesn’t see the fundamental
problem/mistake in his proposed project/argument?
Most students who apply for a PhD program come in because they couldn’t
find a job. Even though PhD students are paid very little, they still sign
up because it’s better than nothing. If/when they graduate, they might
think they’re capable of doing research and become supervisors for the next
generation of PhD students. Or they think they can be good managers
(because in this age, good presentation/salesman skills are regarded better
than the actual ability to do research), and go onto managing a lab. But in
fact, they are far from capable of advancing the scientific frontiers. They
come up with pointless projects like they have a quota to fill and admit
cheap & low-quality students to do the projects, so that they maintain
their PI status.
Some truly brilliant students, if they are lucky, get very competent
supervisors. If they’re unlucky, they are quickly disappointed by the
quality of their peers (who come in because of a salary than science),
supervisors (who are either more focused on advancing their managerial
career than the actual science or are just mediocre scientists) and the
lack of support (financial, professional) from the University. They become
bitter and lose motivation and lost.
The value of the PhD has decreased so much: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223
To fix the broken system: admit only the best of the best for PhD
programs and reward them with good salary for what they contribute to
science.
Until then… the real, smart ones are going to find jobs (and do
amazing things) in the real world. Only dreamers and the
slightly-above-average ones go to Grad School.
88. REPLY
12/09/2013
VIGHNESH NV
Dear Gene,
Felt so reassuring to know that someone else shares my views on
academics. For a moment, I even wondered if I was cloned out of you ! I am
currently in the second year of my PhD, but wondering if I should continue.
While I may not be courageous enough to quit my PhD as yet, I am hopeful
that I can, with like-minded people such as you, bring some positive
changes in myself as well as in my surroundings. As an Indian, it is nice
to hear that you would like to work in the developing world, although I
don’t subscribe to the prevailing definition of development. You are most
welcome to work in India. :-). I have some fresh ideas.
Please let me know your e-mail address so that I can correspond with
you (FYI, I generally don’t send long emails ). Note my e-mail
address: vighnesh_nv@outlook.com
89. REPLY
12/09/2013
PHILIPPA
I am really happy seeing that finally someone had spoken out.
I study in Germany and I and many of my friends share your
frustration.
The situation is even worse for PhD students coming from outside
Europe, Canada, and the US. They are often forced to work with 50% of the
PhD students salary for 10-12 hours per day 7 days per week.
I believe modern slavery is this.
I have witnessed one case of burnout in my colleagues during my PhD.
People are stressed out all the time. The nervous system diseases
are ubiquitous among my colleagues who are below thirty years old in where
I work.
I loved my field of study before I did this PhD. I no longer do.
Every thing is so superficial and ugly that I do not want to be a part of
it. I have also decided to quit science for good after I finish my PhD
studies.
90. REPLY
12/09/2013
SHAHRZAD
This article is worth ten “academic publications”!
It is so close to me and my experience I almost thought I wrote it,
I wish of course I had written down my experience as well,
instead of just discussing it with friends , the whole thing reminds me of
the naked king and the little boy!
somebody needs to shout it out, let it be us,
91. REPLY
12/09/2013
AMIHAPPY
My sincere respects to you and few of the other commenters who
making an earnest effort in understanding of pitfalls in academia. I agree
on quite a few things that is presented in the original letter, although I
have been lucky to escape them by the whisker.
I too have recently submitted my first draft of dissertation and
hoping to graduate in coming months. Few years ago, when i was finishing my
masters and thinking about future options. I was eagerly seeking advice
from other graduate students who were pursuing their PhD on what to expect
in case I decided to undertake PhD. Most (not all)of the people I spoke to
were prone to frustrations expressed on this page and some of them had
bought into the system and others were cursing their lives while biding
their time till graduation.
I made it a point that I would feel comfortable in the group(which
takes in the factor of Prof/Advisor) such that I would be enthusiastic
about going to the lab everyday. I cannot imagine spending 3-5 years of my
life doubting my choices, feeling insecure, incapacitated, frustrated about
life in general. I am sure such a time comes in to everybody’s life and
we’ve learn to cope but to bring it oneself is something which has to be
avoided!(I think I have so far, lucky me:))
My point is, the ills of the system apart, there are Profs out there
who are making an effort to swim against the tide. Some students are
lucky(I really mean this, I know people will doubt my qualifications for
saying this) and rest of them either get sold into the system or living
their lives in frustrations. Then there some brave souls who call the bluff
and walk away.
I don’t want to walk away now but even in case I wanted to ….I would
not, life back home is not so sweet…..its god damm greyhound tracks back
there and if I don’t go back with a fancy certificate……now you see why I
consider myself lucky.
Good luck for all you brave souls who are walking away and my
sincere sympathies to the frustrated souls out there.
Regards
iAmHappy
92. REPLY
12/09/2013
SLEHAR
Great letter, all true except for one thing: Science is NOT a
business, science is a charitable venture funded by government. And
government is famously incompetent at getting ANYTHING done efficiently or
sensibly, because government is also not a business, it lives off the
taxpayer, few of whom even follow what their money is being spent on. So
science is a big charade where bureaucrats hire committees of “respected”
academics to make collective judgments on distributing the government
funds, so all the conniving and deal-making and back-stabbing are a natural
part of the process. It happens wherever government spends money, not just
in science.
That the cynical truth. Now for the hopeful truth: Government will
always grow and grow till it is barely sustainable, and it will spend and
spend to justify its bloated existence by “doing good” by one measure or
another. Every culture has its religion, some spend the collective wealth
building pyramids or spinning prayer wheels. We have the good fortune to
live in a society where science IS our religion, because if you have to
have a religion, science is the least deceptive and most grounded in actual
reality of the alternative belief systems.
The true benefit of all that government funded research is NOT the
piles of incomprehensible publications generated by all the career
scientists building their careers. That literature is indeed mostly
worthless and incomprehensible. The true benefit of government funded
science is that it offers a (almost useless but delightful) career for many
science-minded people, who do more interesting REAL science and philosophy
and mathematics in their spare time at home than they do in the boring lab,
and they get to exchange ideas over beers with like-minded
science-interested folks on every topic under the sun. The culture is
enriched by giving a living to the geeky nerd thinkers. Jump on the
bandwagon, join the gravy-train, write your mindless papers, but give
thanks that you live in a culture where there is a career available to
anyone who is willing to play the game. THAT is what is good in science.
Not the obvious “product” published in peer-reviewed journals. That is just
the game they play to earn their respected position in the system.
93. REPLY
12/09/2013
VPYNCHON
I want to congratulate myself with the author of this letter.
I think what s/he says actually captures a lot of what is going on
not only in science departments, but also in the humanities. As many people
may be aware of, during the last decades the humanities have started to
feel “inferior” to the sciences and, in order to fight such a complex of
inferiority, they’ve started to become more “scientific” themselves.
Nowadays, in whatever branch of the humanities you work, you are expected
to produce papers written with “scientific clarity”. This is translated in
very short papers, focused on an extremely narrow topic, citing a lot of
pre-existent and “important” literature.
In this way, historians are now “scientists of history”, anthropologists
are “scientists of culture and men”, philosophers are “scientists of
thought”. No-one is interested in actually trying to give a humanistic
perspective to the most urgent problems of society. There are no more
historians who try to understand how we ended up in this current situation,
there are no more anthropologists who try to actually understand cultural
conflicts, there are no more philosophers who engage themselves in the
construction of a general system of ideas to make sense of ourselves and of
the world we live in. There are only a lot of “scientific humanists”
spending days typing on their laptops and producing shallow papers which
are going to be read only by seven people in the world; finally, when they
have ten of those papers, they collect them together, they write a Preface
and a Conclusion in which they say exactly the same things of what is
already said in the papers, and so they are ready to publish their first
book – which probably is going to be reviewed by their old teachers and
friends.
I am a PhD student in Philosophy of Science, and I share the same
feelings of the author of this letter. Philosophy of science is a complex
discipline, with many branches and sub-branches. Lately, it has become
clear that the very disciplinary structure of the philosophy of science
mirrors the taxonomy of the sciences. This tendency to the
over-specialization is almost suffocating. Once upon a time, there was a
sort of “general” philosophy of science, treating issues like the
epistemological status of scientific claims (i.e., whether such claims are
“true” or “false”, and how we can be sure of that), the history of
scientific concepts, the inter-relations among the sciences, the definition
of scientific rationality, the role of science within society. Then, it
happened that many “philosophers of science” became “philosophers of
physics”, or “philosophers of biology”, or “philosophers of the social
sciences”. Nowadays, there is the philosophy of quantum mechanics,
philosophy of statistical mechanics, philosophy of relativity, philosophy
of evolutionary theory, philosophy of economics, philosophy of psychology…
While putting effort on a special field is not bad per se, the problem here
is that all these “philosophers of the special sciences” do not even
communicate with one another anymore. If you ask to one of them a question
which is not related to their narrow area of expertise, they don’t know
what to say or they just say that “it’s not their field” .
All of this, in the name of a “scientific clarity” which is sold as the
highest virtue in the humanities and accepted as a dogma.
Because of this over-specialization, another tendency in the
humanities that I have noticed is the lack of a sane – I would say
“enlightened” – critical spirit. I make again an example from the
philosophy of science, since it is the area that I know best. In the past,
several philosophers of science were interested not only in the “conceptual
analysis” of this or that theory or equation. They were also interested to
other issues like, for instance, the “ethics” of science, or the place that
scientific knowledge should have in (and for) society, or the relation
between “scientific progress” and “human progress”. There was this famous
philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, who knew a lot about science – in
particular, the various interpretations of quantum mechanics – and yet,
despite his detailed and informed analyses, was claiming that ultimately
the problem that philosophers of science should try to solve is happiness.
Feyerabend’s research tried to answer to the question: “How can science be
used to improve our lives and to make us happier?” (or, alternately and
more critically: “Is science actually used to improve our lives and to make
us happier?)
Nowadays, no philosopher of science asks those questions. If you try, you
are labelled irrational and idealist. All you have to do is to have this
“scientific attitude” which translates in the dogmatic and a-critical
acceptance of what science is and does. In other words, if you have a PhD
in philosophy of science, your job description is going to be: “Given that
science is right, you must be able to explain why”. But this attitude is
neither humanistic nor scientific, I’m afraid! And beside, what would be
the need of having philosophers around, if what they say is exactly the
same of what scientists are already saying by themselves.
Finally, there is this eternal academic arrogance which pervades not
only the science departments, but also the humanities. It is true: people
from the departments of physics may look down at people from the
departments of biology who may look down at people from the departments
sociology. Because the structure of the philosophy of science mirrors the
taxonomy of the sciences, the same thing happen in the departments of
philosophy: people doing philosophy of physics look down at people doing
philosophy of biology who in turn look down at people doing philosophy of
the social sciences, while philosophers of maths look down pretty much at
everybody.
Moreover, philosophical disciplines are also more or less important
depending on their nationality. Anglo-American philosophers say that German
or French philosophers, the so-called “Continental”, are just a waste of
time and they all write wishy-washy non-sense. All of them. You then ask to
these people which German or French philosophers they have read and they
will most likely reply: “Well, none of them, because they are all of waste
of time and they speak non-sense, all of them!” The opposite is also true.
When asked about Anglo-American philosophers, the so-called “Analytics”,
the Continentals would reply that they are all shallow and narrow and
affect by an irrational scientism – all of them, that’s why none of that
should be, and have been!, read.
My feeling is that current academia has destroyed what both the sciences
and the humanities were about. Both scientists and humanists are just caged
in the lab or in the library and they have no idea of what is going on in
the world. Wars, famine, financial collapses, climatic and natural
disasters: this is what is going on. Yet, you ask to academics to try to
make sense of even one of this problem and you find out they can’t: they
are too busy writing the next paper in which they have to cite those guys
who have cited them, or supervising the next thesis about nothing – all of
this with public money, of course.
The only reason why I am not giving up on PhD is because I have
almost finished and I don;t know what to do. I don;t feel particularly
blessed or intelligent in doing what I am doing. Actually, I feel rather
dumb and, sometimes, even morally “dirty”. Let’s see what the future will
decide of me and best of luck to the author of the original letter.
VP
94. REPLY
13/09/2013
SAM
Whoever you (the original author of the content) are, dude, accept
my “friendship”. Yes, we are less in number, but does it matter? We always
have been. Keep courage, my friend. Bloodsucking leeches have networks and
self-sustaining-mediocrity always. But that never bothers the true Howard
Roarks (ref: The Fountainhead). Keep doing what you believe in, and don’t
bother about peer-support. In the end, they all kneel down and worship the
harbingers of new ideas. and yes, they do keep on making their bread and
butter from our ideas!
Only thing that I suggest? or request? Do NOT quit from doing science. Then
those businessmen win.
95. REPLY
13/09/2013
RJ
Thanks to bring this issue up. Such cases happen a lot.
I was forced to be working fully on supervisor’s projects, and
stressful work makes me work every until late night. These projects have
nothing to do with my phd topic!!!
I always have to beg for time for my research, I fill my holiday time
to write my papers and send it to my supervisor for correction. After
waiting 3 months, I asked, he didn’t even read it!!! and later he spend
only a night to finished.
Now I am struggling not to be involved into any business projects.
96. REPLY
13/09/2013
ARUN
Just a recommendation – Science and Method by Henri Poincare.
97. REPLY
13/09/2013
PROMETHEUS
What this young apprentice says is largely true. But, out of a
hundred papers you may read, you may stumble upon “the one” that is life
altering. It makes it worth is.
Your work is a pure as your soul. I do not see it as an Either/Or,
but a chess game to keep your soul and keep an academic roof over your
head. No shame in that.
What else… oh, really hard problems worth solving could take
decades…Yes. But, I look at a Journal like a notebook that is made public.
Heh, it may not all be E=MC2, but it is the best I can do. If you look at a
journal pub as an open notebook, then maybe you would not have such high
expectation of each individual publication.
98. REPLY
13/09/2013
TAMI
The key is to pick your advisor and project carefully before getting
involved. While that is easier said than done, it is much easier than 4+
years of uninspired work. There are scientists out there doing science the
way you imagine it should be done (whatever that may be) — find them and
don’t settle for less.
99. REPLY
13/09/2013
ALEX
To the author: I admire you. Like you, I have experienced a similar
situation and have the exact same feelings. Here, five months ahead from my
dissertation I don’t have the guts to quit. Yet I decided to take a
different path and go to the industry since I don’t believe in Academia
anymore. Certainly the industry is also money-driven, but at least they
honest about it.
100. REPLY
13/09/2013
MOKHLISS
Unfortunately so true.hope it will change.the real researchers have
to do something to change the situation
101. REPLY
13/09/2013
TAMAGHNA
I feel this is more of a supply-demand problem. I’m an undergraduate
and I’ve done most of my research in my home country (India) and while I
agree that such things happen even here, I’ve been fortunate to the extent
that I would think twice before calling it a coincidence. The facts are
thus…
I’m now working on two research projects in Condensed Matter
Physics. Project 1 was decided after discarding three different project
ideas that came up, two of which came from my supervisor and one from
myself. There was not the least display of any sort of negativity when I told
him I found a different topic more interesting or that I didn’t want to do
a certain type of work this summer. I’m still early in my career and in no
position to judge the merits of a professor, but to my limited
understanding, he is a brilliant researcher with a keen command over the
very interesting (to the scientific community in developed nations as well
as to myself) topics he specializes in, which it is surprising to me that
the strength of his research group is at this point I believe limited to three
PhD students one of whom is leaving this year. Project 2 is being carried
out at my home instituition. During our first encounter after I had
finished describing my previous work, the professor expressed interest in a
project of mine that I was incomplete (because a European professor I had
started it with had lost interest in the project) and suggested that it
might be interesting to reformulate that into a more general problem as our
project and try to complete my project on the side. Both of these professors
actually work on the projects, in the sense that they get their hands dirty
and work through the stuff when it gets interesting enough to excite them.
These are not isolated instances; I have had similar experiences in other
projects in my country and a single starkly different experience in my lone
stint abroad.
I feel that one of the roots (and certainly not the only one) of the
problem is that there is a surplus of supply in the hallowed scientific
centres of the developed world, the US, Germany, Switzerland, France,
Britain, Canada among others. Supply of good quality graduate students when
in excess, will inevitably lead to a system in which they are undervalued.
Also, it increases the managerial overhead on the professors, who then have
even less time for their students, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle.
This is essentially the same problem that would arise if all the tomato
famers of the world preferred to sell their tomatoes (cf. 5 years of
graduate school) to Walmart and Tesco, say (cf. hot-shot Western
universities). The tomatoes would rot and both companies would be deluged
in managing inventories so there is really no point blaming them either. As
the businesses expanded under the pressure of more and more supply, the
possible objective of providing quality tomatoes at lower rates to the
world is lost in the rat race, as both try to one-up the other. In
principle, the analogous problem in academia would need to be resolved in
similar fashion. However, I’m not sure what the necessary steps would have
to be in practice for the encouragement of a global academic “free market”,
where quality researchers are matched to quality graduate school applicants
irrespective of affiliation, if at all I am right in believing that this
would solve the problems addressed in this post. Fixing a maximum
PhD:mentor ratio sounds like a very naiive and knee-jerk reaction, I would
be glad if someone came up with a more feasible solution.
Just my two cents,
Tamaghna.
102. REPLY
13/09/2013
D
Science is a messy, messy place with morally bankrupt individuals
competing with one another for paltry, waning grant funds. The only equity
left in the world of science is social equity freely paid to influential
professors who store it in a vault of ego.
I dropped out of my (ivy league) PhD too. I refused to develop, as
you say, Stockholm Syndrome for my advisors, who were using their students
as robots to do their work instead of developing the students themselves. I
once received a report that said something to the effect of “you desire to
innovate, but that distracts you from your work.”
There are almost NO checks and balances in the system. You can work
for years under a professor who holds your degree or letter of
recommendation hostage, and there is no way to earn your “payment” without
delivering whatever expectation they have, no matter how absurd.
Let the pompous “intellectuals” tear themselves to pieces as science
becomes privatized, education becomes free and online, and grants all but
disappear. The real world is a well-paying meritocracy established on
concrete and objective market demands. Fight on and don’t look back!
103. REPLY
13/09/2013
TOMMASO TUFARELLI
Thanks for the beautiful article, I am still working in academia a
see a lot of the things you mention.
104. REPLY
13/09/2013
ALAN WRIGHT
What a wonderful article! Without saying so directly, the
author has touched on a few pertinent real life challenges such as:
+ that part of culture where ignorance is bliss and those who have gone
down the road to enlightenment discover their own shortcomings and those of
others;
+ that part of economics where money and greed drive decision making in an
world where dependence on money enslaves you or protects you from the will
of others;
+ that part of individuality and choice which eludes so many because they
do not have it, or do have it but don’t realise that they are in a position
to stand free…
All that said, the article reveals so many opportunities. For
instance, there is the opportunity to be an academic outside of the formal
structures and inject truth into the world through platforms like this (a
blog). Or go straight into the (business) world and do the same. I do the
latter. I abandoned my masters because of my principals’ egos. Had I been
so naive at that stage of my life, I would have spent less money on them
and more on me. But my clients love my work – it’s brutally honest and ego
free. Most of all, it’s totally scientific.
105. REPLY
13/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
Okay, given the interest that this letter has generated, I’ve
decided that it would be criminal not to do something to act on the spark
that this seems to have created for many people. If you want to create a
group where we could discuss/propose/implement potential solutions, the
first step should be to get everyone who’s interested together, after which
we could start formal discussions.
If you are interested, either:
(1) e-mail Juliette at juliette.colinas@gmail.com
(2) e-mail me at eugene.bunin@gmail.com
(3) join the Facebook group I created for this (called “Honest Science”,
link above) – I recognize that Facebook is not the best choice for
everyone, but it’s free and as a quick-and-dirty solution it’s good, as it
can also immediately give a forum to more focused discussions (if we want
to migrate to a dedicated forum later, that’s of course possible)
A big thanks to everyone, again.
106. REPLY
13/09/2013
PETER
MURRAY-RUST
Thank you for the courage to write this article.
I have just retired from a career in academic and industrial science
and it’s been very kind to me. I’ve had freedom – both funding and choice
of work – in both situations. For the last few years until I retried I have
had a wonderful group of people working with me (in chemical informatics).
I am extremely proud of them and they have uniformly gone into productive
high-tech industry (almost all in UK) which I believe represents a very
positive outcome.
I have no doubt that I was very fortunate to be in a golden era of
science and that it’s much harder now. I was fortunate to be mentored by
first class scientists , all showing great humanity. None had large groups
and I have always held that I personally did not want to run a group that
could not sit down at a single table at a pub on Friday afternoons without
a deadline of rushing back. But this is increasingly hard to do. Crick and
Watson might mind it hard to work today in the way they did.
There are wonderful things in academia, but I think the system is
getting out of touch with the world outside. I’m now working largely
outside the system (in the Open Knowledge Foundation) and looking to do
science with those outside the ivory tower. In the digital era there’s a huge
potential to change the way we do education and research – and universities
have failed to recognize this. Indeed academia is one of the few business
areas largely untouched by the digital era.
It depends very much on the field but there are often equally
exciting challenges in industry as in academia. The constraint of a
business focus can be beneficial as well as constraining. I think both
biotech and IT are very exciting areas outside academia. And – although
it’s not common – it’s often technically possible to do non-laboratory
research privately. I hope we shall see the development of non-academic
communities doing innovation and research in the public arena – Wikipedia,
Mozilla, OKF, and crowdsourcing are growing rapidly. So earning your living
outside academia may allow you to continue certain types of “research”. It
will be very challenging, but it’s possible.
Change can often be a good thing – I left academia because I had
wonderful industrial collaborators and I saw the potential of doing new and
exciting things.
Of course, you will be lucky and unlucky in the people and
organizations you meet. Make the most of the good fortune
107. REPLY
13/09/2013
SI
So If I get it right from your own comments:
– You were given the great opportunity to work on a topic you are truly
interested in
– You were well supervised, you were granted public money for a duration of
four years to pursue “true” science
– You claim to have learned a lot during your PhD journey
…and yet you chose to quit.
How ethical is it, not to want to share what you have learned with
others, while you accepted public funding for all the duration of your
journey?
How is this better than the people you described?
108. REPLY
13/09/2013
PAUL
To be honest, I’ve come across similar writings several times during
the course of my Masters degree, and it didn’t stop me from doing a PhD.
Sure, a lot of it is true, to an extent, but if you feel that you are not
given enough freedom, not working in the right place or on the wrong
project, with the wrong people, or making enough money, then the fault
cannot fully be with ‘academia’ (whatever that is!); most of the
responsibility of this lies with yourself. I do understand that not
everyone has the good fortune to be offered a position in their preferred
lab or on their preferred topic, but blaming your misery on ‘academia’
after you knowingly chose a sub-par position, is not honest; no matter how
unfair ‘the world’ might seem.
109. REPLY
14/09/2013
CHRISTIAN SCHMEMANN
I apologize for the length of this post.
I started out my university life as a physics student, with an
interest in nuclear physics and biophysics. During the course of my
studies, I became convinced that nuclear energy was the only feasible way
to effectively tackle the issues of climate change. I started PhD program
in nuclear engineering, where I decided to specialize in radiological
physics and radiation safety. I found the field interesting, from a
mathematical perspective and as a practical endeavor. Being that I had no
nuclear experience starting out, I was given a year or so to work casually
on several projects, so that I could find my niche. Whenever, I found a
major professor, he assigned me to a thin-film neutron scintillator for my
dissertation project. I never had any experience in solid-state physics or
photonics, and I wasn’t allowed to take any solid-state physics class. To
make a long convoluted story short, things ended very badly.
I was starting to become concerned about the prospects of nuclear
employment in America after Fukushima and the ideologically-driven closures
of two nuclear power plants just this year. I still maintain that nuclear
energy is the only workable solution to adequately address climate change,
but I would not recommend going to graduate school as a means to enter into
the nuclear industry.
I’ve read a lot on the responses to this article about how the
dysfunctions of the neo-liberal and laissez-faire capitalism are eroding
academia, and my experiences are fully consistent with careerist professors
who are only interested in grubbing as much money as they can; the academic
profession is quickly going to replace the legal profession for being the
worst of blood-sucking parasites. I think that academia is too far gone,
too full of rage-prone egomaniacs, ranging from the University President to
the Provost to the Deans to the Faculty to ever reform internally. I think
that reform to academia is going to have to come from the outside. Specific
to America, I think that all graduate students should have a right to have
to organized labor, and I think that weekly overtime laws that apply to
regular workers should apply to graduate students as well. Academic work
needs to be seen as just another form of labor that should be covered to
the same labor laws that govern all other labor.
I think another problem with academia I would add to this letter is
that the academic climate can be extremely unforgiving for people who have
interests and hobbies outside their scientific specialty and want to
interact with people outside the academic climate. Outside science, I have
a love for classical music, both performing on piano and organ and going to
the symphony; I realize that I am in the minority for being a physicist who
is a Greek-rite Catholic convert and enjoys volunteer work. And I can say
in all honesty that I was often seen as a pariah by my major professor for
wanting contact with the outside world. To be just blunt, these are signs
of a cult!
I still maintain that science is the means by which the majority of
the world’s problems will be solved. Whether academia can deliver on this
or not, I do not know and I no longer care. Since my time as a PhD student,
I have completely fallen out of love with science, and I can no longer be a
functioning product worker in the sciences or engineering. I have also
found other causes are a lot more important to me. I am completely sick of
both the careerist academics who treat students as food for their
ill-gotten gain and the anti-science American Fundamentalist heretics
called the Tea Party. I I have decided that I should go to the seminary and
be a priest.
110. REPLY
14/09/2013
IFTIKHAR QAYUM
I think there is a lot of bullshit here. One person’s or a few person’s
personal experiences or opinions are being blown out of proportion to
malign an entire system that has produced countless benefits for mankind
over many centuries. There is no problem-free system in the world and any
serious student of science would know that this is inherent to any
evolutionary process. Did any of us learn to run before learning to walk
and learn to walk without falling? Yet it is the human spirit and endeavor
for struggling against the odds that has brought us to see the modern world
from jungle and cave days. Imagine what would have happened if our
ancestors had given up on effort and sat contentedly with what they had?
There are always dropouts, for whatever reasons, and they have always been
ignored while the bandwagon moves on. Instead of just condemning things and
dropping out of them, one should spend time and effort into finding
solutions. In this case, a better course would have been to complete the
PhD, join the group and then work to convince the system of your proposed
changes and have them implemented…change things from within, as it were,
rather than running away.
111. REPLY
14/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
Interesting rebuttal to the letter here (from a very different
perspective):
https://medium.com/advice-to-graduates/d0dd648b7c4d
112.REPLY
14/09/2013
DIFFEOMORPH
@ FeuDRenais
Hmmm, Interesting lettre.
Nothing new though, and you’re definitly not the first. I have respect for
the fact that you stated your mind so clearly and had the courage to send
it to so many “large” egos.
You say that you want to do true/honest science. Have you actually
asked yourself what that might be? I’m sure if you took a pole, you would
find as many answers as there are to this blog. The problems you state in
your lettre do not just apply to academia. They are problems found in
almost every aspect of life and this because we live in a world populated
by Humans which (last time I checked) are flawed creatures. Therefore
anything they do will also be in someway inperfect.
Your answer to the problem is to quit. What will this achieve? You
will go to industry or elsewhere and you will be confronted to the same
problems of egos, dishonesty, cheating, etc. You say academia pulled a
trick on the world. Look at some of the companies out there trying to sell
there products to the world, are they any better? Not really. Will there
ever be something as pure honesty in an imperfect world? The answer is a
resounding no.
However, this does not mean that we should not strive for this. From
my point of view our job is to make the world better, if only in a neighbourhood
of ourselves. You want to change academia for the better, than stay and
fight for what you believe in. You can only change things by hard work and
perseverance in the area itself. Your quitting will only get you a few days
or weeks of discussion and then people will loose interest and go back to
there life and struggles. You will not become a becon of honest science
because you quite, you gave up. If you truelly want to change something,
then finish your PhD, stay in academia and spend the rest of your life
trying to improve it, if only locally.
113.REPLY
14/09/2013
DRJOHNGALAN
One of the world’s most eminent electrochemists (a man I knew) in
1989 was vilified and his career (albeit late in life) ruined though the
search for a new scientific phenomenon.
He and a colleague reported observations, measurements that they had
made, which flew in the face of established theory. They openly stated that
they did not understand the theory of the phenomenon behind their
observations. Despite that, they were accused of being charlatans and
performing “junk science”. How can reporting an observation be anything
other than of scientific interest?
Almost a quarter of a century later, the observations they reported
have been replicated many times in many laboratories throughout the world.
Mainstream science still ignores this field: a quiet word in the ear from
the established scientist tells a young researcher not to go anywhere near
this topic. The world is a poorer place as a result.
Fortunately, like you, there are a few brave men and women who have
integrity. They continue to pursue this research which is likely to be seen
in due course as leading to a paradigm shift in science.
114.REPLY
14/09/2013
ALESSANDRA
Hi all, I just came across to this article…I really suggest you to
read this book: THe Culture of technology, A. Pacey (http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Culture_of_Technology.html?id=JFfV7EopNPoC&redir_esc=y)
it is a very “academic” description of how ambiguous is science today. We
still believe that science is pure and bring a positive progress but
reality is that everything touches technology enters into industrial-market
logic which is most of the time far far away from pushes people to become
scientist. …
115. REPLY
14/09/2013
ISOMORPHISMES
After the disenchantment with academia, the next step for this young
person will be to de-mystify the business world. S/he seems to think
“Business = Evil” when in fact plenty of jobs do actually accomplish
something.
116.REPLY
14/09/2013
W.W.WYGART
FeuDRenais
Good luck with all of your future endeavors.
You might be interested to know that Sean Summers at ETH Zurich has
posted a kind of nasty-gram to you at his website:
https://medium.com/advice-to-graduates/d0dd648b7c4d
Comments don’t seem to be possible there.
You’ve also been picked up in the USA at Anthony Watt’s blog WUWT –
take that for what its worth.
As I say at my own blog:
This seems to be a symptom of a larger problem that many outside of
academia, such as myself, have been commenting on for years, namely the
degradation of institutionalized science into an academic racketeering
operation.
Academia is along established institution – or meta institution. All
long established institutions share a common phenomenology – they serve to
protect mediocrity and stifle genuine innovation. Institutions are often
[though not always] created for some original purpose as an innovative
impulse, usually that of an exceptional innovator. That purpose inevitably
degenerates into self-perpetuation of the institution, rather that
innovation. Of course it is often the case with political institutions in
particular – and academic institutions are by their nature quasi-political
– that they are founded precisely to shore up a status quo and stifle any
outbreak of novelty or innovation. The exceptional and innovative of course
do exist in academia and elsewhere, but the academic institution is often
at odds with them – my outsider take on the situation.
In the cases where institutions are created as an auxiliary to some
innovative or creative impulse, for example that of some great innovator
who creates an institution to further his work, once that innovator leaves
the scene the decline sets in. You cannot institutionalize innovation, innovation
and institutionalization are contrary impulses. The best that an
institution can do is recognize the real innovators in their midst and get
the hell out of their way and let them try, fail, and succeed and give them
the necessary resources and support along the way.
Spengler has a new essay at the AsiaTimesOnLine here: where he
discusses, in the light of his recent death, economist Ronald Coase, the
notion of the Firm in regards to innovation.
“Firms exist, he argued, because the individuals who comprise the
firm – the production workers, the salesmen, the typists in the office
pool, and the janitor – would have to spent too much time searching for
work if they all worked freelance. By collaborating in a firm together they
are assured of steady work.”
Its supposed to be all about lowering everyone’s transaction costs.
Spengler later corrects, or extends, Coase’s theory of the Firm.
“I have an alternate theory of the firm, namely that large firms
exist to protect mediocrity – from the lunatics and conmen on one hand, and
disruptive innovators on the other… …For every Thomas Edison there are a
hundred candidates for commitment to state mental health facilities.
Most people don’t like disruption. They want to acquire a skill,
work reasonable hours, secure reasonable pay, watch television in the
evening and play golf or whatever on the weekends. They don’t look deeply
into the matters that concern them and are content to do what other people
in their position do. If they are diligent, reliable, well-mannered and
polite, they are just the sort of folk that the human relations types at
corporations prefer.”
In this way, academic science seems to have become indistinguishable
from Coase’s and Spengler’s Firm.
Good luck to those who are exceptional enough to find their way out
early.
W^3
117. REPLY
15/09/2013
ASTRODOOBIE
Yes, there are all these problems, obstacles, difficulties, irritations,
egos, ….but, actually, the most important thing I’ve noticed in all my
years of academia is that really passionate people who are reasonably
smart, who work hard, and who “keep their eyes on the prize” almost always
make it. It’s a human endeavor that can be a lot of fun, but it’s still
part of the real world.
118.REPLY
15/09/2013
EJ
A courage to be saluted.
Reminds me of Hal Lewis’s resignation from the APS: http://heartland.org/policy-documents/hal-lewis-resignation-letter-american-physical-society
119.REPLY
15/09/2013
LLOYD
Before doing anything else, read Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds,
which exactly describes the group sociology of this situation. I am
surprised it hasn’t already come up in discussion. I believe every grad
student should read it.
120. REPLY
15/09/2013
MIKE HASELER
I am doing research into the culture of academia and I would like to
know more about the circumstances that led to this letter as well as how to
cite it.
Mike Haseler BSc.MBA
121.REPLY
15/09/2013
PIEZEN
EPFL PhD here. Congratulations and sympathies to the author of the
letter and to our gracious host. My two pennies:
1) Academia draws on average rather intelligent people. For this
reason, they are even more susceptible to manipulation by flattery — hence
the dismal salaries, social status and living conditions that we accept in
exchange for the mere hope of approval and recognition by an intellectual
elite.
2) Because academics are rather smart, they are good at gaming the
system. Most of the paper publication system, the way funding requests are
written, even the research topics themselves are optimised for high returns
on the performance metrics, irrespective of any link to actual social
benefit.
In particular, research that is too theoretical, too applied, or even that
has some degree of uncertainty in it stands no chances of funding. It is
almost impossible to obtain grants for a research that is not at least half
completed already.
3) There is a micro-political aspect. The unconditional acceptance
of the “American model” entails a gutting of the mid-level researcher
category, and attention to publicity stunts such as grandiose-sounding
projects, supporting VIPs and the construction of impressive buildings.
There is also a degree of top-bottom authoritarianism: for instance tight
control of communication organs like internal journals and mailing lists,
or a degree of rigging in school-administrated research grants to promote
politically fashionable topics
4) There is a macro-political aspect, framed in the general
disfranchisement of younger populations and the Baby-boomers – Generation
X/Y fracture line.
Up until the 90s, professors were to some extend judged by the success of
their pupils, who were the inheritors of their theories; since then,
professors have been judged by the amount of grant and private partnership
money that they gather for their institution. As a consequence, PhD
students and post-docs have decayed from pupils you had to care for into a
disposable, cheap, overqualified workforce.
This follows the general evolution of generational relations between
privileged Baby-boomers and struggling members of Generations X and Y. I
suggest reading the following piece on and drawing the parallels to
Academia:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/28/spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation
Now, to echo Lenin: What is to be done?
122. REPLY
15/09/2013
MARK
Dear FeuDRenais,
I urge you to reconsider and to get those three letters.
I agree with your arguments, so much so that I left academia for
these very reasons, but only after I’d gotten the three letters. The last
months were the worst, stretching from the depths of my disillusionment
until achieving the three letters, but I persevered and am very glad I did.
With my PhD my credibility and the strength of my argument is greatly
enhanced; “I got my PhD” is simply much more persuasive than “I was three
months away”. Unfortunately, you will find a large number of people who did
not complete their PhDs for a wide variety of reasons, including (rarely)
yours. Yours may be very principled, but this will not be apparent to
anyone but you and your closest friends. The three letters will convey that
your argument is genuine and that your reasons for leaving academia were
out of principle. Without them, you will blend in with the many who were
not capable of completing and who left bitterly, blaming their failures on
others. Though you are not in this group, once you leave ABD, you will have
a hard time explaining that, and your power to change the system will be
enormously reduced.
One fact remains: those who have the three letters DO want them to
mean something. Indeed, we all want them to convey exactly what you despair
is being lost: that one is capable of searching for truth. You can use this
common desire that even jaded academics will endorse, and you can help to
reform the system, and you will find support. But your arguments will be
strong and corroborated by the evidence, or will be weak.
You get to make that choice now.
123. REPLY
15/09/2013
MARCO
From the huge reaction to this email it seems like the system is on
the border of a crisis. I personally think it is in the interest of the
heads of academia (also of those who only care about money) to carefully
read this thread and try to address some of the arisen issues, if they
don’t want to risk a snow-avalanche type of collapse..
I am one of those who joined a PhD program (in the same institution,
namely EPFL) motivated by his love for science, knowledge and ethics. I had
quite many good opportunities in industry after my MSc., but I said no to
all of them because I loved research and I wanted to do a PhD abroad. I was
(and still are) convinced that science pursues higher goals than just
money, but before actually starting the PhD I was quite unaware of how
academic systems worked in countries different from mine.
I don’t want to describe my personal problems with the PhD, but I
definitely have experienced all of the feelings reported in the mail, on a
daily basis; especially points 1), 2) and 3) and probably with the
exception of point 8), as I work in applied sciences (actually in applied
sciences there’s the opposite problem: good numbers on experimental data
are way too important).
I will likely abandon academia, but it is very soothing to know I am not
alone and to let all these feelings emerge to the open air; so thanks a lot
for the letter.
@FeuDRenais I think that facebook is really not the place where to
carry this kind of debates. Isn’t there any alternative??
124. REPLY
15/09/2013
ALEXANDRE
You are looking at the negative points only. To criticize is easy,
to make the difference is difficult. Academic area, as well as ALL other
areas, needs optimistic and strong people who can live together with bad
things and turn them into something better. If you are not strong enough,
if your contribution is just to complain, you did the right thing: gave up.
125. REPLY
15/09/2013
LUCAS
I agree completely. After earning my BS in two years, I continued on
through two masters in the next two years. I then worked for three years to
reduce my debt and then did all the coursework for my PHD.
In order to do my Practicum I had to quit work. I just couldn’t do
it. My faith in the system was long gone. Without motivation learning
doesn’t take place.
126. REPLY
15/09/2013
JOEL
This crystalises almost all of the conclusions I came to during the final
months of my PhD better than I could even have done myself. Although I went
through with finishing it, a large part of me wanted to quit at the final
hurdle. I’m not at all proud to have PhD after my name, even though I tried
my very best (and somewhat succeeded) to make my research of value to
society not just my own CV/ego.
This should be required reading for any PhD student.
127. REPLY
16/09/2013
DOM
1) I couldn’t agree more with the author of this letter – he has
managed to put into words all the semi-concious concerns that I have developed
about academia in the past two years of a PhD. On the other hand, I agree
with many of the comments – the non-academic world has just the same
problems, but probably in a greater concentration.
What is the current graduate student to do? My answer (and the answer of
many others here) is to seek intellectual fulfilment in other areas.
2) I wonder if academia is currently experiencing a bubble:
– The number of academics and academics-in-training is higher than ever,
but funding is under threat.
– Universities are requiring more and more from their new hires to achieve
tenure, resulting in overworked faculty, undertaught undergraduates, and a
“publish or perish” paper glut that is unsustainable to produce or digest.
– University fees are rising rapidly. Although a BA is currently worth the
cost when compared to future earnings potential, how long will this
continue?
– MOOCs and the slow increase of free information on the internet mean that
it may be possible to get much of the benefit of a undergrad education
without attending university.
Its hard to say what will happen as a result of these changes – it
seems unlikely that universities are going to go extinct, but it looks likely
that they are going to have to change.
I find this, combined with the current state of research described
in the original letter, to be the two factors that dissuade me from
continuing in academia.
128. REPLY
16/09/2013
NICK
There is far too much rhetoric here for it to be as hard hitting as
it could have been. It’s a shame though, as some of the points, are quite
true, if too emotionally charged. It would have been far better submitted
as a letter to Nature
129. REPLY
16/09/2013
PRINCE
I have the same conclusions about Academia, after working for 5
years in a top 10 School in my field for PhD. Just that I never had the
courage to come out openly and quit.
Kudos to the Author.
130. REPLY
16/09/2013
HLM
A short contribution following the many before. I fully agree with
you. Keep the passion as you mentioned it before. Science, knowledge are
beautiful things. You can contribute to them and have an impact. There have
also been a number of very good books trying to analyze the issue. Finding
solutions has been a challenge though. But let me mention some of these
books, beginning with an author who posted his own post here:
– Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics.
– Joao Magueijo, Faster Than The Speed of Light,
– Laurent Ségalat, La Science ŕ bout de souffle ?
– Libéro Zuppiroli, La Bulle Universitaire, and even to a lesser extent
– Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel
– Peter Thiel in Technology = Salvation (a article in the WSJ) is also
showing the limits of the system, relating to technology, not science; the
issue is similar though.
All these authors show the perverse effects of science. Hopefully, you
Facebook initiative will have an impact.
131.REPLY
16/09/2013
MATT
I found this article interesting because it represents a good
example of how rot has spread into academia. I’ve been examining how under
a long period of stability rot spreads into all corners of a society. In
this case it is academia in Switzerland, but it has also spread into the US
military, US financial system and European financial system. There is also
extensive rot in Japan and China. The core problem being that under a long
period of stability rot starts to slowly grow and spread into all corners of
society. This will continue until there is a very large collapse in
society.
132. REPLY
16/09/2013
STILL STUNNED
Well-written article. Having done a PhD stemming from finding that a
well-established theory in biochemistry was incorrect, I have personally
witnessed most of the systemic flaws you have pointed out. Originality is
often punished; selfish people pervert peer-review for selfish reasons;
there is safety upon the bandwagon and risk off of it. Being correct does
not always elicit admiration; it more often elicits fear and animosity. One
may become the month’s target rather than hero. Personally, I choose to
tell the scientific truth, gain skills outside of academia, and keep up the
good fight. You might win in the end.
While I understand your frustrations (and could add quite a few others to
your list), I’d add that there are still a few good people within the
system. Perhaps we should struggle to help the decent ascend and replace
the more selfish ones to improve the system?
133. REPLY
16/09/2013
FEUDRENAIS
@hlm: Thank you for the extremely useful list. There was also a
short article in a UNIL (University of Lausanne, just next to EPFL) paper that
had attacked this issue directly. It was in French and tackled a lot of the
same things quite eloquently. I wonder if it might be online somewhere… If
anyone knows, don’t hesitate to post.
134. REPLY
16/09/2013
AGFOSTERJR
Clearly English is both the writer’s native tongue and the original
language of the “letter.” Clearly its author is not writing to Swiss
academics, and probably never attended a French speaking school. The
question arises, how did its transmission entangle EPFL?
Whatever its truths and merits, they are tainted by the fraudulent
and anonymous nature in which the discourse arrives and is presented. Can
none of the critics of academia spot obviously inconsistent fraud? –AGF
135. REPLY
16/09/2013
PSHAFFER
What he says is largely applicable to academic medicine as well. I
left Academic medicine 24 years ago, and was criticized at the time for
selling out to go into private practice. However, what I had observed in
academic medicine was no more admirable than what exists in private
practice. In private practice, you are paid more in US dollars. In
academia, the currency seems to be ego dollars. The revered names in
academic medicine tended to be massively egocentric. (this is not, as the
author notes, true of everyone, but it is true of enough to make it the
average).
I would add a few wrinkles to what he saw – The “game” is to do a large
project, and after data is collected, divide it up into smaller parts,
hopefully taking a few years work and milking it for many, many papers for
years to come.
Although he doesn’t note it, this degradation of the scientific
ideal I think is responsible for the fact that much work is, after a few
years, found to be incorrect (or possibly faked). See “Why most published
research findings are false” by John Ioannidishttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)
Like the author, I was totally disillusioned with what I saw. I have
found a fix. I recently retired, and am now pursuing my own research
projects. They are small, they are not likely to result in massive changes
to how we do things, but they satisfy my curiosity, and they also likely
will help a few patients here and there. And that is all I ask. As a
benefit, I run my own schedule, and don’t have to publish if I don’t think
the work is valid, or I don’t think it is worth saying. I think that is the
way science is supposed to work.
136. REPLY
16/09/2013
AGFOSTERJR
Well I hadn’t read all the comments when I posted that: PJ admits
authorship. Now I would like to know where PJ is from, and what is his
native tongue. –AGF
137. REPLY
16/09/2013
DAVID BAILEY
I reached the postdoc stage 40 years ago, before giving up and going
into software development. In my case I went (together with a more senior
colleague) to the head of department to point out that our equipment had 2
serious faults that rendered results almost meaningless. After trying
ineffectually to downplay the problems, he then said that yes they needed
repair, but it would have to wait until his two students had finished
collecting data (a matter of many months at least)!
Since then, I have worked in areas related to research, and have
also talked to many other researchers about the problems in academic
science – including medical research. The picture is pretty bleak – summed
up in this paper:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Every time we open a newspaper, we see trivial examples of perverted
science where ‘researchers’ run a few quick surveys until they get a result
that passes the 5% statistical test. This is how you generate results such
as, “Brain Science: Does Being Left-Handed Make You Angry?” To the
newspaper editor, these are fillers analogous to horoscopes, to the
authors, and to the institutions for whom they work, the fame can only help
– who cares about the science!
138. REPLY
16/09/2013
JR
Did you talk this decision over with your mother or father (or equivalent)
before you pulled the plug on your PhD. program?
I suspect not. If I were your parent, I would have advised you to
weigh the pro’s and con’s. Generally speaking, academic credentials create
opportunities even if they are directly related to the opportunity they
present. For example, I’ve hired PhD’s, not for their knowledge but for the
character quality of perseverance. They’ve demonstrated courage, can accept
constructive criticism, and they are not quitters. However imperfect, the
post-graduate credential keeps some doors from closing.
As a graduate of the US Army’s Ranger school at age 19, during the
Viet Nam era, I cannot count the times I’ve drawn courage from that
accomplishment when I wanted to quit something else, even though I did not
make the Army a career.
So I think you were short sighted to quit. For the very thing you
wish to improve — the opportunity to improve the system, is denied you
because you will not have the gravitas of a credible critic. I get you
point — lots of things to change, but you’re a quitter.
Everything human beings want a lot of, especially if it’s valuable,
will become fungible and be the object from which a business enterprise
forms. Businesses are how we share stuff we want without going bankrupt.
However one wishing some things could transcend monetization, very few
valuable things do. It just is.
We’re seeing the collapse of the destination / hard-walled
university business model as MOOC’s shatter the cost model of knowledge.
Maybe this will make post-graduate studies more appealing?
Regardless, you quit. If it was because the net present value wasn’t
worth it — good for you. And if you’re not pursuing that more valuable use
of your time now, with the same determination you had hurled at your
doctorate — then you’re just lazy.
Regardless, best wishes.
139. REPLY
16/09/2013
PIEZEN
@alexandre:
“ALL other areas, needs optimistic and strong people who can live together
with bad things and turn them into something better. If you are not strong
enough, if your contribution is just to complain, you did the right thing:
gave up.”
I am sure that the Soviet apparatchiks said the same thing in 1989.
You are right to say that it is easy to complain without
contributing anything and to attribute one’s failure to others; but it is
equally easy to attribute the lack of luck of others, and the way they are
exploited, to their supposed lack of commitment. Blaming the victims has
been a leitmotiv in the oppressors’ rhetorics for a long, long time. Our
cultural environment hammers this victim-blaming constantly, and Academia
is especially permeated with this “believe-in-yourself”,
“everybody-is-special”, “be-committed-and-you-can-fly” mentality; just try
to realise that it is just propaganda.
140. REPLY
16/09/2013
LISA
This is an amazing letter. I just finished my postdoctoral
fellowship and am taking some time off from working. I am leaving academia
for ALL of these reasons. I’m having a really difficult time dealing with
my disillusionment with academia after it has been my love, my family and
my support system for many years. It’s so good to see that I am not alone
in these feelings.
I would still absolutely encourage you to finish your PhD. Then
leave academia. They don’t deserve you.
141.REPLY
16/09/2013
JACK
I was fed up doing graduate work being treated as if I knew nothing
and needed another degree to succeed. Educators are like ministers. They
think they know something I need to know. I just don’t know that I need to
know it.
142. REPLY
16/09/2013
STREPHON
Sounds like youthful idealism meets fatigue in Pascal’s letter. It’s
foolish not to finish the degree; stop writing long-winded critiques of
your profession and get the job done. It’s not a perfect system; hell, it’s
not a perfect world, incase you hadn’t noticed. But it’s a world where
knowledge is power, and degrees demonstrate that you have some knowledge.
Grow up, before it’s too late.
If your goal is to reform the system, first master it. Start by getting the
degree.
143. REPLY
16/09/2013
TJ MARIN
Hello Author:
As one commenter said, I’d get the PhD.
Doing something of value requires: 1) Actual work that impacts a
field and 2) Distributing the information. The degree may assist in the
distribution and acceptance. When you have great insight – why impair the
dissemination paths.
But the email carries out a theme infecting, certainly, the USA. To
Wit: In our big institutions, we promote the wrong people in all areas:
Government, business, education and the military. People with a
responsibility to hire for roles have lost the ability to assess
applicants. Reliance is on credentials and certifications.
As Christine Comaford recounted in her pity book, Rules for
Renegades, a GSD (Getting ‘Stuff’ Done) is what should count most in
hiring.
But a GSD is how we hire vendors in the USA, but not how we hire and
promote employees. This email is may be a mold breaker – filled with
inconvenient truths – that Western sociality may be ‘paper’ chasing instead
of finding real achievers in all our most important institutions.
And – to share – Joe Strauss built the Golden Gate Bridge. He had no
engineering degree or architecture degree. (For that he relied on Chas A
Ellis.) FL Wright designed many building before he ever got an architecture
degree. Today – they’d both have gotten nowhere.
144. REPLY
16/09/2013
KAY
I’m on the other side of things as a somewhat recent graduate (got
my PhD last year) currently working as an alt-academic for a tier 1
university in the States.
Academia isn’t for everyone. And it isn’t a perfect system. However
for me to get out of my dead-end technician job in not-so-big-pharma it was
the only option. There’s only so much you can do in my field with only a
Bachelor of Science, few to no professional contacts, and a few years of
experience. The piece of paper and list of professional contacts matters
more than what I know. So I played the game and am now much happier than I
was as a tech and I’m doing a far more rewarding job.
You can do a lot with experience and formal training in
cryptography. I wish you the best in your future endeavors.
145. REPLY
16/09/2013
GENE
A very interesting letter, and as a former researcher, … well … it strikes
with great familiarly. And with tendrils to the research community still,
and an interest in same, I sense a great deal of the same challenges
existing in many areas besides “pure science”).
@ Glenn: What letter did you read? Did you pay attention, or take
instant offense, deciding you needed to charge forth with pen in hand on
your mighty electronic steed to establish the knave as stupid and
unrealistic? For example, you comment: “3) You sound very bitter that you
chose a topic you’re not interested in. Original research doesn’t mean
you’ll cure cancer or win a Nobel Prize. But a thousand people all doing a
little piece of original research does advance science and occasionally
make for some amazing insights. We can’t all be astronauts.”
1) I sensed no bitterness, just a bit of frustration. Personally, I think
the letter was prepared professionally with decent clarity quite a large
degree of frankness. And I sensed no animosity toward — in general — his
own institution and to many of his colleagues and peers. He also indicated
before his comment appeared, that there were other forces ALSO at work in
his decision.
2) The author said he was NOT in the position of being stuck working on a
project that was of little interest to him. “” I don’t know where you found
reference otherwise.
3) I dare say that few PhD candidates actually choose their topic today.
Realistically, few have probably done so for decades. More likely than not,
the student was recruited to work in a particular area of science, a few
“possible projects” were tossed about, and when push came to shove, the
student ended up with whatever the advisor dumped into the student’s lap. I
saw that happen with one of my very best friends in grad school in the mid
1980’s — she hated the work and the condescending attitude of the professor
towards her. Of course, the prof was probably Mensa level intelligence and
was (is) very Sheldon-like in terms of interpersonal skills (that is a
reference to Dr Sheldon Cooper on the American sit-com “Big Bang Theory”
for those of you unfamiliar).
4) There are many scientific studies being published every year that fit
into the categories of “if -then” science; all based on the implicit or
explicit assumption that something or other will or will not occur and that
will cause something else. Thus we have seen the many published results of
Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption that on the
surface make no sense: more drought, less drought; more rain, less rain;
more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes; more ice, less ice; more ecological
diversity, less diversity; stronger storms, weaker storms; and so on ad
nauseum.
5) Really, you think that a PhD student would actually think he/she would
expect to attain a Nobel Prize in Science? That has got to be an exceptionally
rare student, and a truly “super-sized” ego, one that would probably fit in
well in academia.
Scientific fraud is known to be a significant problem, and while it
has existed since the beginning of time it also includes efforts by jealous
peers to trash the reputation of researchers. Much of the time, however, it
has it’s origins elsewhere… Here are but two of 120 results of a search for
the words Scientific and Fraud on NatGeo’s website:
* http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/25/so-science-gets-it-wrong-then-what /
* http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/01/fraud-my-story-in-tomorrows-new-york-times/
There is also “Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted
scientific publications” published by the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences… It would seem there are problems of significance when: “…67.4% of
retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected
fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%).
Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led
to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing
retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted
because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/27/1212247109
146. REPLY
17/09/2013
ROSST
We in academia all live a very sheltered existence where we are
fortunate enough to be supported by society to work with other really
smart, motivated people, seeking things that we really believe in –
education and research.
Because most people in academia haven’t experienced anything else
they tend to belly ache about the fact that there are down sides and that
the system isn’t perfect. Tell it to a tax accountant who spends their
whole time working within a faulty tax system. Or a public servant where politicians
constantly tinker with what they do. Or a factory worker who doesn’t get
the chance to even dream of working for a goal that they truly believe in.
I wonder how many people rail against academia – and then when they get
into the ‘real world’ realize just how privileged they were. That’s
certainly what I did.
I am an academic – and incredibly lucky to work in a job that is
seeking to further knowledge and to educate. If you believe in those values
then everything else is detail. I have worked 6o hour weeks for most of my
career. I don’t care. It’s been an honour. I have had to manage people.
That’s fun too. I have had to ‘play the game’ of papers, grants and
wordsmithing. Enjoyed the challenge because it is about achieving something
worthwhile and good.
I get that there is a stage in your career when you have to make a
decision about whether you believe in the main values enough to ignore the
detail. I get that people feel a need to vent about making that decision
and how angry and frustrated they are.
But the sort of indictment of academia that starts this thread is
not only an unfair reflection on those working within academia – it is
exactly the sort of ammunition that those that are anti-science and
anti-university education will use to support their case to cut public
funds. And then the main values (education and research) will be sacrificed
because people are frustrated and angry.
Academia isn’t broken – it isn’t perfect, but it is a much more
fortunate, productive and worthwhile endeavor than what many people in
society ever have the chance to imagine enjoying.
147. REPLY
17/09/2013
SEBASTIEN
Interesting reading but, honestly, I don’t see the point of making
such a fuss about someone who didn’t like his job and decided to quit. It
sounds lots of frustration and misunderstanding here, or maybe whining and
idealism… and frankly I’m not sure industry or any kind of alternative
position will bring more comfort to the author. I recognize it takes some
balls to quit a job “just because you can’t stand it anymore”, especially
when you are at a top-tier institution with almost unlimited funding to
make your life easier (I’m an EPFL PhD), but I definitely have different
opinions on the various arguments.
1. The rules are clear: if you do good research, you’ll be rewarded (I’ll
come back to the types of rewards later). Honesty is paramount on the long
haul and good results will always be recognized, even over not-so-good
stuff that a better speaker can “sell” better. As scientists, we are also
trained to recognize sound science over meaningless BS that some people
might try to sell us.
2. Yeah, though life. You need to show how good you are before being the
boss. The generals get the medals while the soldiers fight, and the famous
professors get the prizes while the students do the monkey work. I don’t
see how different it is in the non-academic life. And honestly, there are
certainly rotten fruits but my advisors always went through all my
publications and reports extremely carefully – it might have taken months
before I got feedback on a paper but it was done.
3. It sounds very much like “it’s not working so it’s not interesting any
more”. What about side-projects and new ideas that come out event when you
feel like you’ve tried everything to make your stuff work? When you’re
trying to explore uncharted territories, you will always have to struggle,
explain your point, convince your advisor. So you better get the data to
support your claims, and build convincing arguments, especially if you want
to convince your boss his ideas are not working. Remember, until you prove
him wrong, he’s the expert – and you’re probably going to be grateful for
that at some point.
4.Here I can agree that the current short-term profit and vision hamper
long-term projects. That is sad, and I always take the Fourier transform as
an example, that was quite useless when elaborated in the ~1800s and proved
invaluable with the arising of analytical instruments in the second half of
the 20th century. Now, let’s face it: we are not going to cure cancer, or
solve the world energy problems just by ourselves. Thus, every brick we can
contribute with will help solving bigger problems. It’s not about avoiding
real issues, it’s about being realistic and tackling a problem at a time –
and for assessing what research is worth being pursued, I refer you to the
Pasteur quadrant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteur%27s_quadrant).
If your project falls in the blank quadrant, well, maybe it’s time to move
on and find something that actually makes more sense.
5. I don’t agree here, although there is definitely a bandwagon effect. But
just repeating experiments done by people who already did them (with
slightly better or worse results) will not make a breakthrough. You might
sustain a low-tier research program that way, if it’s what you want, fine.
But innovation and creative ideas will always be rewarded, just not
everyone will be able to come up with paradigm-shifting discoveries. And
like everywhere, it’s not always easy to come up with ideas and results that
will shatter years of prior research done by tens of research groups. A
good friend of mine, one of the researchers I respect most, is still
reluctant to reveal the latest data their lab collected, not because they
don’t trust their data, but because they have to figure out how to present
them to the community without making too many enemies. There might be some
politics and inertia but it’s going to be the case everywhere – not just in
the academic environment.
6. Well yeah, welcome to the real world. Science doesn’t happen just by
itself. It requires both money and talented people, for better or worse. Of
course the easiest way to classify people is to put numbers on them, such
as the number of publications or any variation on the ‘impact factor’
theme. Smart people know not to give too much importance to these figures,
but like everywhere, there will be big egos and douchebags who will just
care about their own H indices. The EPFL dean praising good rankings just
shows that the research performed is internationally recognized (which
indirectly benefits you, since it warrants better funding!) and that it
might (remember, it’s research, thus difficult to predict) eventually
impact the everyday life – like, the Graetzel cells were not invented and
perfected in one day, but when they will actually get commercialized,
they’ll make an impact on lot’s of people’s life and the global environment
(just to take one of many examples from the EPFL). Even if rankings are
just numbers, they reflect how the research performed at a given school
might impact on the outside world.
7. Egos are everywhere, I’m not sure you’ll be happier in industry from
this point of view. And regarding the peer review system, to paraphrase
Winston Churchill: “Peer review is the worst system, except for all those
systems that have been tried before”. Your peers are still the most
qualified people to judge the validity of your findings- so the system
might change in the future, like, become transparent, but it’ll persist
IMHO, just because there is no other way to assess the quality of research.
8. It academia necessary? Well if you don’t know why your project is
important, or why people should care about it, it probably is not
important, and public (or private) money could probably be spent elsewhere.
But still. Academia educates people to do research, be curious, look for
the devil hiding in the detail, push their limits, be critical, and
eventually, yes, make progress in research and perhaps try solve some big
problems. It also teaches resilience, honesty, and provides many
highly-educated people, who have the opportunity to make an impact wherever
they chose to go.
In conclusion: I pretty much agree with the letter from Sean (https://medium.com/p/d0dd648b7c4d), I was
also kind of offended by your letter, and I think there is no ambiguity: we
know what we’re getting into when we sign up for graduate studies (eg we
might struggle with bad results, we might feel lost and hate our advisors at
times)- and if we don’t agree, either we quit, or we try to make it a
better (academic) world. From a reasonable point of view, only the latter
solution makes sense.
Good luck for you future endeavors!
148. REPLY
17/09/2013
FR.
The author sounds like a courageous and lucid person, but there is a
collection of such letters lying around in various languages (I can cite at
least three on the top of my head, plus blog posts on the theme “why I left
academia”), and his letter is still one of the optimistic ones.
The word “paid” appears only once, as “underpaid”. It seems that all
PhD candidates at EPFL are funded in some way or another. This is far from
the case in any of Switzerland’s neighbor countries. Everything that is
described in this letter is true, and even more clear when you are
technically working for free.
My point is: in most countries, academia hosts a large, unpaid group
of workers that also happens to be the pool of incumbents for its job
market, and that contributes a lot to the kind of environment described in
the letter. It’s not a minor aspect of the question from where I stand.
149. REPLY
17/09/2013
KAVI
I recently changed fields and am now in business. At least in
business people are upfront about being in it for the money. Academia will
only change when mindless publishing stops becoming the measurement of
progress/success. The academic path has gone horribly horribly wrong and
there is a declining number of positions in academia too, so the future of
post-grad students is bleak (http://www.continental-philosophy.org/2013/09/13/the-adjunct-crisis-an-infographic-progressive-geographies/).
Academia is killing some great minds!
150. REPLY
17/09/2013
KAVI
@Sebastien … and everyone else that seems to be in denial about the
state of the academic system…
THE FACT THAT THIS LETTER WENT VIRAL…. SAYS SOMETHING, DOESN’T IT
I’ll let you deduce what that might be
151. REPLY
17/09/2013
IMPRESSED
This letter is very impressive!. I hope it starts a movement that
changes how science is done. The system awards only a “certain type of
thinkers” while leaving anyone who does not fit that standard out in the
cold. Not to mention the old boys/girls club.
152. REPLY
17/09/2013
MARK HUNTER
Terry A. Davison above wrote:
Thomas Edison spent his late years in courtrooms … he fought against AC
power with deception because his was DC.
All wrong. First, he spent some time in court and won a patent
infringement suit against Westinghouse, which had stolen the “three-wire
power distribution system” he had invented.
Second, AC is “natural” current in that it is the type of current
produced by the generator. You must go out of your way to change it to DC.
Edison made the conversion to DC because it is far safer than AC. (AC has
an economic advantage when used with transformers, too technical to
describe in a short space.)
Oddly enough, for the very long range transfer of power today power
companies have gone back to DC. It saves on self-inductance losses.
153. REPLY
18/09/2013
CASPER
Pretty much agree with whatever the author of the letter has to say.
Anybody who’s offended by this letter needs therapy. If you get
offended by such things, then you should essentially live in isolation and
not communicate with others in fear of getting offended.
Publish or Perish is the academic mantra. If you ask me, that is the
problem.
154. REPLY
18/09/2013
CHRIS REEVE
See Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt. We are going in circles,
guys. All of this stuff has already been covered, and if you talk to newer
grad students, they don’t even know who Jeff Schmidt is …
It’s very sad.
155.REPLY
18/09/2013
PIEZEN
@Sebastien: “The rules are clear: if you do good research, you’ll be
rewarded”
Yup. But in practice, the rules are not applied in this manner. You
can do excellent research and get nothing — I’m thinking of a colleague
with two papers in “Science”.
Conversely, we see the stars in some fields revealed to be hacks who
made up their experimental results — not incompetent people, mind you, they
had to know what to make up; but it is gross injustice that these con men
recieve the positions, the fundings, the honours, strangling the careers of
others in appearance slightly less (and in reality much more) deserving,
and be punished with big fat salaries in the private sector when they are
found out.
In such an environment, the cry of “do good research, you’ll be
rewarded” is akin to Stephen Colbert’s “We can all be in the richest 1%”. Joe
the Plumber has the excuse of being a manipulable ignorant; we academics
have no such mitigating circumstances.
156. REPLY
18/09/2013
GARY DEERING
Get real, cry baby “academicians” and wannabe Ph. D.’ers. Read my
book Yes. (Is BiO Spiritualism the answer?) on amazon.com and
then also my book, Selfish’ism and then continue to link and read all my
material on the web that I started putting there in the last decade of the
20th Century. The “solution” is to go-galt-in-spirit and become the patron
of your own arts – by whatever means it takes, be it working as a waiter in
some local restaurant or coffee shop or peon in a big box store. The fun of
deciding your own research topics and then working on them is beyond
compare. The pain of never having anyone see them or read them is real for
sure but at the end of the day it is pretty small in comparison to the pure
joy of doing what you want and then writing up your own—COPYRIGHTED (as in
TIME STAMPED in the YEAR YOU FEEL finished)—book about some aspect of your
particular interest, is really all a true scientist needs. Being read by
others and making money on your love interests is as they say, gravy. The
only real requirement for this to succeed for you is that you are truly
writing and thinking and researching in a field of study that you
absolutely love – and at the same time making enough money by some
productive means to live on. For me that love interest is psychology and I
managed to get to the Masters Level before it dawned on me that I couldn’t
stomach all their “errors” let alone their BS.
Now having said all of the foregoing my biggest fear is that I will
unleash some super-duper intelligent people currently imprisoned in the
world of professional academics who will also be interested in psychology
and beat me to the punch in many of psych(h)ology’s remaining to be
explored areas.
But, what the hey, there’s still plenty of room for everybody and I
also have enough of a head start in my areas of interest that I’m not all
that worried.
157.REPLY
18/09/2013
KRISHNAN
Very well said. As an assistant professor — in a prestigious private
university in the Eastern part of the US —
on my way out of academia, I have struggled with many of these questions
myself. What the writer says about “spam” from the Dean, reminded me of all
the spam I received. I would go one step further. The faculty meetings
also, more often that not, dealt with departmental rankings, faculty
statistics, and such. I often wondered, what is the point of all this? Why
has
the emphasis on teaching and education been so trivialized?
Do not know a solution to fix the balance, but perhaps minimizing
the importance of indirect costs (from grants) in the
running of universities might be a start. That would force faculty to ask
why they are in this endeavor in the first place.
158. REPLY
19/09/2013
ED
There is certainly a great deal here that is true, but it does a
huge disservice to the vast majority of your colleagues who are still
pursuing idealistic goals of research with full integrity.
Academic research has led to a huge number of spectacular advances
in the last half century and it has done so with very little of the
ugliness that one sees in the corporate jungle. You cannot deny that.
In fact, money, or more precisely the scarcity of money, does poison
the system and turns highly trained scientific thinkers into second-rate
capitalists always in search of more funding for their projects. It makes
the system exploitative, such that people pour years of their lives into
doing research in order to obtain that independent faculty position one
day, a day that for most will never arrive.
But I would argue that the real problem is a society that has come
to value income and wealth over actual contributions to society. Being paid
$40,000 as a postdoc with 5 years of PhD under your belt, mainly because
the carrot of a faculty job is held out somewhere in the indeterminate
future, seems like exploitation if money is how you measure success. But
imagine being given access to some truly amazing equipment and the funding
to carry out investigations into some question that you are truly
passionate to answer…. and then on top of that being paid cash money for
the privilege! It’s not so awful when you consider the opportunity we
scientists are given. Do some start to blindly pursue fame and grant
funding and lose sight of the more idealistic aims? Perhaps, but we
scientists are all human after all. Receiving recognition in the form of
media coverage and grant funding is the closest thing we have to outside
approval and endorsement of our work. We all want to be told we’re doing a
good job and that’s how it is done. Maybe some weaker souls become addicted
to the praise and forget why they needed it in the first place.
But no, I don’t believe for one moment that academia has lost its
way and is now nothing more than a way to bring in money. If that were the
case, we would be doing a pretty lousy job of it, given the massive cuts in
research funding these days. Nobody is living high on the hog on research
grants. I think that if one were to ask whether all the criticisms enumerated
above apply to any job in any field he would find not only that they do,
but also that once those things were removed there would be nothing left.
At least with science the data lives on.
159. REPLY
19/09/2013
DREAMER
@Rob I completely agree with you. I am still in Academics and I am
trying fight for the right cause.
160. REPLY
19/09/2013
WRONG TIMING
I agree with the author’s points, but I don’t think quitting your PhD
when it’s almost done is the smartest thing to do. He should have
perservered a little more. What he did is just make himself less
employable. I don’t think potential employers would be impressed with his
reasons for quitting. True, the academe works like a business or a corrupt
system, just like industries, governments, entertainment, families and
anywhere else where there is money, people and incentives involved. People
just publish for the sake of publishing solving irrelevant problems or
tweaking parameters of the same old stuff. Students just waste money
hopping conference after conference without producing any new output, many
just bringing crappy recycled posters. Supervisors have no idea what their
co-authored publications are all about. Data is cherry picked/manipulated
and stories are twisted just to make them look good… We will never escape
this ugly reality. We could just do our best with what we have, where we
are,and strive against odds just like how the rest of the world creates
real progress. He would do more if he had a “PhD” attached to his name,
whether or not he continues to the academe. He could even be like the other
people in academe that he respects. It’s not that quitting is bad
especially when you are no longer challenged or inspired, but the timing he
chose is bad, i.e. close to finishing when the pressure is high and feel
like giving up… unless perhaps he’s planning to be self employed and change
the game.
161.REPLY
20/09/2013
ABDUL BASIT AHMAD
The interesting thing to notice here is that how neatly the people
are divided in their opinion along the same lines as they are along the
teacher-student divide.
Teachers – the skags – are all about how the kid is a burnout and
such.
Students – they are all agreeing as this is a fact – this is the
absolute truth about the nature of academia.
1. Professors get paid and get cited from the research that grad
students do.
2. Grad students have no say(in many cases) in what they research.
3. Grad students are criminally underpaid.
4. Research is a dick-measuring competition. Impact factor is inches.
A very significantly large number of students would agree with what
the author has said, especially if they (the students) has at one point
nursed romantic thoughts about what research(and science) ought to be.
Teachers would disagree, they have been in academia for far too
long, so they know what it really is about. Well that impact factor and
that citation is the ONLY quantifiable measure of how productive their
research is! Would Prof.X’s research on ethics be the basis of all human
civilization a hundred years from now? Maybe, he hopes so, but all he has
to measure it, is that impact factor! His value as a human being is derived
from that impact factor.
Students on the other hand, want to change the world, have always wanted
to change the world. To understand, to explain, to cure the world of its
ills. No such thing is going to happen. This “disillusionment” is thus
going to happen, because eventually the student realizes that he has no say
in the system – not even the area he wants to research in.
There shouldn’t really be a fight for ideology between these two
groups. There is no way this discussion can be had in real life, no grad
student has the gall to say that his(or her) adviser’s research area is of
no use to the universe, even when it is! What does that say about the
nature of grad students? Meek, cowards! Bullied in school – most likely.
The true irony is that grad students go on to become professors
themselves.
Academia – wasted on the academics.
162. REPLY
20/09/2013
MOHAMAMD H. ANSARI
Hi,
I can add a few more items to your list that in the case you changed
your decision and got your degree anyway, you may experience them too. But,
note that in almost majority of jobs you may find hypocrite and dishonest
people too. In modern science people can be so, and sometimes because they
are smarter they could be worse.
Some of the problem you see in Academia is only due to their
personal weaknesses, not the weaknesses in Sciences they follow. Note that
Science is already existed and Scientists are digging to only discover its
pieces. Here I only put my focus on this part, which I could not read in
all of the above replies.
Scientists are smart but some of them perhaps are oversmart that
they do not realize their attitudes for making others attracted to science
is not proper. For instance, I know a scientist who wrote public science
book and in that they clearly state that based on the second law of
thermodynamics if somebody said something not proper to you, since time is
not reversed, your relation shall never get healed! You can imagine how
eccentric should be the relationship between this scientist and their
students! Compare this piece of advice, as an example, with all other
advices from great people in the past that we need to forgive each other.
You assume that how horrible the world becomes if people start listening to
his second law of thermodynamics, instead of following social ethics (*).
Mind functions independent than one’s belief system and a great scientist
can easily be a damage to ethics.
There is a fast approach in the universities toward growing mental
health services, specially in the Northern America. Did you ever think why
is so? Isn’t this alarming that there are currently many conflicts between
students/postdocs and their supervisors that a third party is needed to
properly find a resolution. Who should be blamed? The professor, the
student, or their second law of thermodynamics?!
The main problem in Academia is that the Ethics of Science is not a
credit course during the undergraduate studies. People are left unassisted
on their decisions, and if they fall into the trap that how great minded
they are, they may easily follow their version of the second law of
thermodynamics instead of a supporting behaviour. The contents of such a
course should not be restricted only to the behaving with mice in the lab.
We must bring human-human interaction to the rules. Scientist never learn
that they are not allowed to steal ideas from their
students/postdocs/colleagues; must report their results faithfully, must
stop informally and indirectly asking grad student to get pleasing results
by staying at nights and on weekends in the lab, etc.
In the past centuries, the mathematicians and scientists in Asia,
Middle East and Europe knew about the importance of ethics in Academia and
already wrote important books on this subject. Scientists needed to forget
about ethics in order to become able to create mass destructive devices.
But not those who are involved in such production are the few who should be
blamed. In the weaker regime, only a person who has never opened up a book
in ethics can invite new students to skeptical science he/she is working
on, just as tools to intensify the hunger for the uncertain sciences.
My single piece of advice is that if your supervisor cannot open
your mind to the joy of Science and its importance, I strongly advice you
change your supervisor. Search a lot for an honest scientist and start
again. Do not fall in trap with the names, look at the future of his/her
students. If you see the majority of the students have quitted Academia
earlier for other jobs, this may happen to you too!
Regards,
Mohammad H. Ansari
——————————-
(*) By the way I apologize from the second law of thermodynamics, which is
a great law, for this misconception.
163. REPLY
20/09/2013
DAN SINGLETON
Hmmm. Here is my experience. I tried industry after my B.S., but no
one was ever going to listen to my ideas. In retrospect, they were right –
I thought I knew everything but I was just ignorant, without a clue.
So I went to grad school. I got paid to go to school, a new
experience not found in many areas, and it would not have occurred to me to
complain. I worked hard and got out quickly after coming up with some
things that my advisor did not think about. He taught me things to start,
he pushed me, he payed the bills, and he helped me move on.
I postdoc’d and I got paid a little more as I learned more.
I then went into academics. To get the job I had to beat out 150
other applicants. To survive I have had to publish and get grant money and
convince graduate students to work on my research instead of that of
others. I worked very hard to succeed and I still do 25 years later.
Publication has largely meant doing what interests me, but always
keeping an vague eye toward completing projects and making it fundable and
making it doable by inexperienced graduate students who are just like I
once was. Such constraints add to the difficulty but I have never found it
impossible to find interesting things to do.
Are my ideas worthwhile? Am I able to be brutally honest about it?
Who knows? I suppose that my research has often been dismissed as
completely worthless by graduate students (who of course never have big
egos). But to be brutally honest, I worry a lot more about what the members
of funding study sections think than what graduate students think. To do
anything at all I have to convince study sections that my work is better
than 9 out of 10 of the other proposals that they see at the same time.
Every one of the other proposals is from someone who beat out 150
applicants to get their job, and “sells” their work, and worries about their
image, and is strategic in their vocabulary, and networks, and makes a good
presentation. Still, weirdly, when I have been on study sections, the
arguments seem to focus on whether ideas will work and whether they will
have an impact.
Regardless of whether my very basic research is worthwhile or “of
marginal importance,” when I succeed at getting money I can recruit and pay
my graduate students. I can then teach them to do research that will be
published with my name on it (oh, the “gross unfairness”), and at the end
they can get a job that pays a lot of money. In theory. In practice, it has
mostly worked out, but far from always, and that has been the part of the
system that bothers me the most. I have fired students that I considered to
be friends. I have seen students every day for five years, then had them go
off to a good job but get laid off after two years or have their whole
company shut down after eight. I have seen some struggle in a tough job
market. I hate that.
I complain as much as anyone else, in some ways more, and the system
is pretty imperfect. But I have missed the part where anyone is chained to
their lab bench. By all means, if you don’t like it and will actually like
something else more, leave. I also missed where academics is worse than other
paths. My brothers were construction workers, and I worked construction
summers during college. That sucks, believe me. Academics does not suck.
And I am not apologizing.
164. REPLY
21/09/2013
NICKCHOP
I’m a late year PhD student. I get what you’re saying and have seen
much of the same. That being said, go get your ass back in the lab and
finish your damn diss.
165. REPLY
22/09/2013
FORMER ACADEMIC
Ed wrote: “Academic research has led to […] with very little of the ugliness
that one sees in the corporate jungle. You cannot deny that.”
I don’t know what what ugliness you are referring to is, but as a
female former academic who is now in the corporate “jungle”, I can tell you
about one type of ugliness that academia has a lot more of.
When I was unhappy about the way my phd work was going and went to
speak to my advisor about it, I couldn’t tell whether he was listening
because he never took his eyes off my breasts. I left that supervisor. When
I went to my first conference, a professor suggested that I do my eyebrows
and wear tighter trousers. At another conference, one of the professors
(who I could assume would be reviewing my papers, grant applications, etc)
made a very explicit pass at me on the first evening and avoided me for the
rest of the conference.
Some of this of ugliness does occur in small companies as well (I
was at a startup which was almost as bad as academia) but in corporates
there are HR departments that enforce a couple of basic rules. There is
gender discrimination everywhere, but in any large company there will not
be anything that comes close to the constant sexual harassment that many
academics allow themselves.
166. REPLY
23/09/2013
I HAD ONE OF THOSE
I just want to mention a few misconceptions of a few dreamers
commenting here. Fighting the system inside and other nonsense being put
out every ~10 comments,
1) The argument is weak: Oh really, would you like fries with that?
What would you expect from a letter that is sent internally, a full blown
publication with citations? Now you are sitting in front of your computer
and judging the author by his/her argument, seriously? meh, boring right?
Well you have been playing the part that helped to create and sustain this
system, reviewing peer papers in 10 minutes, writing up ridiculous reviews
which are two lines long. Spreading your nerd anger all over the place in
conferences while holding your coffee in one hand and your weird “dossier”
full of your nonsense in the other. Attention span and extrapolation. Cite
these concepts in your next paper.
2) Sorry to hear that the author had bad experience but we are not
like that, hihihi, sorry: Well if you claim to be a true academic just look
at the statistics. I mean look at the stats and grad student suicide rates
in US only. I’m serious just open a browser page and study!!! As you claim
to do science. No, don’t comment now! Open up a new tab and spend at least
20 mins. Since when did you stop calculating exactly? You give me one good
example I’ll bring thousand. So your lack of empathy is one of the major
concerns. you don’t even worry that this might be true. An academic is
responsible from the consequences of anything that is worth of studying.
And clearly you are not. You and your success stories are simply
statistically insignificant.
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