On (not) working in academia.
I’m with Doug Pete in really liking the Zite app.
Although it’s a proprietary, closed product I haven’t come across anything close to it for discovery. Take, for instance, a post entitled On Leaving Academia by Terran Lane, someone I’ve not come across before. He’s an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico.
Terran is off to join Google.
His post is neatly organised into section titles listing the reasons he’s leaving academia to join Google:
- Opportunity to make a difference
- Workload and family/life balance
- Centralization of authority and decrease of autonomy
- Funding climate
- Hyper-specialization, insularity, and narrowness of vision
- Poor incentives
- Mass production of education
- Salaries
- Anti-intellectualism, anti-education, and attacks on science and academia
I’ve written about this kind of thing before in You need us more than we need you. As Terran explains, it’s not (just) about money.
Whereas he’s decided to quit academia, I’ve made a conscious choice from the start to stay on its sidelines. Around the margins. On the edges. Whilst the logical thing to do after my doctorate would have been to apply for a research position or lectureship at a university, I decided against it.
Why?
Not only would I be earning half the amount of money I am now – and less than when I was teaching in schools – but it seems a spectacularly bad time to decide to become a career academic. No money, no status, no freedom. And with the introduction of a market into UK Higher Education it’s increasingly difficult for academics to even claim the high moral ground.
That’s not to say academics aren’t doing good, publicly-useful work. Of course they are. It’s just crunch time in their industry.
I think we’re going to see a lot more of this talent-drain from academia. In fact, we’re already seeing a new generation of people not satisfied with traditional career structures and ways of working. I’m not sure if this is good or bad in the scheme of things, given the direction the universities (in the UK) seem to be headed under the current government.
What I do know is that universities need to do something, and fast. The Bank of Goodwill doesn’t have infinite reserves…
Image CC BY-NC-SA Patrick Gage
