On not hating academia

I should be going to bed, but I really needed to respond to Megan McArdle's semi-recent comments on tenure.  This is one of her (many) pet topics, and while as usual I find her arguments reasonable, I don't agree with her position .  (Caveats: she seems to be talking mostly about liberal arts and humanities fields; the sciences are often ignored in such discussions, perhaps because there's a better outlet to non-academic fields.  Also, I have no statistics and I know of many people who are actually very bitter and feel academia has ruined their life, including myself on occasion.)  I think it's important for me, as I switch from a decade devoted to academia to an entirely new phase of my life, to make sense of this for myself.

Of course tenure itself doesn't involve me directly, but McArdle's comments are about the entire structure of academic work, which she assumes (I'm not sure how correctly) arises from and only because of tenure.  She also has the (important if true) belief that many tenured professors have long periods of doing almost no work; I've never seen or heard good evidence of such a thing happening in my field.  She is, however, correct that there is a pyramidal structure in which the majority of aspirants fail to attain tenured positions, and in which they sacrifice things many people spend the early part of their careers striving for: good income, stability, freedom (as an early-career scientist you are generally both tied-down and unstable).  As a person who fits the description of someone how has been victimized by the system, I am fully acquainted with the unpleasantness of interviewing for entry-level jobs at the age of thirty, and while I don't usually feel that my life has been "ripped up" (her terminology), it's certainly the case that my early adulthood - where I lived, who I was friends with, my relationships - was very much influenced by my academic career.

But I think McArdle has missed something very important.  I don't think many people enter graduate school with the idea of making it to a cushy tenured position and then resting on their laurels; I imagine that any who do quickly drop out.  It is simply not worth it, and this is obvious from the beginning.  If your primary desire is money or status or comfort, there are ways that are much less uncertain, or require less sacrifice in the short term, or lead to greater potential rewards.  The only way that struggling through a career in academia is at all sensible is if you really enjoy the work you are doing, and I think that she completely ignores that payoff - or rather, she seems to assume it is entirely deferred to the future, post-tenure period that for many academics never arrives. (I also think she conveniently ignores the fact that in all fields, most people never make it to the top... most people who go to business school don't become CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, instead spending their careers in middle-management positions.  Does that make them failures, which is what she seems to think adjunct professors are?)

It is true that there are problems in academia; I've certainly witnessed my share of them.  There are also politics and strong personal rivalries that shape the system more than they ideally should, and some scientists receive recognition beyond their due, while others fail to advance as far as they perhaps should - but how is that different from any other field?  There are also frustrations entailed in the long training period - but in the sciences, most of the length of that training period arises out of necessity; recent college graduates are not generally capable of conducting a meaningful independent research program.  Certainly, I think there are adjustments that should be made - supports that could be added to help people through the early parts of their career, provisions for reviewing how faculty treat their research assistants, ways to reward self-promotion and sucking-up-to-important-people less and good research more.

But, even as one of the "victims" of academia, I find it hard to really hate the system.  It's true that I did not earn as much as a grad student or postdoc as I would almost certainly have earned in most other likely jobs; it's also true that I experienced plenty of stress and disruption, particularly on a per-dollar basis.  But, I got to spend several years doing original scientific research with some of the leading experts in their fields.  I got to think about the way the world works on the most basic level and try to understand things that are not yet understood by anybody, and that was my job.  I got to participate in the development and publication of new theories that helped shape the discourse on a (very small and specialized) topic in physics.  I got to attend conferences where I heard about brand-new research from the people who were doing it, asked questions, and argued.  And I got to do all this while wearing jeans and never worrying that my division wasn't profitable enough and I might get laid off.  It's true that I didn't take home a substantial paycheck, and that I will never attain the position of tenured professor.  But I learned a lot - which is its own payoff - and had some pretty cool experiences, and while perhaps in retrospect I should have gotten out a couple years earlier, it was a pretty interesting ride.