Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith– the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo.
I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don’t like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is, I spent a lot of time noodling around doing other things while they chatted in the background. There’s just not that much value added by the video.
More than that, though, I thought that McArdle, like most people who aren’t actually academics, has a seriously skewed view of life in academia. Drezner did a lot to drag her back in the direction of reality, but they still ended up some distance away from the academic universe I inhabit.
The biggest annoyance, though, was a sort of ideological point. At one point, Drezner said that the biggest problem with graduate school was that it teaches people not to go for the money. They both agreed that it was a Bad Thing that people were arranging their lives and careers around things other than salary concerns.
Really, this is one of the reasons I’m glad to be in academia– I don’t want to spend my time fretting about who gets paid more than who, or surrounded by people who are obsessed with money and maximizing their income. I like being around people who are motivated by different concerns and goals, and I think it’s not only not a Bad Thing, but a good thing for society as a whole to have a place for people who are motivated by concerns other than money.
Of course, now I’m wondering where this puts me in the Watt-Evans taxonomy of class…
intellectual professional, as I recall
not quite upper class, but out of the middle management angst of the middle class
“At one point, Drezner said that the biggest problem with graduate school was that it teaches people not to go for the money. They both agreed that it was a Bad Thing that people were arranging their lives and careers around things other than salary concerns.”
WTF!!!??? I thought society had evolved past the ‘he who dies with the most toys, wins’ attitude.
I’m reminded of a news special I saw a few years ago about people working at Microsoft and Netscape on the next generation of browsers. They were making a fortune, and could probably retire by age 40, but they were working roughly 18-20 hours a day, every day. Is that a worthwhile career path? Does it make sense to completely sacrifice your youth so that you can wile away your retirement years peacefully?
I take a moderate view that I want a job where I can make enough money to live comfortably, but also can enjoy the work I’m doing. Considering that a majority of my life will be spent working my job, it would be foolish to make the salary the only consideration. Academia does it for me: there are days when I’m actually eager to get in and get things done. How many people can say that?
Given that both Dan and I left more lucrative degrees for academia and journalism, respectively, I think it’s safe to say you missed our point. The point was that grad school leaves you only a single way to measure your worth: getting a good academic job and doing impressive research. A lawyer, by contrast, can go for big money as a corporate lawyer, impressive power as a justice department lawyer or DA, social justice as a public interest attorney, cozy family practice, etc. All of these things sound horrible to me because they involve being a lawyer, of course. But they have more possible status hierarchies to choose.
“They were making a fortune, and could probably retire by age 40, but they were working roughly 18-20 hours a day, every day. Is that a worthwhile career path? Does it make sense to completely sacrifice your youth so that you can wile away your retirement years peacefully?”
That sounds like grad school, except on top of the horrible schedule, I get paid jack shit.
“The point was that grad school leaves you only a single way to measure your worth: getting a good academic job and doing impressive research. A lawyer, by contrast, can go for big money as a corporate lawyer, impressive power as a justice department lawyer or DA, social justice as a public interest attorney, cozy family practice, etc.”
My graduate degree permits the freedom of staying in academia, getting a 9 to 5 job making 80-100k/yr starting salary, joining a smaller startup with perhaps lower starting pay but a much larger stake in the company should it be successful, or starting my own company. I fail to see how that equates to only a single way to measure my worth.
The point was that grad school leaves you only a single way to measure your worth: getting a good academic job and doing impressive research. A lawyer, by contrast, can go for big money as a corporate lawyer, impressive power as a justice department lawyer or DA, social justice as a public interest attorney, cozy family practice, etc. All of these things sound horrible to me because they involve being a lawyer, of course. But they have more possible status hierarchies to choose.
See, I don’t really agree with that, either. It doesn’t really match my experience of academia.
Now, granted, I’m a physical scientist, and I work at an elite small private college, but I just don’t see my colleagues even in the humanities as being status-obsessed to a destructive degree. That doesn’t really fit the people I know who work at big-time research universities, either.
I also think that, to whatever extent this is true, it’s not a problem unique to academia. Lots of people, even in fields where they have access to multiple status hierarchies, choose to pursue their careers and evaluate their success based on things other than financial status– the needs of their family, for example. My wife is an attorney, and smarter than I am to boot, and could undoubtedly be vastly more successful in the lawyer status ranks somewhere other than Schenectady, but she’s here because she placed our relationship higher than simple career status. I tend to think of that as a Good Thing.
But, again, I just don’t see my colleagues as being all that bitter in the first place, so we part ways well before getting to the stuff about money.
it’s also worth noting that grad school isn’t professional training like med school, law school, or business school. In the sciences, you are learning how to do science, you aren’t learning how to be a Scientist. And you’re being taught/mentored by someone who did gradschool and then academics. Your advisor probably has no experience working in industry. And certainly no experience for things farther off the beaten path. And at least for chemists, I think the options are pretty good. academics of various sorts, industry, a very good grounding for transistioning to patent work if you discover you don’t like labwork. A chemistry PhD is actively useful even if you aren’t a bench chemist – most (all?) of the patent attorneys I deal with are “former” chemists.
Chad, I can tell you aren’t going to bite on that ad I’ve been seeing recently for the Escalade. It’s pitch is all tied up in being one of the cool kids in high school. I know I’m not in that focus group because I didn’t buy Sansabelt pants to be cool in HS and I just laugh out loud at a middle-aged suit in an Escalade with Rims. That dude needs to grow up!
That blogger’s view of the value of academia is similarly twisted. There are brilliant PhD physicists working at Cisco, M$, Google, Wall Street, you name it. Granted some were forced, kicking and screaming, to go after the filthy lucre because of a dearth of lower paying academic jobs, but I know several who had that as their goal. They were the ones who didn’t lolly-gag their way through the PhD!
“The biggest annoyance, though, was a sort of ideological point. At one point, Drezner said that the biggest problem with graduate school was that it teaches people not to go for the money. They both agreed that it was a Bad Thing that people were arranging their lives and careers around things other than salary concerns.”
Put like that, it sounds stupid. But these guys sort of have a point. I have a problem with academia that, in my personal experience, it teaches people that being practical doesn’t matter — we’re scientists (theoreticians, moreover!) so what we do doesn’t have to be useful to anyone, it only has to look nice. In my country, something like 50% (or even more) of the brightest physics students of my generation, of those who really can achieve something in research, went into stuff like mathematical physics, quantum gravity, or string theory. Now, these are all useful subjects and we need to progress there — but we also need talented people doing research in condensed matter physics, hydrodynamics or geophysics. And this is somehow seen as “less worthy” in Polish academia, which IMHO has been caused by the notion of practicality and usefulness often being rejected by the members of the physics community in my country. And, unfortunately, usefulness and practicality can be often measured by money. Hence, having an anti-monetary attitude does not help the scientist to recognize in what ways he could help the society live better. I mean, if the industry is willing to pay lots of $$$ to a PhD with skills to do A, it means that there is a lot of demand for A. And maybe this is not always a capitalist plot to enslave the masses?