Why Will He Quit?
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
An academic has posted to his blog a letter sent
anonymously to all the researchers at his university by a student who has
decided to quit pursuing his Ph.D. just shy of completing his thesis work. I
agree with the blogger that it raises issues "worth thinking about" by anyone
who is or has been "in the academic world". Let me also echo both the author
and the blogger in making it clear that my personal experience has also
included numerous examples of good people doing good science. Science isn't
dead, but it's in deep trouble.
Three things strike me about this
letter. The first is the author's overall concern:
... I'm starting to think of [academia] 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...It is interesting to consider where most of this money comes from and how it is distributed (i.e., government grants doled out by scientists established in the sense of having a track record of publications) in light of the following concerns, which are also the second thing I wish to highlight:
... 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 ...And, much later:
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] 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.We clearly have a system that, while not making it impossible to do good work, stacks the deck against those who want to judge its value objectively, as opposed to how it looks to others.
The real problem is that this habit can easily carry over into one's postgraduate studies, until the student [himself] becomes like the professor, with the backwards mentality of "it is important because I've spent too many years working on it".
And this brings me to the third salient point about this letter, and the one with which I disagree. The author, who I would surmise is as anti-capitalist as any other typical academic, seems to blame capitalism via the surrogate of common popular stereotypes about "business". (I'd say that to the extent there is truth in the stereotypes, it is due to the pragmatist (i.e., range-of-the-moment, expedience-minded) mentality shared by some businessmen and some academics.)
... 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 naïve PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.And:
... [T]he 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)...It is simply wrong to claim (on the basis of time spent in a lab, at least) that non-PhD's are "doing most of the work". Karl Marx (and anyone he has influenced) is wrong to write off the intellectual and managerial effort of running a research lab as somehow not being work.
Perhaps it is the last point that is making it hard to see the relationship between the first two, to diagnose a possible cause, or for either the author or the blogger to see a solution to the problem.
If anything, academia needs to become much more like a business -- one that can't count on a government bailout if it fails -- rather than one of the many tentacles of the welfare state that it is now. I suspect that many of the problems the author describes above would disappear were money to come to those who deserve it, rather than to those who curry favor with those holding bags of loot.
-- CAV
7 comments:
By the way, that particular blog ‘Pascal Junod’ was poorly written and had a number of obvious grammatical mistakes and stylistic flaws to the point where it was starting to become painful to read. The student’s letter was actually higher quality writing and more compelling. Surely, an academic can do better?
Dead weight exists in most departments, which is one reason why I eventually chose an industrial position (the other being the wish to earn every cent of my pay) but it is simply wrong on so many levels to conclude that most PhDs do little work. It may be that my field (biochemistry) is somehow different (I’ve heard it called the last hard science) than whatever field student was studying. In any case, my experience in the academy was the polar opposite of this person’s, so I thought I’d chime in.
My supervisor taught me many of the basic lab techniques I needed, spent literally dozens of hours discussing science with me and ripped apart the first draft of my first manuscript with a red pen to the point where he might as well have rewritten in completely or used a paintbrush (but then I wouldn’t have learned how). In addition, to the time spent working his way up to that high level of knowledge and skill are the hundreds of hours he spent to; 1) Decide on the topic to research, 2) Set up the lab and determine what equipment he needed, 3) Apply for grants, 4) get the basic system set up so the students coming into his lab could start churning out results immediately…and so on. My experience as far as I could tell wasn’t exceptional. I say Karl Marx didn’t have a clue.
My PhD supervisor did get his name on my papers as the last author. This is standard procedure when a student publishes but my name always came first as it should have.
As far as dishonesty and sleaziness goes, I’ve encountered that with some people as well but not with most. For example, I remember once I published a paper which politely but logically trashed the results from a famous laboratory, getting an exceptionally good review and finding out later that the review had come from the very lab I had disagreed with. Talk about good sportsmanship from a famous scientist!
One of the keys though is that in some fields (mine in particular), if what you do, doesn’t work it doesn’t work. One lady spent two years working on a gene that she thought she know what it did and then found out it was something completely different. Obviously, she couldn’t publish that, so had to scurry to research the ‘new’ function and ended up adding more than a year and a half to her thesis work.
A final point I’d like to make is that the department and most especially the particular lab can make a world of difference for any prospective PhD student.
Your elaboration of what a good advisor does is especially well appreciated and dovetails with your last point. Nothing is more important at the start of a scientific career than seeking out the right mentor.
Steve D writes, "By the way, that particular blog ‘Pascal Junod’ was poorly written and had a number of obvious grammatical mistakes and stylistic flaws to the point where it was starting to become painful to read. The student’s letter was actually higher quality writing and more compelling. Surely, an academic can do better?"
Junod's probably French Swiss and his native language is French; his English is quite good except for places where he uses French constructions. For example, "worth to read" is common among French people speaking English, from vaut lire; more generally, French uses the infinitive where English would use either the infinitive or gerund and the English usage has to be learned verb by verb, so it's no surprise francophones who haven't been immersed in English-speaking environments for many years aren't perfect on that score. It's just the sort of thing one has to learn to recognize and read past when traipsing through international sites.
Or adjective by adjective, for that matter.
Yo, Gus, anyway, I've thought about the article and have to think about it some more to see if there's anything I actually want to say about it. I don't agree with it in two respects: I don't think the situation's as dark as it paints, and in any case there are more serious problems in the university--failures in educational theory, distortions due to massive state funding, vast ballooning of administrative blubber, and structural problems.
Snedcat,
Thanks for bringing up the possibility of the blogger's writing quirks being ESL-related. I'd thought of that myself, but promptly forgot to say anything about it.
Regarding the greater problems you bring up, I think some of the problems the letter-writer brings up, particularly "selling" one's work dishonestly and entrenchment of pet theories, are (at least in part) byproducts of the distortions due to massive state funding. I also regard the last two problems you cite as byproducts of the first. Someone has to administer all that money, and Mises's Bureaucracy indicates lots the havoc of what that fact alone can wreak.
Yo, Gus, you write, "Regarding the greater problems you bring up, I think some of the problems the letter-writer brings up, particularly "selling" one's work dishonestly and entrenchment of pet theories, are (at least in part) byproducts of the distortions due to massive state funding. I also regard the last two problems you cite as byproducts of the first. Someone has to administer all that money, and Mises's Bureaucracy indicates lots the havoc of what that fact alone can wreak."
I agree. I just don't know if I'd have anything interesting to add in drawing out all the possible interconnections.
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