<story><title>“The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research or merit.”</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1494369809538195456.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why hiring in academia is so weird. People are strung along for years, and then you are suddenly either out or you have tenure for life. (A friend compared a professorship it to being the pope, which I think is fitting.)&lt;p&gt;You need to have a perfect track record. You have to have worked in a couple of different places, with no gaps, you need a lot of publications and &amp;quot;visibility&amp;quot;. And even then, in my experience about 50% of positions are given on merit, and 50% are given seemingly randomly. Even if you are incredibly self-confident and count yourself among the top 5%, it is still a gamble.&lt;p&gt;Academia works like a guild, or maybe like the military (up or out). But it seems everybody would benefit if hiring was changed to be more like outside academia. No more temporary positions vs unfireable professors, but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts. Don&amp;#x27;t insist on an unbroken career and years of travelling journeymanship, but value broad experiences and career changers. I know a lot of people who are considered academic failures but were welcomed in industry &amp;quot;with kisses&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think the cause is just resistance from entrenched people, or ideology. There is a lot of neoliberal pressure to run universities more like companies. And I guess hiring is one of the few areas where this would not be a bad thing. Is it just shortsightedness then? Or lack of funding, and scarcity of jobs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jltsiren</author><text>Traditional universities were structured like guilds. After you completed your studies in liberal arts, you got the rank of master and the license to teach at any university. The members (masters) of the university made decisions by vote. The idea that universities should have bosses and that the faculty are employees is rather new.&lt;p&gt;These days, the weirdness of academic job markets is mostly limited to research universities. That&amp;#x27;s because universities don&amp;#x27;t do research, but they still hire researchers. They provide office&amp;#x2F;lab space, equipment, and administrative services to researchers in exchange for a large fraction of the funding the researchers are able to obtain. Senior researchers are employees only in a technical sense. If one of them quits, the university most likely won&amp;#x27;t try to hire another person to continue the research. Instead, the researcher probably takes their job to another university and continues there.&lt;p&gt;Research universities hire people who teach, mentor, and serve in administrative duties. They don&amp;#x27;t hire people to do research, because they don&amp;#x27;t do research and have no need for researchers. They hire active researchers and give them the opportunity to do research primarily for the prestige value. Because most universities are funded by taxes and&amp;#x2F;or tuition fees, they can&amp;#x27;t pay competitive salaries. In order to attract top researchers (and thus prestige), they have to offer something else. In most cases, that &amp;quot;something else&amp;quot; is a promise of a permanent position with the option to spend a large fraction of their time on whatever they are interested in.</text></comment>
<story><title>“The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research or merit.”</title><url>https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1494369809538195456.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why hiring in academia is so weird. People are strung along for years, and then you are suddenly either out or you have tenure for life. (A friend compared a professorship it to being the pope, which I think is fitting.)&lt;p&gt;You need to have a perfect track record. You have to have worked in a couple of different places, with no gaps, you need a lot of publications and &amp;quot;visibility&amp;quot;. And even then, in my experience about 50% of positions are given on merit, and 50% are given seemingly randomly. Even if you are incredibly self-confident and count yourself among the top 5%, it is still a gamble.&lt;p&gt;Academia works like a guild, or maybe like the military (up or out). But it seems everybody would benefit if hiring was changed to be more like outside academia. No more temporary positions vs unfireable professors, but instead hire everybody on regular open-ended contracts. Don&amp;#x27;t insist on an unbroken career and years of travelling journeymanship, but value broad experiences and career changers. I know a lot of people who are considered academic failures but were welcomed in industry &amp;quot;with kisses&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think the cause is just resistance from entrenched people, or ideology. There is a lot of neoliberal pressure to run universities more like companies. And I guess hiring is one of the few areas where this would not be a bad thing. Is it just shortsightedness then? Or lack of funding, and scarcity of jobs?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwd</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t understand why hiring in academia is so weird.&lt;p&gt;Well do the math.  In a steady-state where the number of academic positions is static, each professor needs to train &lt;i&gt;a single academia-focused PhD student in his entire career&lt;/i&gt;.  OK, maybe make that 2 to account for attrition.  But most professors are churning out &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; more PhDs looking to enter academia than there can possibly ever be jobs for.  Then these highly-skilled and disciplined individuals end up working for peanuts for decades in the hopes of landing a &amp;quot;tenure&amp;quot; job.&lt;p&gt;I have two close friends, one in their 40&amp;#x27;s, one around 50, who are in this situation, and I think it&amp;#x27;s absolutely shameful.  Post-doc positions are fixed terms, so every two to three years they have to worry about getting more funding or being without a job.  There&amp;#x27;s no reason someone as highly skilled and disciplined as these two should be 1) paid so low, and 2) worrying how they&amp;#x27;re going to support their families every few years.  It&amp;#x27;s really like some kind of a cult.&lt;p&gt;At this point I would honestly never advise anyone to enter academia, unless you&amp;#x27;re in a field like Computer Science, where industry does a good job competing with universities for PhDs.  If you have the chops to get tenure in STEM, you have the chops to be paid more, with better job security, better work&amp;#x2F;life balance, better career trajectory, better everything, somewhere else.</text></comment>