<story><title>“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/10/24/quitting_academic_jobs_professor_zachary_ernst_and_other_leaving_tenure.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mililani</author><text>My wife is in academia.  Although, not in the ivory towers.  She&amp;#x27;s at a community college in California, and she&amp;#x27;s both on the tenured faculty track and administration as a program director.  So, her experiences may not speak entirely to this article.&lt;p&gt;There are lots of problems inherent with academia that most people thinking about this field are not really thinking about.  The biggest problem, I think, is that for most 99% of all professors, once they are tenured, they are LOCKED down geographically.  And, that sucks.  My wife and I have one foot out the door all the time.  We go where the jobs are.  But, now that she&amp;#x27;s on the tenure track, we wonder if this is where we&amp;#x27;ll lay down and die.  It&amp;#x27;s pretty sad, when I think about it.  You hear about it time and time again from so much of these guys. One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this.  He complained a lot about living in Hawaii and how his wife divorced him because of it.  He had a page up here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.math.hawaii.edu&amp;#x2F;~lee&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;But, apparently, after some time he decided to take down the more controversial stuff.  The index.html page to his ramblings are down.  Anyways, that&amp;#x27;s a huge problem for academics.  And, I thought about it, and I think the biggest problem is the whole tenure thing.  I think it should be abolished.  Professors should be able to move to new institutions without worrying about that entire process, and they should be paid a better wage because of it.  It should be like any other free market enterprise we have nowadays.  And, Universities should also be able to get rid of dead weight.  I&amp;#x27;ve had some professors in the past who just gave up on research and life.  For example, said professor mentioned above.  He gave up on math research because the University kept screwing them over on pay.  He retired with only 17 publications under his name.  My other friend who is now a tenured math professor at a 4 year college has 17 publications at just 37 years of age.  My other friend who has been teaching for about 10 years now has only 2 publications: his math Ph.D. dissertation, and a one page paper that probably isn&amp;#x27;t worth the paper it&amp;#x27;s printed on.  Anyways, I think it&amp;#x27;s high time tenure is made obsolete.  It gives professors more latitude to move, probably better pay, and more incentive to do research or teach better.  It also gives schools and students the opportunity to get better teachers and lose the dead weight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>Interesting data point.  My father-in-law was a math prof who gave up research.  He felt bad about it.  He went to the department chair and said that since he wasn&amp;#x27;t doing research any more, could he be given more classes to free up other professors who were doing research to spend their time that way.&lt;p&gt;He was told no because, &amp;quot;It would make the rest of us look bad.&amp;quot;  And so he spent many years working a half-time job and feeling bad about it.&lt;p&gt;(He was also one of the best teachers in the department.  In large part, possibly, because his attention was on teaching, not research.  And face it, most of the material that is presented in first and second year math courses has not been a subject of research since the 1800s.)</text></comment>
<story><title>“I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/10/24/quitting_academic_jobs_professor_zachary_ernst_and_other_leaving_tenure.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mililani</author><text>My wife is in academia.  Although, not in the ivory towers.  She&amp;#x27;s at a community college in California, and she&amp;#x27;s both on the tenured faculty track and administration as a program director.  So, her experiences may not speak entirely to this article.&lt;p&gt;There are lots of problems inherent with academia that most people thinking about this field are not really thinking about.  The biggest problem, I think, is that for most 99% of all professors, once they are tenured, they are LOCKED down geographically.  And, that sucks.  My wife and I have one foot out the door all the time.  We go where the jobs are.  But, now that she&amp;#x27;s on the tenure track, we wonder if this is where we&amp;#x27;ll lay down and die.  It&amp;#x27;s pretty sad, when I think about it.  You hear about it time and time again from so much of these guys. One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this.  He complained a lot about living in Hawaii and how his wife divorced him because of it.  He had a page up here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~lee/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.math.hawaii.edu&amp;#x2F;~lee&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;But, apparently, after some time he decided to take down the more controversial stuff.  The index.html page to his ramblings are down.  Anyways, that&amp;#x27;s a huge problem for academics.  And, I thought about it, and I think the biggest problem is the whole tenure thing.  I think it should be abolished.  Professors should be able to move to new institutions without worrying about that entire process, and they should be paid a better wage because of it.  It should be like any other free market enterprise we have nowadays.  And, Universities should also be able to get rid of dead weight.  I&amp;#x27;ve had some professors in the past who just gave up on research and life.  For example, said professor mentioned above.  He gave up on math research because the University kept screwing them over on pay.  He retired with only 17 publications under his name.  My other friend who is now a tenured math professor at a 4 year college has 17 publications at just 37 years of age.  My other friend who has been teaching for about 10 years now has only 2 publications: his math Ph.D. dissertation, and a one page paper that probably isn&amp;#x27;t worth the paper it&amp;#x27;s printed on.  Anyways, I think it&amp;#x27;s high time tenure is made obsolete.  It gives professors more latitude to move, probably better pay, and more incentive to do research or teach better.  It also gives schools and students the opportunity to get better teachers and lose the dead weight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>&amp;gt; One of my old math professors had a page devoted to this. He complained a lot about living in Hawaii&lt;p&gt;Wow. No offense, but I can&amp;#x27;t imagine this guy with a real job. The self-entitlement is insane.  I really think there&amp;#x27;s a forest for the tree problem with a lot of academics.  The few I know get massive entitlements, days off, benefits, etc.  I work in IT, worry about layoffs, get minimal holidays, have on-call, and generally get treated like an idiot savant because no one likes techies and techies go against the corporate &amp;#x27;sales guy&amp;#x27; culture that dominates so many companies.&lt;p&gt;I wish my biggest problem was being forced to stay in Hawaii. On top of it, I went to some pretty good schools and honestly half my professors were loathesome misanthropes. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine where they would fit elsewhere. They&amp;#x27;d be destroyed in corporate culture in a new york minute.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am suffering from a &amp;#x27;grass is greener&amp;#x27; mentality, but sometimes it helps, i think, to remember where you came from and what you have.  Some problems are real and others just aren&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;I really wonder if the real issue is the ease that someone can enter many phd programs. With massive private&amp;#x2F;public loans and universities hungry for money, we might have long ago hit a tipping point of being too generous and letting a lot of people in who otherwise would have been unacceptable for phd programs, especially in the humanities. Of the academics I know, maybe one is a stellar thinker, the rest are just upper-middle class milquetoasts who wanted an easy life.</text></comment>