This post contains excerpts of a letter sent to staff at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, English: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.
I wonder how many more letters like this we will see after AR5 is released. – Anthony
An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia: A Resignation
Dear EPFL,
I am writing to state that, after four years of hard but enjoyable PhD work at this school, I am planning to quit my thesis in January, just a few months shy of completion. Originally, this was a letter that was intended only for my advisors. However, as I prepared to write it I realized that the message here may be pertinent to anyone involved in research across the entire EPFL, and so have extended its range just a bit.
…
While I could give a multitude of reasons for leaving my studies – some more concrete, others more abstract – the essential motivation stems from my personal conclusion that I’ve lost faith in today’s academia as being something that brings a positive benefit to the world/societies we live in. Rather, I’m starting to think of it 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.
(1) Academia: It’s Not Science, It’s Business
I’m going to start with the supposition that the goal of “science” is to search for truth, to improve our understanding of the universe around us, and to somehow use this understanding to move the world towards a better tomorrow. At least, this is the propaganda that we’ve often been fed while still young, and this is generally the propaganda that universities that do research use to put themselves on lofty moral ground, to decorate their websites, and to recruit naïve youngsters like myself.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the 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…Rarely do I hear of advisors who actually go through their students’ work in full rigor and detail, with many apparently having adopted the “if it looks fine, we can submit it for publication” approach.
(3) Academia: The Backwards Mentality
A very saddening aspect of the whole academic system is the amount of self-deception that goes on, which is a “skill” that many new recruits are forced to master early on… or perish. As many PhD students don’t truly get to choose their research topic, they are forced to adopt what their advisors do and to do “something original” on it that could one day be turned into a thesis.
(4) Academia: Where Originality Will Hurt You
The good, healthy mentality would naturally be to work on research that we believe is important. Unfortunately, most such research is challenging and difficult to publish, and the current publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on the table while working on problems that require at least ten years of labor before you can report even the most preliminary results. Worse yet, the results may not be understood, which, in some cases, is tantamount to them being rejected by the academic community.
(5) Academia: The Black Hole of Bandwagon Research
Indeed, writing lots of papers of questionable value about a given popular topic seems to be a very good way to advance your academic career these days. The advantages are clear: there is no need to convince anyone that the topic is pertinent and you are very likely to be cited more since more people are likely to work on similar things. This will, in turn, raise your impact factor and will help to establish you as a credible researcher, regardless of whether your work is actually good/important or not.
(6) Academia: Statistics Galore!
“Professors with papers are like children,” a professor once told me. And, indeed, there seems to exist an unhealthy obsession among academics regarding their numbers of citations, impact factors, and numbers of publications. This leads to all sorts of nonsense, such as academics making “strategic citations”, writing “anonymous” peer reviews where they encourage the authors of the reviewed paper to cite their work, and gently trying to tell their colleagues about their recent work at conferences or other networking events or sometimes even trying to slip each other their papers with a “I’ll-read-yours-if-you-read-mine” wink and nod. No one, when asked if they care about their citations, will ever admit to it, and yet these same people will still know the numbers by heart. I admit that I’ve been there before, and hate myself for it.
(7) Academia: The Violent Land of Giant Egos
[He must be talking about Mannworld here -Anthony]
I often wonder if many people in academia come from insecure childhoods where they were never the strongest or the most popular among their peers, and, having studied more than their peers, are now out for revenge. I suspect that yes, since it is the only explanation I can give to explain why certain researchers attack, in the bad way, other researchers’ work. Perhaps the most common manifestation of this is via peer reviews, where these people abuse their anonymity to tell you, in no ambiguous terms, that you are an idiot and that your work isn’t worth a pile of dung. Occasionally, some have the gall to do the same during conferences, though I’ve yet to witness this latter manifestation personally.
(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick It Ever Pulled was Convincing the World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?” Year after year, the system takes in tons of money via all sorts of grants.
…
What’s bothersome, however, is how long a purely theoretical result can be milked for grants before the researchers decide to produce something practically useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be a strong urge for people in academia to go and apply their result, even when this becomes possible, which most likely stems from the fear of failure – you are morally comfortable researching your method as long as it works in theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it and to learn that it doesn’t work in reality. No one likes to publish papers which show how their method fails (although, from a scientific perspective, they’re obliged to).
read it all at Pascal Junod
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the power elite learned to fear the imagination and curiosity of scientists as a threat to their hegemony. The academic system exists to try to contain that fearful energy within controllable bounds.
Oh, but it is SO tempting to enter a career path that could lead to SAVING THE WORLD
Dodgy Geezer;
Everybody has the primary goal of preserving their job.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’d echo the many recommendations above to the young person in regard to completing that PhD before moving on. But I want to underscore Dodgy’s comments above. Private industry is rife with politics as well. Internal fiefdoms will squelch each other’s ideas to the detriment of the company rather than let another fiefdom gain power. Companies that burst onto the scene with brilliant ideas often see their growth stall a decade later because their internal politics prevent them from continuing to innovate.
One of my favourite examples is the Swiss watch industry which at one time dominated the global market. When a Swiss engineer invented the quartz movement, the watch makers whose entire careers were invested in mechanical movements scoffed at the idea and convinced their managers that it would never work. Most of those companies are now bankrupt because the inventor went to Japan and sold the technology to Seiko.
Bottom line – the world is what it is. Learn what it is and how best to deal with it. Quitting simply delivers victory to the unethical and selfish. There’s good places to work in public and private sectors and there’s bad places to work in public and private sectors. The trick is to find a good place to work, regardless of where that might turn out to be.
I’m getting towards the end of my professional doctorate and am being constantly pressured to publish in journals and promote myself via conferences. Luckily I’m funding myself and being a tad older can oppose much of this pressure. The crazy thing is that I teach grad and postgrads and have had three chapters published in well received and widely read academic books, but apparently in the ego driven world of academia all this counts for nothing compared to publishing something no one will read in some obscure journal or giving talks to small audiences on the conference ego trail.
Surely this has always been a problem within academia. The problem with academics is that most have an inflated sense of entitlement. They see nothing wrong in acting deceptively in order to out do their competitors – and they have lots of competitors as you’d expect with people with huge egos.
But the young student should finish their PhD. It might be hard, but you find many of the same problems in many walks of life. In private industry it’s kept in check by the need to actually make money in order to justify your position, but it is there also. It’s human nature I’m afraid but I would agree that it flourishes in academia probably more than anywhere else.
Geezer
Excellent comment.
Good article. I would have completed the PhD, even though the writer showed a lot of integrity by rejecting it. Players have more influence than non-players. They must be listened to, otherwise the critical PhD’s denigrate their own status.
The way of the world these days is this: it does not have anything to do with right or wrong, or with morality, or honesty, or conscience, or the Scientific Method, or finding out as much scientific truth as possible. Today, it is all about what you can get away with. That is all that matters now. Gleick, Obama, Mann, and their ilk are perfect examples of this brave new world. Integrity does not matter any more. We have fallen very far in a very short time.
On a lighter note, this is how assorted folks in acedemia see each other.
Occasionally academics come up with something useful.
http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary.org/content/117/10/2791
But I can understand someone getting frustrated and leaving – I couldn’t stand it either.
When most anyone of at least average intelligence and in possession of sufficient ambition, will and tenacity can obtain a PhD, academia becomes the mill it is today.
All true, but fighting ‘the system’ from the inside has a much higher likelihood of success. Get back in there and get your PhD, then take no prisoners. GJ Rebane, PhD
The emphasis on citations and reviewing others work is not because they don’t want you to make a big discovery….The cruel fact is that it is unlikely that you will ever make a big discovery anyway, so they encourage you to make ‘small contributions’.
That said, if it is unlikely researchers will make a big discovery from the start, then I’d say you’ve got no chance at all if you never try!
I echo others and say finish the phd, and at the same time work on your big discovery during after hours.
What a poor desillusioned guy.
Chickening to write a thesis?
MishaBurnett says:
September 14, 2013 at 10:20 am
The idea of “Truth” as an abstract concept is not simply irrelevant to academia, it is positively antithetical to the primary purpose of universities, which is to get enough donor and grant money to keep going for another fiscal year.
Which is why I say abolish the grants system entirely. Give academics a budget for research and let them do whatever they like with it. It is the only way to unpoliticize science.
I could make a few other suggestions like appointing research positions by lottery among suitably qualified candidates.
@Peter Ward
Ain’t that the truth, Peter. Ain’t that the truth!
But you missed the bit where not only do we fund the no added value work, we are also expected to listen to the academics lecture us from their self-appointed positions of moral superiority about how evil we are and how our tiny intellects can’t match up to their great minds.
Summed up in the ridiculous phrase ‘Trust Me, I’m A Climatologist’
richardscourtney: Firstly, I strongly urge you to finish your PhD study.
I am glad you wrote that. On rereading, my post with the same intent seems curt and almost mean.
He should finish his PhD. I couldn’t submit mine through illness, and I felt pissed off and a bit of a failure for nearly 30 years about that, only partially ameliorated by eventually getting an MPhil in a different field. He could end up regretting it for the rest of his life.
That magic title “Dr.” can help in other contexts: an acquaintance of mine who had a PhD in biology ended up with an academic job (after a spell in commercial IT) in a university computer department. It’s plain silly not to complete with only a few months to go, even if I do admire his principles.
Relevant books:
Daniel Greenberg: Science, Money, and Politics
Henry Bauer: Dogmatism in Science and Medicine
I’m a retired professor and I’m afraid this letter is right on the mark. Years ago I was chairman of a search committee for a new department head. The committee wanted to hire a truly despicable candidate based strictly on his extensive publication record. When I asked the assembled committee which of his publications they had read and thought most impressive, my question was met with dead silence. Of the nearly dozen people on the committee not a single one had read even one of his papers. I exploded and went into a giant rant about the stupidity of the publish or perish mania that had engulfed modern academe.
I wrote a letter to the NY Times about this incident and it was published. Within a couple of hours of the letter being published I was flooded with emails and phone calls from professors all around the country (including many Ivy League and top notch schools) thanking me for the letter and telling me that I’d exposed the dirty little secret of modern acoademic research and publication. Namely, that no one gave a damn about substance and quality of research. The only thing that mattered was extending the list on your CV. Total BS.
@Philip Bradley at 2:44 pm
Which is why I say abolish the grants system entirely. Give academics a budget for research and let them do whatever they like with it.
Oh, that’s a great lesson to learn in graduate school: “Attempting to sell your research ideas is beneith you.” /sarc
It is bad enough there are government agencies with research grant approval boards and officers that pretend research proposals have value to others. Now you propose just giving a budget for research that interest no one but the researcher. That is the wrong direction for improvement.
“[He must be talking about Mannworld here -Anthony]”
Or Tol-land maybe?
I was a PhD student about 20 years ago, ABD, in metamorphic petrology, at a leading American university. I love geology, but I was much older than my peers, in my late 30s, and I realized that once I got my degree my next step would be a postdoc for a couple years and then, maybe, an assistant professorship at the University of Nowhere, competing against bright kids ten younger than I and twice as smart.
I did not choose my PhD thesis topic or field area, my advisor did. Eventually, I realized that I really wasn’t going to learn very much of interest, except how to operate an electron microprobe — more and more about less and less. More importantly, I realized that my primary objective had metamorphosed from the quest for knowledge, which had led me to return to school in the first place, to the quest for a degree, just so I could put “PhD” after my name. It no longer seemed like a good idea, so I dropped out and went back to my prior profession, software engineering, at which I am pretty good, and which certainly pays better, despite the absence of initials after my name. One of my best decisions ever. So, today, I make good money in software, and I still get to “do science” whenever I want, not because it pays the rent but simply because I love it. Works for me.
I don’t see anything new in the above. I did much the same thing 25 years ago as an ambitious but frustrated young engineer.
I left academia and went into private enterprise. Although the deal seemed much more honest in the business world, it’s not all that different in reality.
Organisations ( academia, business, or others) reward effort and loyalty. Work hard and get your shoulder behind the team, and your team (as best it can) will reward and protect you as a valued member. If you disagree with the team or its goals, your talents may be better recognised and rewarded elsewhere – so be ready to go where you will perform best and be appreciated.
If you are “a soloist”, life can be rewarding if you perform well and it can be harsh if you don’t. I remember being told (a long time ago): “Make your friends on the way up, because you’ll need them on the return leg.”
The above letter appears to be from a young and ambitious individual who just needs to find a more suitable environment and purpose.
I wouldn’t see it as anything new and WUWT should not fall into the “it’s worse than we thought” mentality.
None of this should come as a surprise to any one who has been in a graduate level science degree program. Having gone through a grad science program myself, it was one of the very reasons I have been a skeptic from the get go – I know what goes on behind closed doors of science departments & it makes it easy to smell a rat. The whole CAGW hypothesis has stunk to high heaven from day 1, especially if you have any familiarity the geologic scales of climate change. Couple that with fact that the CAGW hypothesis sits comfortably with the traditional liberal academic bias & there has never been any reason to trust any of the academic research supporting CAGW.
Kudos to the student for daring to say what many have thought. I hope that this will release the floodgates & many will join in the chant as this is the only way academia will have any hope of getting back on track
He forgot one crucial issue: all academia is falling all over themselves to tell govt and other bureaucrats what they want to hear. Even when it is a total lie. E.g. A central bank centrally controlled system makes sense; carbon emissions need to be taxed; you can set up huge bureaucracies and tax the hell out of the people; they will be able to have central control and do better than free markets.
Thank you Pamela Gray for providing a bit of fairness and balance that is sadly lacking in the post and many comments.