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.
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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.
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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
And there you have it.
An excellent compilation of the reasons I chose not to finish my dissertation, at 90% completion. For other reasons given by commenters above, I have lived to regret that decision.
I reached similar conclusions around 20 years ago but never wrote a letter like that.
I simply left academia and moved on.
The one thing this young man hasn’t discussed is the relationship between science research and how it is reported in the Press. It’s something which genuine scientists would rage about, but those seeking more grant money will play the game to achieve the ends.
Sounds like an engineer being born! 😉
Tobias: Unfortunately, no. I work in an industry that has tight regulation over technology transfer. We had a nice, short discussion with a Russian national who was driving a taxicab in Canada. He was an engineer who worked on the Russian RD-180 rocket engine that Americans buy to launch Atlas Rockets. None of the big aerospace companies would talk to him. He thanked us for at least telling him WHY we couldn’t talk.
This thread has lots of comments on the work environment and joining a ‘team’ in the workplace. I submit that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Teams exist because teams can accomplish more than individuals. The complaint seems to be that teams inherently protect their own more than they provide their intended service. Hey, they’re composed of people, and people are only human. I further submit that this problem is worse in the academic/government/contractor environment. Workplace efficiency (getting things done, and figuring out what is the right thing) inherently decays in this environment because there is little competition to keep the organization on track. [fill in rant here on climate scientists] Remember when NASA could put men on the moon? Their current budget is about $17 Billion per year and NASA can’t even put people into orbit any more. They buy rides from the Russians. How sad is that? Parkinson’s law and the Peter principle rule in organizations like this, and you need a PhD to get ahead.
Private industry on the other hand, must stay focused or it will die. Real commercial companies compete for consumer money and whoever provides the best value survives. I highly recommend “Barbarians to Bureaucrats” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma” to explain the life cycle of a private company. In this environment, it matters more that you can give the customer a better value than it is to have letters after your name.
When making hiring decisions, the company I work for values honesty, competence, and your accomplishments above the letters after your name. There are lots of other organizations like this out there too, most of them smaller, and most of them in private industry.
I’m not a scientist, but I play one on tv.
But who was the author? And in what language did he write? –AGF
I agree with those who think the writer should finish the doctorate. But he really shouldn’t be quite so whiney about it.
Finish the degree so he can change the system so that only research that saves the world is done, faculty are not banal, academic research is not a rush for publications and continuous grubbing for grants. Of course, there won’t be as much research done without the grants, nor will there be positions for post-doc and grad students.
One of the running jokes when I was in grad school was that there was a “suffer quotient.” You got your degree when you had suffered enough. One of my advisors fondly told the story of is first year oral exam. He was asked a question, gave the correct answer and was failed and told he could come back in 9 months for a retest. 9 months later, same question, same answer and he passed. His advisor told him that they thought he had it too easy and hadn’t suffered enough.
Just look at the way the universities operate (especially the one you plan on sending your children to.) Shortly after I graduated (*back in the 70’s) there was an article in the paper about the problem that “new” teachers were having getting a job. Seems like the state universities (not counting private) had conferred twice as many teaching degrees as there were openings for new teachers. Add in the graduates from private schools, and those that had attended college out of state and the newly certified teacher had about one chance in 3 or 4 to get a teaching position. I was an engineering major and had no problem. A good friend that was in many of my math classes but going after a degree in math with teaching certification was not as lucky. Talked to him later and he ended up using his math at an engineering firm and not teaching like his parents were and he dreamed of. All the universities care about is keeping themselves employed – don’t tell them being a teacher is a bad idea, that might make them change majors.
@ur momisugly Dan, Thanks, I understand and all the best, hope to find out soon what you are working on!
This kind of thread is why I return to WUWT daily, sometimes multidaily. Bravo.
It is impossible to express my delight at seeing Mr. Courtney return to posting comments at WUWT.
This isn’t even the hundredth time I’ve heard this.
Don’t build a system based on ego, featherbedding, lies, distortions, make-work and a culture of petty authority and expect good results from it.
Unfortunately people are very good at building systems like that.
Dear Former EPFL PHD Candidate:
My sincerest condolences on the death of your idealistic ambition. Getting b!tch-slapped by reality hurts, but in time you may be grateful for it. And come to think of it, it seems that you caught yourself before reality did, so my congratulations as well. I have to admit that it took me much longer to wise up (assuming you are a mid-late 20-something).
Plus, there is a silver lining! You seem to be someone who wants his/her life to count for something, and there is a group of people who do useful work throughout their careers, whose lives do count for something – they are called Engineers (in fact they do the world’s most important work, although very few of them would be pretentious enough say so). They keep lights on, water running, planes in the sky, boats on the water, etc, etc. True, engineers rarely get important-sounding titles & awards; they almost never get MacDonald’sArthur “Genius” awards, but since you have already outgrown academic vanity I doubt that this is much of an issue for you. And since society needs competence more than ever, no matter how much some of the scribbling classes try to belittle it, engineers are well paid. You will never find yourself in a pissing match over some $5,000.00 grant. Engineers are generally so good at their work that the rest of the world takes their work for granted.
Best of Luck,
PJ
P.S. Since you’ve already given academe the heave-ho, I’m betting it will be less than a year until you’ve stopped using phrases like “. . . the goal of ‘science’ is to search for truth . . .”, and not just because “to search” is not in itself usually considered a “goal,” but because engineers and real scientists just don’t talk about searching for the truth. They know that if they keep their vanity under control and get their facts straight, The Truth will take care of itself.
Sorry to be so late to a thread that is very important to me. Two points:
1-As a Ph.D. student I would say that the writer is if anything over optimistic.
I suspect that fraud is quite common in scientific research. There is great pressure to publish and almost no oversight. If you look at the cases that are detected they usually involve high profile research and reckless scientists. Cautious, intelligent fraudsters are unlikely to be found out.
Even worse than fraud (it takes some guts to run the risk of faking results) are supervisors who assign graduate students experiments with one acceptable result, if the experiment produces it the student has a publication, if not they have failed. (I have seen this myself).
2-There is no excuse to say that the problems that the writer describes are inevitable and there is nothing that can be done.
Several examples.
Usually when a prof has an interesting idea they have to find a graduate student to do the lab work. This can turn into an ugly pantomime as student typically has little lab experience and so screws up a lot and at the end of the process has to stand in front of an examining committee and pretend that the supervisors idea is his or her own. Sometimes this also involves the supervisor writing most of the publications that come out of the study (I have seen this myself).
Why not hire more technicians who do lab work full time for years ? They would work more efficiently than Ph.D. students and would allow the supervisors to present their own ideas instead of using graduate students as sock puppets.
Punish professors who abuse their graduate students. There is a case of a chemistry prof who has had three grad students commit suicide due to work pressure. Two corpses should end your career. There was a case at Columbia where the favourite grad student of a supervisor was found to have been faking data. Three students reported their suspicions and they were kicked out for this (check Chembark for this and several similar cases, http://blog.chembark.com/2013/08/06/a-disturbing-note-in-a-recent-si-file/ is a bit funny).
Professors cannot police each other as they are too dependent on each other for favours. Have some non-academics who are administrators and not scientists in on these decisions. Non scientists should not have too much power but they should be involved in academic decisions as they are disinterested if ignorant so at least nothing egregiously corrupt will get by them.
Finally I wish the writer all the best.
I worked in academics as well as an “outsider” (finance and administration), and I can definitely attest that cronyism is alive and well. It was all about how long the publications section of a CV was. Husband and wife in similar fields keeping separate names so they can cite/co author each other on more publications. Lots of quid pro quo type of back room deals. Countless grant applications not written toward scientific conclusions drawn from data received but toward “what the reviewers are looking for.” Research fellows working night and day while tenured professors slept in their offices if they even bothered to come in at all. Some of the tenured professors were lazier than any welfare recipient you could imagine – and their welfare checks were MUCH bigger. Man, what a racket! And this was in a respected field – medicine – not the pile of doo doo called “climate research”.
I got a graduate degree (MBA) just because I had to for job prospects, to make more money to better support my family. That piece of paper opens up jobs where I can get paid more by working at the same level of effort. I used academics the way it uses other people. I did as little as possible, I cut the maximum amount of classes, I was there to get the piece of paper and move on with my life. One of my profs got frustrated with me and said I was smart enough to move on and get a PhD so why didn’t I work harder? My blunt response: “so I can pay another 50 grand to get 3 more letters behind my last name that don’t mean a d–n thing to the guy on the other side of the desk doing the hiring? I think not.”
There are plenty of good people in academics, but you have to look a little harder to find them. They are often not the successful ones. There are plenty of smart people in academics. Some use the system. Some do not. Academics is definitely not discovering the black and white, it is about the millions of shades of gray, and you can get lost doing this.
I feel sorry for folks who got into science because they were wide eyed and searching for truths but had to make it into a career to pay the bills and became disillusioned. Those who believe this person has wasted his time quitting are wrong, this person has made a discovery earlier in life than many people and can hopefully find a better path to self fulfillment. It’s better to live happy as a failed PhD than miserable with one. He’s definitely smart; his observations are right on and any number of fields would benefit from that kind of perception. Good luck!
Like in most places, few people are out-standing by DEFINITION, in academia, as elsewhere. If all were super-duper awesome, none of them could stand out (sic!).
If this dude didn’t know that academia, too, is a cut throat business and not everybody is your friend, just like in ‘real life’, he arguably didn’t know what he was doing in the first place. His reason number 8 is a strong indication – sounds like a 3-year-old asking ‘mum, mum what is sciene, do we really need it?’ – Sorry, even if 80% in academia were to go wrong, this would still be an idiotic question. Which it is.
Also, there is a clear frustration here with how his work has been received by others – maybe he was just crap, we don’t know. So him quitting his studies is not indication or proof of anything.
On the other hand, I know, or know of, a few people who don’t deserve their PhDs, as they are either outright crap or are not ‘original works’. This even includes the former CEO of a leading international chemical company, who had it written by an employee; then, a person veeery close to me has written a PhD for a friend in about 2 weeks (not unusal for a dentist); just recently, one of my newly PhD’ed friends working for a recognized London uni told me how his Prof. asked him to do the experiments for a current PhD student, as he is simply too incompetent to do it himself. And on it goes.
Espcially in the medical field PhDs are often of questionable value. Only recently, there was a case reported on the German news, saying that a first (sic!) semester student wrote his PhD in 4 weeks! – This is telling on a lot of levels: First off, how do you even liase with a Prof so that you can hand in your thesis before your fellow 1st semester students have even managed to find their personal locker on campus?! So there, another successful dentist.
Just the other day, one of my neighbors wanted my advice before enrolling for a masters degree in islamic law – a masters degree that you can obtain without any written exams! This is not a fake online uni in America, this is a well known uni in London, GB. Actually there have been loads of new legal master programmes lately which are all rubbish, in that you don’t embark on an actual masters course anymore. You just go about your normal studies, and if you want a masters, you just write a 10.000 word essay on top of your studies and you got yourself an LLM behind your name.
Meanwhile, in other countries, you don’t have to do anything AT ALL to get your PhD. – That is, nothing over and above anyone else does. I know from lawyers and pharmacists in eastern Europe that they are now all ‘Doctors’, well, by law, because they don’t need a thesis any more, they just get it when they finish their studies.
Likewise, you do not need to write a habilitation in many places anymore to become a Professor at uni – they just make you one when hiring you.
So it’s a mixed bag, but certainly it is awkward that our young friend here does not seem to understand what academia is good for, after all.
Katabasis says:
September 14, 2013 at 10:08 am
“Everybody feels like that when nearing the completion of a PhD. You have to get through it.”
– I’m glad you said that Matthew. I’m in my final year and reading that critique gave me shivers.
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Yes agreed. B.Sc, M. Sc straight forward but Ph.D. at least in my time was hard going specially the writing up bit. It requires the utmost concentration and effort and is difficult (its meant to be). But believe me good training for subsequent project report writing and completion. So stick at it its worth the effort as a once -in-a -lifetime personal achievement.
I tried to warn undergraduates, years ago.
More recently, the historic perspective at a centenary was, if not damning, certainly depressing.
Based on the letter, I have every confidence that this person will have much to offer somewhere else, and will find people to whom he can render service. The rewards and honors from doing real science and working for meaningful and useful ends, for better people, is achievable and within reach. Besides, you can’t go wrong being grateful for what you had, even if it is over with.
I very nearly quit before my own dissertation. I went through with it, and passed easily, but I had become fed up with what academia had come to represent. That was 21 years ago. I truly cannot imagine how bad it is now, even tough I get a window into the inner workings of the pal-review-grants-at-any-price mentality from WUWT. Yep, it’s unimaginable,
I hope when all the dust settles a world court is set up and bring these so called climate scientists to be accountable for this fraud
Everybody has the primary goal of preserving their job. People in companies making consumer products aren’t doing it because it helps society. They are doing it because it pays them. And if another product looks as if it will supersede theirs they will try anything (legal, and occasionally illegal) to stop it.
In some sectors of the economy this might be true but not all. Silicon Valley and the computer industry could have never made the tremendous advances that it has over the last 40 years with that type of attitude. When we began what was then called the microcomputer revolution we knew that what we were doing was changing society and the same thing in networking which brought down the cost of ethernet to the point to where what once cost a thousand dollars (in the early 80’s) had decreased to a few dollars by the year 2010.
This type of advance does not happen under the conditions that you state “everybody has”. We knew that we were accomplishing things and providing new and improved services for the consumer and business customer, the paychecks then took care of themselves. Yes today we see a slow down of that but it is because people start working to preserve what they have rather than to continue to aspire to what can be.
This is what must be changed.
Poor Mr Junod. Fortunately I came to realise what science had become in my late teens. I think it was perhaps during the “Voyager” probe visitations to the gas giant planets. The scientists had all manner of “theories” about the gas giants and their rings and what-not that they had come to believe is if they were scientific laws, but once engineers had built the Voyager probe and it had gone out there to take a look, all their theories were cast to dust.
How many more theories about the start of the universe, sub-atomic physics, micro-biology, evolution, psychology and so on are wide of the mark because we have not been put in the position of making the right observations? Almost every one of them I suspect. Without observations they are merely well-funded guess-work.
And shouldn’t a great scientist be doing “great science”? Stephen Hawking is considered to be a great scientist because he speculated the existence of black holes direct from theory and was proven to be right. But wouldn’t his great intellect have been more valuable if he had applied it closer to home – to looking for a cure for motor neurone disease? For all his great ability, his work is actually of less value to us than Asimov’s science fiction (think about that for a while and you will realise how true that is).
Hello everyone,
I am the author of this letter and only learned yesterday that it had made it to this blog (albeit as an abridged version).
I will copy my post from the main blog (Pascal Junod’s) to this one, so that people who are interested in tackling these issues may join our little “movement”:
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Okay, given the interest that this letter has generated, I’ve decided that it would be criminal not to do something to act on the spark that this seems to have created for many people. If you want to create a group where we could discuss/propose/implement potential solutions, the first step should be to get everyone who’s interested together, after which we could start formal discussions.
If you are interested, either:
(1) e-mail Juliette at juliette.colinas@gmail.com
(2) e-mail me at eugene.bunin@gmail.com
(3) join the Facebook group I created for this (called “Honest Science”, link above) – I recognize that Facebook is not the best choice for everyone, but it’s free and as a quick-and-dirty solution it’s good, as it can also immediately give a forum to more focused discussions (if we want to migrate to a dedicated forum later, that’s of course possible)
A big thanks to everyone, again.
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I would add another point “You can’t graduate, you’re my cash cow” to the list. I was a PhD grad student in the early 90’s researching C60 Fullerenes. I had published 3 papers with some basic science that had not been reported before and was finishing my dissertation when my advisor told me I needed 2 more years of research to finish. By that time I was 5 years into the program and 10s of thousands of dollars in debt, married with 2 kids and an impatient wife. He thought he had me by the short hairs but I told him to “take a long walk off a short pier” and moved on with my life. Three others in my group had taken parts of my work and gotten degrees in the meantime but my work was bringing in grant dollars so I had to stay. BTW in the 20+ years since, no one has come up with a viable commercial use for the things yet.