Working in academia

I think it depends a lot on where you are. I cannot say I found it unfriendly and cliquish, but resistant to change, sexist and racist--definitely.

Most academics are socially retarded

These are people who have never worked a day outside school.

OP doesn't understand that true communism has never been tried. Send him to the gulag!

I hope somebody take R1 before I do, because my reply is not meant to be snarky. Academics live in mortal fear of being discovered to be frauds. Not because we are frauds, but because we fear the next person over is smarter. Therefore, people are always on guard, aloof, and putting on an act.

For my first few years, I probably did the same. But I realized that having a PhD does not make me any more or less competent at doing my job, that virtually everybody around me also has a PhD, and if we strip away all the pretenses, we can be damned good educators.

Yes, r5, I complete agree. My institution is pretty cool, but my friend is at one exactly like OP describes. I think it all comes down to insecurity.

I am in a field where most academics have MFAs rather than PhDs. This means that we worked--and continue to work--professionally outside of academia. Maybe that is part of what is different.

PhDs and people who have never had careers outside of academia are definitely are harder to deal with. People who start teaching in their late 30s and after are a lot easier to deal with.

Well try working in corporate America OP. Then you will realize how good you have it. Soul crushing inhuman capitalism where human feeling and emotions are unacceptable and intellectual curiousity and interest in aesthetics or academics is frowned upon. Appreciate the high school atmosphere - the real world of capitalism is much worse.

I worked in the real world for many years before I got a PhD and began teaching.

I never experienced such discrimination, toxicity, homophobia, and utter unpleasantness in the real world as I did in those fucking hallowed halls.

I ended up quitting academia - never to look back.

I often regret ever leaving my corporate job where I was a hotshot at 25 years of age. Great pay, great benefits, quick advancement, and fun co-workers.

The last tenure track position I was in, I discovered that, after taxes, I qualified for welfare.

Academia is so focused on money in a much more immediate way than the corporate world. When I was in the corporate world, money could be found for experimental projects, raises could be negotiated, and you did not have to toady to the boss to be considered a valuable employee.

In academia, there is a lot more emphasis on immediate financial return. There is no time or patience for trying something new that may have uncertain results. Raises are mandated and not negotiated by individuals. However good your work is, you are paid what you are paid until there is a mandated increase. And the culture is one of deference to administration. The thought seems to be that anyone in the deans office has to know more about the departments and classrooms than anyone actually there. The level of submission required by deans is on a Trump-like level.

Well said r10.

I agree with r9. I am glad I left academia.

I don't have any experience of academia outside of English and Scottish universities, and for most of my professional career I was working in hospitals, private practice and prisons (I'm a psychologist). However, I would say that it depends on the faculty as much as the university. On the other hand, I went to Oxford and the snottiness was much more apparent between colleges than between faculties.

My partner is a humanities academic and at 42 it is true he has never worked a job outside of being a student, teaching assistant or professor, save a brief summer intern job at a Manhattan PR firm in his early 20s. They never leave school behind.

In some fields like mine (cs) you have to be at least borderline autistic or else extremely cunning, and be able to work 15 hrs/day to have a shot at a good academic position. With that sort of profile, how could things be any different? I've never seen such open cruelty displayed anywhere in industry as I have in the academy.

The problem is a lot of the top administration never worked in the real world. So they do not have any business sense or organizational chops.

Full of tyrants who never got over being snubbed by the "jocks" and "cool kids" in school. They are snobbish about their education and Machiavellian in their outlook on life.

All of the absolutes above are nonsense. Not all schools are any particular way. Not all departments are exactly the same. Not all academics are from a cookie-cutter mold.

I worked in offices, retail, libraries for decades before I entered academia. I understand the "real world."

Most of the people I work with at my school are dedicated to teaching students. Most of the people I work with are supportive of their colleagues.

There are no more or no fewer angry, bitter, destructive people in academia than any other position. The same assholes work in offices, retail, public and private sector.

Just like anywhere else, you have to seek out the good people and avoid the bad.

But characterizing all academics as monsters or sheltered morons is just part and parcel of the anti-intellectualism being shoveled out by the Right. Congratulations at being a tool of Trump and the oligarchs.

Studies have shown that academic administration has a higher proportion of sociopaths than other professions.

Four hundred years ago, Roger Ascham wrote: "I have been a looker-on at the cockpit of learning."

Not much has changed.

Got anything to back that up, r19?

Here's another rebuttal to your claim, r19.

Oh look, it's a bunch of people spouting off about academics who don't know dick about academics. The culture of an institution completely depends on the institution, whether it is academic or business. I've worked for good and bad places in both.

My HR friends in academia let me know that one of the common things they have to deal with in terms of professors (rather than the non-faculty employees) is the enormous amount of porn some of the faculty download onto their university computers.

That's not exclusive to academia, of course, but I thought it was funny.

I'm in academia - but I also worked in the real world (if you can call 4 years working in the movie industry the 'real world'?) and much of what has been posted here is spot on. I find the hypocrisy the hardest to deal with: academia is a business, and as such profit (whether simply balancing the annual budget or increasing the endowment) motivates the vast majority of decisions that are made. However, no one wants to admit that outright.

Tenure is a fine thing in a college or university, so long as it is not abused. You should have to publish to get it and you should have to publish, or its equivalent, to keep tenure. The people who get tenure and then keep reading last year's outline to this year's students... have to go.

Tenure is a fine thing for those with intellectual curiosity and a strong work ethic. However, there are many whom it preserves in amber. Whatever was current when they got tenure is what they teach and whatever attitudes were current toward minorities and women are what they have forever.

Do they love themselves in the field or the field in themselves? That is what it comes down to.

R5, now that I'm out of law school and working, I realize that my law professors (some of them) had very little experience as an everyday, working attorney.

I would think that competitiveness has a lot to do with it. There is an overabundance of qualified people wanting to teach at the university level, at least in the humanities. So, in terms of pay, benefits, and respect, it’s a race to the bottom. There is also a paucity of resources as described above, made worse with the movement of money away from academics and toward sports and amenities like better food halls, gyms, dorms, etc.

You also have a structure where power is abnormally concentrated, as in the case of Avital Ronell. If you have a bad boss, you can transfer departments or quit and get a new job. In academia, a single person or small group of people decide your professional fate at every turn. And, as Ronell’s victim discovered, it’s an incestuous world. He could not move away from that psycho because she was connected everywhere and would hear about it.

And academics are strange and have a poor understanding of reality. I work firsthand with minorities, the poor and marginalized every day. As in, talking to them at length, treating medical conditions, arranging resources. For all their posturing and obsession with identity politics, most humanities academics have no contact whatsoever with the truly disenfranchised. They exist in a self-reinforcing oasis that goes untouched by the sloppiness of the real world. They are basically living in a bubble, and that could drive you crazy after awhile. If it matters, I got my bachelors in English before going into the sciences in grad school.

The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

That's a quote, r30.

I have worked in small colleges and mega universities. Malevolent behavior exists, in part, due to hierarchies in the academic disciplines. Faculty in lab sciences get headlines, a lot of internal and external funding, new facilities, plenty of research assistants, time off from teaching, travel grants, and so on. In the social sciences and humanities, not so much. As a result, the lab scientists tend to run the gamut from snobby introverts to fun extroverts. In the humanities, which suffers more than social sciences in terms of perks, the default is snobby introverts, who border on severe personality disorders.

And it flows up the food chain. Deans reward those who make headlines, which in turn attracts funding, which allows new labs, lots of graduate students, etc. Provosts reward deans whose schools do the same. As am academic dean, I know I do. I would be shortsighted not to, since other schools actively recruit the best faculty.

In my experience, humanities department chairs are among the dimmest people in a university. But given the slightest whiff of power, even as small as it really is, they lord it over the faculty and staff in their departments with abandon. They would stand on the neck of the senior colleagues in their departments if they thought it would get them a millimeter more attention. As I said above, once you turn the corner and choose not to engage in the utter ridiculousness of academic polemics (for the reasons others have stated above and more), it really is a cushy life. I can see, though, that people invested in one-upmanship would enjoy the posturing and fighting, as they try to convince everybody else that they are better than them.

At small colleges, the situation is essentially the same. Except that there are fewer players in the smaller arena, and their egos bump into each other more often.

No shit, Sherlock R31.

I would argue that rates of narcissism are higher in academia than in the general populace. The profession (at least the humanities) breeds it.

I've done a PhD and for years it's basically just you and your (very narrow) research specialty for years. It becomes important to you in a weirdly obsessive and unhealthy way. And you're surrounded by other doctoral students -- vying for the same fellowships, professor attention, and jobs as you -- working on their own niche research topic. It creates a terribly hostile, unfriendly environment, the dynamics of which, I'd argue, play themselves out over and over again in the profession.

Personality disorders -- of the high-functioning sort -- are everywhere. Many academics I know are petty, deeply unhappy people.

[quote]Studies have shown that academic administration has a higher proportion of sociopaths than other professions.

That was police officers, dummy.

Academics are usually snarky and superior snobs. Because they studied medieval sex habits of mosquitos, they think they are better than everyone else. Like most I T people, they are social misfits and have shitty personalities. Most have never worked a day in their life and could not function in the real world--or--and this is so true--in the world of public high schools. I have no respect for American colleges, unless it is medical or science instruction. Learning about Shakespeare's dark mistress or the significance of Winged Victory makes very few people any money, is unimportant, and is scoff worthy by 75% Off the earth.

So the committee rejected your dissertation at North Central Upper Dakotas State University, R36?

r36 types conservative

In my partner's department, no one wants to be the Chair. They literally have to pick straws. Why not just have a permanent person in that position as opposed to rotating after a three year term?

When you can’t hack it in the real world.

Highly dysfunctional from the top down - almost militantly resistant to change or improvement, more interested in good PR than actual quality of campus experience, in a perpetually reactive state only, as opposed to being or thinking proactively, top-heavy with overpaid administrators and deans, and occasionally lying and slanderous.

They suck. Anything good or successful to come from them is due entirely to the quality of individual students and select faculty, not the university system.

(Typing this from a state college campus in the Midwest)

R30 's quote nails it precisely and the last person who taped it to his office door on my campus was ousted in less than four weeks.

It's like working for an alcoholic family .

Or this woman:

Anyone else notice that some of the non-faculty staff are just as cunty?

R39, no one in my department wanted to put their research and teaching on hold, so we hired a chair from outside the department.

[quote] Anyone else notice that some of the non-faculty staff are just as cunty?

Yes, I'm one of them and I'm uber-cunty, but only on DL.

I was one of them too for almost 40 years, was never cunty, saw the world on their dime, and am now happily and quite comfortably retired - the pension plan was more than generous. Not anymore, though.

He didn't say it, or at least he didn't say it first, but the quote is always attributed to Henry Kissinger speaking about the Harvard faculty: "They fight so much because they have so little to fight about."

R39

No one wants it because of the time involved: extra work, usually for no extra salary but penny-ante shit like a half-time staff person or teaching one less class a year.

I have such a crush on one of the academic guys at my work, Jon.