Employment Situation
From Chapter 25:
What happens when people do survive grad school and finally get their PhD? A large percentage wants to become faculty, so they seek postdoctoral positions as a step toward that goal. Times have changed. The pond is getting smaller but the number of fish is growing. In the past decade, it has become the norm to do two post-docs before applying for a faculty position, but not all postdocs want to become faculty. There are people who end up doing a postdoc because they couldn’t find a job in industry for two reasons: immigration and lack of “industry experience”. Non US nationals are kicked out of the country within 30 days if they don’t secure some kind of a job to stay. The industry does not hire people that lack “industry experience,” as if working in the industry implies some superhuman abilities that academia is not able to provide. So, the need for labor to do the work at the universities is there. It is primarily done by the temporary cheap labor that upon graduation reaches a bottleneck and cannot land a job in academia. If academia can’t absorb all the scientists that it produces why is it producing them? If those scientists are supposed to go work in industry why is academia not providing them with the skills that are needed there? What is killing science here? The answer is simple: Capitalism is killing science. The discoveries that are made in the western world are not done thanks to capitalism but despite of this primitive system that humans seem to value so much. How can something as noble and important as science be subordinate to capitalism?! Capitalism is a brutal rudimentary operating system in which we are trying to run a helpful sophisticated program. They are not compatible! I am not talking about industry here; they belong to capitalism. This is about academia and research that is supposed to bring us progress. The truth is simple but never pure, to paraphrase someone smart you may have not heard of due to reading only science papers. It is cheaper to have a huge turnaround of an underpaid workforce that will tolerate low wages than keeping a well-paid scientist at the same job. Once the old batch of hopefuls are used up, the new one will take their place. Instead of having a full-time well-paid researcher who will on top of a decent salary receive benefits and a pension plan, the system will use people who will work for much less and receive no benefits, making them even cheaper labor. The system will apparently keep going well, with the only drawback of overproducing PhDs who will either not be able to do science or will lose the motivation to pursue this path. How can this be in the best interest of science? Even if we disregard the individual well-being, the system itself rests on people who are usually not happy with what they are doing and how they are doing it. The main concern of a postdoc, for example, is to survive and move onto the next (hopefully better) stage. The end result is that science is done by a bunch of stressed-out unhappy people. Is this the kind of people who will bring progress to humanity? Another huge issue is the hiring practices of universities that involves pedigree more than anything else. There are always two piles of resumes. The CVs of a handful of ivy-league school candidates are placed on one pile, while everyone else goes to the second pile. I am sure you are familiar with this practice, especially if you have been hiring yourself. If two people with similar academic achievements apply for the same position, but one of them comes from a prestigious school, that is the candidate who will be hired. The other one may not even get an interview. Isn’t this just another popularity contest? Is potential future discovery so dependent on academic pedigree or you try to make your life easier by simplifying the hiring process? It is true that ivy-league schools produce the “best” research but that can be explained by funding and a longer legacy, not necessarily the quality of the individual people who come out of that institution. It takes time to build a name, and once done, it means something, but does it mean that ideas do not exist elsewhere? How is attracting the fashionable pedigree in the best interest of science? Has there been research done that monitors the performance of new assistant professors with and without desirable pedigree? The metrics are screwed up anyway, but since it is a relative comparison, any metrics are good enough. If it is true that certain schools produce candidates that are better than anyone else, then let’s expand Harvard as much as it takes and close down other institutions! This way the balance will be reached. How many people give up on science at this stage facing the issues I mentioned? People who come from ivy-league schools and do get hired get evaluated based on the previous publication record in the area of research in which the hiring department is looking to expand. Nobody evaluates this person based on their skills to teach students in class or his/her own students in the lab. This is where a huge problem sets in. You hire assistant professors for the task of managing a lab, writing grants, teaching and motivating students, yet nobody cares if that person is capable of those tasks! All that matters is pedigree and publication record in famous journals, yet the responsibilities of this job are much broader and equally important. The department will think that the tenure evaluation is good enough to weed out bad hires after five years, but that creates huge pressure on the new hires, who start panicking while writing their first grant. Students who start out their careers in this kind of environment don’t experience the best of science, as their bosses will frequently use them to prop their heads above the water to prevent their own drowning and get tenure. If no tenure is given, everyone loses. New hiring needs to take place, startup funds for the professor who did not get tenure were wasted while some students find themselves in the middle of a project when the lab falls apart. What does the department want from the new hires? Sadly enough they want only money. If the new assistant professor brings in grants to the department he/she gets tenure. A publication record alone is not enough, but grant money alone is good enough. If the person creates a toxic environment in the lab and mistreats the students, that is not relevant, as long as there is positive cash flow. There are people with impressive publication records who did not get tenure because they did not bring in enough grant money. So here we go again: An academic institution that supposedly wants good science, hires people based on pedigree and high-impact factor publications, does not care whether that person can teach and lead a lab and pretty much expects only cash in the future. True science seems to be secondary here, don’t you think?
No Comments