82. Academia: is it really a cult?
Uncategorized — By Dmitry Podolsky on November 8, 2008 at 10:00 am
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After my rant (by the way, why do you think I was using exactly this word?) on switchers and global financial crisis one disappointed fellow Scandinavian reader wrote in comments:
Tonight I was glad to see that neqnet was updating again after the fall hiatus – until I saw your “switchers” rant.
Now I doubt that I’ll ever come back again. Life’s too short to waste on such delusional arrogance.
Get a clue:
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/academia-is-a-cult/
I’ve decided to do as he said, i.e., to get a clue how exactly the Bug Girl was going to convince students that academia is a cult. She has the following three main points:
- Authoritarian structure, that is, the system of PhD advisors, postdocs, tenure track
- Isolation from society and use of mind control techniques such as peer group pressure, confusing doctrine, verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, dress codes, financial commitment, controlled approval.
- Control of the environment, in particular, demand for purity, domination of doctrine over person, dispensing of existence (if one leaves the research group, one loses their salvation/transformation, or something bad will happen to them).
What to say about the point 1… I know two female professors. One of them is indeed quite authoritarian, likes to push her postdocs to their limits and further, demand better performance up to 10 times a day. Another one is extremely supporting and does not push her agenda at all (Ok, if you are not performing well, she does get a kind of nervous 
). But… both are not too famous (although the total number of citations hits about 2000 for both). I would say, scientific career of both ladies is in decline. I think, the very ultimate reason is that your personal success in science does not depend much on personality issues, whether you are authoritarian or supportive/friendly to your students or postodocs. Itis rather a strongly peaked function of your creativity.
Point 2. Isolation from society??? I bet you want to get a postdoc at CITA Also, go ahead and read what professional scientists prefer to write on their blogs – 99% of the time this is some mumbling about Obama, global warming or cute persons of the opposite sex. Reading them, you can be pretty much sure that science does not possess their minds completely
Point 3. We are using special language confusing ordinary tax-payers? Like math, for example (mathematics is the language)? Anyway, try to enter the group of professionals in, say, search engine optimization or day trading, you should face with the same thing. Domination of doctrine or idea over person? Sure Sorry, buddy, we are scientists, and if you are talking bullshit, I’ll tell you about that directly and will not take into account the fact that you have damn pretty eyes. Unless, maybe, if we both work in sociology.
In conclusion, Bug Girl’s analysis did not impress me, so I shall add another argument in favour of her statement that “academia is a cult”.
You see, a person who belongs to a cult, always looses in quality of life. Being in academia is such a loss. Indeed, if you are a physics student, you can get your PhD and leave for industry or Wall Street immediately after defence. Another guy, who will prefer to stay in academia, will have about 35000$/year as a postdoc, while your compensation will start at the level about 100000$/year on the Wall Street and about 50000$/year in industry. Isn’t it a loss in quality of life? You bet it is.
But… there is one small shade that makes all the considerations above a bit weak. I think, the most important feature of a cult, that makes it so dangerous, is that it is very easy to enter a cult but very hard to leave (did anybody of you, people, ever have any interaction with Jehovah’s witnesses?). The situation in Academia is in fact the opposite: if the way you think does not impress anybody, nobody will cry if you will leave academia forever (for, say, an alternative career in science).
So, is Academia really a cult, what do you think?
Update: we were visited by the Bug Girl herself! Please see our little debates in comments to this post.
2 Comments
Interesting. I had to go back and read the earlier posts in which my blog was referenced to try to sort this out. I believe this was the comment that the person was referring to:
.
In other words, your saying that people don’t get jobs because they aren’t “good enough” had a reflection in some of what I was criticizing in my post about academia.
What you completely missed was that the post was satirical–I was exaggerating for effect. There *are* similarities between the ways in which we are trained in academia and the ways in which people are indoctrinated in a cult. I am pointing that out in order to get students to examine how their thinking is altered in this environment.
Your use of the word “alternative” in relation to careers pretty much makes my point–why is non-academic always considered the worse choice?
Dear bug_girl
Thanks for dropping by! Rarely one has a pleasure to face an opponent like you in the debate (and I’m saying this without even a drop of irony).
Unfortunately, I believe, that’s how it works in reality. Academia has its own hierarchy of priorities and accepts new members according to it. The first place in this hierarchy, whether one wants it or not, belongs to creativity. Networking, connections, ability to satisfy sadistic fixation of the one’s scientific advisor do belong to the hierarchy as well, but, as I would claim, they are secondary. If one passes the creativity threshold, one is in irrespective to other criteria. This is what happened to many scientists from the former Soviet Union who did not have powerful connections in the US academia but still were quickly absorbed by it after USSR fall (examples of Linde and Polyakov immediately come in mind). On the other hand, if one does not pass the creativity threshold, then other criteria start to play a role, and sometimes, say, networking does help to secure one’s tenure track position (I will not disclose any names at this point
)
That’s because I am rather dumb, damn serious and do often miss jokes.
I don’t question that, but what would you want? In the situation of constantly decreasing funding, when too many good scholars (like yourself) do prefer to leave academia, the field tries to defend itself, to keep standards high.
The very sentence you have in mind was initially designed in order to bug you personally in case you will click the trackback link
Now, your analysis is not terribly deep, neither is mine. So, what’s the point to write posts like that? What I wanted to do is to support a girl/guy who once decided to stay in science, had many disappointments (in particular, regarding the level of her salary) and
maybe sometimes wonders – why not to leave for industry, alternative career in science or anything else. I would like to tell her/him – recall why you chose this career in the first place. Maybe, you just were a little bit too curious about how the Nature works. Or maybe you were dazed by the beauty of some idea. Although some new things like publishing or networking did become important for you recently, these first things did not go away, and in fact, they never will.
Cheers,
Dmitry.
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