DailyDirt: How Do You Solve A Problem Like… Academia?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Getting a tenured professorship position has been the dream job of a multitude of highly-educated researchers, but as funding cuts have hit public universities, these careers aren’t looking as attractive as they once did. The academic system may soon be looking at some significant changes if the promise of tenure no longer serves to compensate underpaid educators. Here are just a few complaints about the current system, and feel free to suggest some solutions in the comments….
- Associate professors are unhappy (significantly less satisfied than assistant or full professors)… with the monotony of writing research grants, publishing and teaching. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis, or just the realization that there’s not much appreciation for teachers in general. #firstworldproblems? [url]
- The problems with academia are nothing new — graduate education has been called the “Detroit of higher learning” for a while now. Full-time professors probably shouldn’t complain too much around grad students and adjunct professors, though. [url]
- Tenured CS prof Terran Lane explains why he resigned from his position to go work at Google. “We’re being paid partly in cool. If you take away the cool parts of the job, you might as well go make more money elsewhere.” [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: academia, education, professors, teachers, tenure
Companies: google
Comments on “DailyDirt: How Do You Solve A Problem Like… Academia?”
Maybe those people should I dunno do what Khan Academy did.
Produce your own teaching material and sign up those that want it.
Just throwing ideas on the wall to see what sticks.
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some tenured professors don’t actually want to teach, they want to do research and teaching is just the part of their job that pays the bills….
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It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to teach; it’s that teaching’s not rewarded. This is particularly true at Tier 1 Research institutions. You’re teaching evaluations play very little role into whether or not you actually get tenure. You have to work on publishing and grants.
Subject of preofessors.
Business reality/School reality is the SAME..
You need 1 professor(boss) that earns the money and 20 people BELOW him/them to DO what the BOSS says.
It dont matter what occupation you are in, now days.
you need 1 person that knows it all, and it DONT MATTER what the others know, they just work CHEAPER then having 10-20 BOSS’s around.
All in all...
It’s just another brick in the wall.
Re: All in all...
Yep. And I don’t need no “education”/thought control/drugs to calm me.
From the third article
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Pretty sad, but it’s nothing new. It’s the reason I don’t give a fuck about the usual methods of education, I have learned 10x more in .01 the time just surfing the internets.
As you probably suspected, I never did good in school, I was always singled out as an idiot and a psycho for doing/thinking differently.
The irony is that I was probably the one of the smartest people there but people tend to judge “intelligence” by how much useless parrot knowledge you can remember and how well you can cling to the doctrine.
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I know what you mean, it was the same with me… When I was in elementary school the teachers said I shouldn’t go to a school with classical education cause they thought I wasn’t smart enough. I’m now about to get my master’s degree in Biology, probably the only person from my year to do so. Elementary school teachers are themselves generally too stupid to recognize intelligent kids. Even more so if those kids have some sort of learning disability (autism and dyslexia run in our family, but we didn’t find out about this until my younger brother got tested).