[2012-Jan-17] Academician vs someone from anywhere else

[blah]

just a little fuck you, from someone that has been trying to be an academic, and despite working very hard over 6 years has continually failed and not published anything.

a lot of people get paid a lot more for a fuckload less work and have job stability to boot!


Only a little fuck you though, because I'm certain that doing what you do for a job is not easy either.

[idiotboy]

The votey makes it okay though, because he's intentionally trying to piss you off.

[Quarex]

Agreed with the minor angritude only. It probably still sounds pretty funny to non-academics, so that is cool. But yeah, as someone who just wants to be a professor for the teaching and community service part, not the "publishing meaningless articles no-one will read in journals only 200 people in the world care about, all as an arbitrary gauge of your usefulness to academia" part, it does make me sad.

[Durandal_1707]

Actually, the "Do your job" for a professor ought to be teaching the freaking class that their students are paying to take. Ironically, the pressure to publish often causes that part of things to fall by the wayside...

[tophernator]

I'm an academic.
I've been struggling to get good publications for 5 years now.
I still found this funny.

Seems to me there are several things which contribute when I'm applying for a new position.
1) CV/Interview. A test of my presentation skills and ability to appear confident in a crushingly stressful short-lived situation.
2) Personal recommendations and references. A test more of my relationships with my superiors than of my actual ability.
3) Publication record. A relatively standardised test of how relevant and successful my research over the last few years has been.

Publications may not be the perfect test of an academics worth but I think it's probably more accurate than the other criteria.

[Davy]

I am also an academic, just finishing up my PhD, and this is totally true. People say academia or real job. Academia is a real job. Publications are our output. They are just a lot sparser than the outputs of other professions. Depressingly sparse in fact!

[supertom]

We have the same thing in the practice of law. Its called "Bill enough hours or the partners eat your children"

[thelee]

is "academician" just a hokey way of saying "academic"?

also, as a grad student, "publish or perish" really means "do one of several conflicting parts of your job in addition to teaching, committee work, etc in the vague effort that one day you'll get rewarded with tenure or at least the hope of tenure, all to compensate for the fact that you have given up years of prime salary-earning years and earn less-than-private-sector wages for so long; also: adjunct-hell!" so yes, it is different from "real jobs" (which i also have had experience with). you have to seriously screw up, write ethnic slurs on your performance evaluation, or have the bad luck of being disposable during an economic downturn to escape a 35-40 hour comfortable job security in the real world.

still found it funny though.

[Alex the Too Old]

Actually, the "Do your job" for a professor ought to be teaching the freaking class that their students are paying to take. Ironically, the pressure to publish often causes that part of things to fall by the wayside...

This. This this this. How many students come out of universities these days having learned nothing but how to play up to their professors?

[Guest]

First of all, the joke's funny, stop crying about it.

Second of all: Not every academic's job is primarily teaching. I am a PhD student in molecular biology; we focus primarily on research. Personally, I want to be a professor at a teaching institution, but the general reaction I'm seeing here (that academic research is basically pedantic and useless and teaching classes is somehow more important) is unwarranted. Maybe in some fields, sure, a professor's research isn't doing a whole lot to make the world a better place. But that doesn't mean that all academics are wasting time and public money on frivolous projects, either.

Your education is important, sure, but is it more important than the research your professor is doing? Is handing down acquired knowledge more important than the acquisition of new knowledge? I don't really know how to judge, but there's definitely room in academia for both concerns.

[squiptryx@gmail.com]

This might be the first time I've ever disagreed with one of Zach's comics. Seriously, I've posted links to SMBC in my philosophy classes because they often clearly illustrate important philosophical points. But this one is depressing. I vehemently agree with those above who posted that a university professor's job is teaching. The "anyone-else" equivalent to publish-or-perish is "do something that isn't your job or get fired." (Which, of course, happens in virtually all occupations, so academics are not uniquely cursed after all.) Yes, research is important, but a mindless insistence by administrators that no-one be hired without publications leads to a corruption of the process. (See http://chronicle.com/article/Fast-Food- ... ip/130049/)

And, um, just to clarify my overall view, I think SMBC is absolutely brilliant.

[PapaSloth]

Agreed with the minor angritude only. It probably still sounds pretty funny to non-academics, so that is cool. But yeah, as someone who just wants to be a professor for the teaching and community service part, not the "publishing meaningless articles no-one will read in journals only 200 people in the world care about, all as an arbitrary gauge of your usefulness to academia" part, it does make me sad.

So go teach at community college if you care about teaching and community service but don't want to publish.

[Another Guest]

Second of all: Not every academic's job is primarily teaching. I am a PhD student in molecular biology; we focus primarily on research. Personally, I want to be a professor at a teaching institution, but the general reaction I'm seeing here (that academic research is basically pedantic and useless and teaching classes is somehow more important) is unwarranted. Maybe in some fields, sure, a professor's research isn't doing a whole lot to make the world a better place. But that doesn't mean that all academics are wasting time and public money on frivolous projects, either.

I agree with this. Some universities are geared towards teaching (usually undergraduates), whereas other universities have research as their main focus while teaching to try to "pay the bills" so to speak. Within every university, some areas are naturally more focused on research than others. In the department in which I am a graduate student, literally no one is expected to teach more than a half dozen lectures a year (nevermind actually teaching an entire class). My supervisor has zero teaching responsibilities and teaches two lectures a year in his topic area out of interest alone.

For these academics, publishing (research output) is their entire job and this comic suits them perfectly!

But yeah, as someone who just wants to be a professor for the teaching and community service part, not the "publishing meaningless articles no-one will read in journals only 200 people in the world care about, all as an arbitrary gauge of your usefulness to academia" part, it does make me sad.

I don't think that it's right to equate publishing with meaningless busywork that nobody cares about. Although there are certainly many journals out there in very niche fields with low readership, there are also many journals with very high impact that are followed by scientists worldwide as well as news-media and government bodies. Publishing is only as meaningless as the quality/importance of the research that's been put into it, and journal choice often reflects that.

[Tenure]

I think this is more relevant to those of us doing pretend-sciences (Philosophy, in my case). We live in this weird state where our research does have value, but it is not quite as... concrete as, say, scientific research. And so how do we justify our salaries? Is it through our teaching or our research? On the one hand, it seems to be the teaching, since that brings the money in, so we'd like to focus on that - that we are allowed time to research is a perk of the job but, for many of us, a secondary benefit (it's like being allowed to bring in our projects from home). But then, the insistence, for the sake of job security or advancement, is that we have a strong publication record. So, we would like to have more time to research - in fact, we would like more time anyway, since we love Philosophy so much, and want to read and write more about it!

So, we get caught in this weird bind. On the one hand, we'd like to devote more time to our teaching, since doing well at that is surely what our job really is. And yet, to devote time to the thing that makes our job possible is to pull resources away from what makes possible our personal employment in that job. So, do we *want* to be teaching or do we *want* to be researching. Well, really, we want to be doing both, but whenever we focus on one we are necessarily fundamentally violating the dictum of "do your job". So, I think that's why a bunch of us are pissed off at this comic.

Now, as someone said above, this is not unique to academia. We are not the only ones to have the quality of our work judged by metrics outside the quality of our work. But see, I'd have nothing wrong with "publish or perish" if I was actually given an even split between teaching and publishing time. But it's not like I'm being asked to do something else whilst I am in the office or "on the clock" so to speak. This rule means my job candidacy/performance being evaluated on what I have to do outside my working hours, since I don't have time to do this research in my working hours. That is the crucial, depressing difference.

[tophernator]

Just to weigh-in on the "is our primary job teaching or research" debate. This is not a complex philosophical question. It's a very straight forward question you should have asked when you applied for your position. I recently applied for a post-doc position at a university and the job advertisement showed clearly how the different career tracks were structured and which track this position was on.

If you don't know whether you're a researcher who does a little teaching or a lecturer who does some research on the side, stop the debating and ask you're superiors! They will have a solid answer for you, and if they don't tell them to get one!