After some thought I think I should retract that statement. Most academics don’t think their research is the most important thing in the world. But academics do think their research is important enough to devote one’s life to, and/or just fun and exciting enough to spend all his/her time doing. I think that’s a little different from taking oneself too seriously.
For what it’s worth, my research is in arguably one of the “hard” sciences, and I never had the illusion of my research changing the world. At best, it’ll “change the world” only in the sense that all basic research add to the pool human knowledge and help push it to the point of the next breakthrough. But I do find the work rewarding, and feel fortunate that I get paid at all to do this stuff.
Two things. First–and remember this if you forget everything else from this thread–your are not obligated to lead your life that pleases your professors. Professors are generally good people, sometimes great people. They are usually very smart, but they are not fonts of holy wisdom, and they may not understand why a student would have reservations about the academic life. I was in a situation like yours a couple years, and I never found any professor who really understood the issues I was having.
Second, I would suggest talking to some of your fellow students about this. Students in doctoral programs generally know that success depends on the approval of those higher in the heirarchy. This often leads to some kissing up, displaying more enthusiasm than they really feel. If you cornered some of the other students in private and had a talk about these question, you might find an unexpected amount of agreement.
Absolutely. This describes my life. (The case of chasing grants and publishing.)
If you’re on the tenure track, you’d better take your work seriously. Because if you don’t, no-one else will. And that means no-one will fund your work or publish your articles…
Part of every study is the problem statement or the justification of the study. I was trained to sell this part. Don’t underestimate the impact of this work; if anything, you should overestimate it. Part of the tenure-granting process is “how important is your work?” Do other academics cite and know your research, or are you generally pissing in the wind?
I think this is true regardless of your discipline or your institution type. It’s nice to be known or recognized outside of the school in which you work. Most folks who make a career of this want some recognition for the work they do.
I certainly don’t think the individual studies that I conduct are all that earth shattering, but I sure as hell think the questions that I ask (and attempt to answer) are important!
As ITR champion states, institutions have very strong cultures. The culture at my grad school was Tier 1/research. If you didn’t seek that as a goal you were somewhat deviant. However, the folks I know who have made a different choice - one of whom chose to be a principal in a school, even though he was doing research and even had major publications before he left school - are very happy. The doctorate should be liberating, not a straitjacket. You can do whatever it is you want to do… except do that thing, and then try to get back into academia. That’s seen as “dilettantism” and is the kiss of death.
Yeah, that pressure is there. On the bright side, you’re one step up from someone like me who got the PhD in the sciences and then chucked it all and went straight into the business world. Or a friend of mine who gasp became a stay at home mom.
My advisor was surprisingly okay with it when I finally told him, although he indicated acceptance by saying he never thought I was obsessed enough to be an academic anyway. Well, he was right. I remember a visiting prof who reported going into (his words) “a measurable clinical depression” when the animals he was studying weren’t doing what he expected them to do. All I could think was that I never wanted to be so obsessed with anything so esoteric as to destroy my mental health over it, and if that’s what it took to become a big name researcher in my field, I was glad to let someone else have at it.
Honestly, I became bored in grad school with all the focus on one narrow topic. I’m too much of a generalist, and my interests shift over time.
Teaching is an important job, and it prepares the next generation of people to go forth into the world and do all kinds of things. Although I left academia, I never stopped mentoring the people around me. Sometimes I miss doing research, but I find a lot of satisfaction in helping younger co-workers grow in their careers. So go where you are drawn to go, and try not to worry about stepping outside of the inner circle. Yeah, sometimes I’m a little wistful at ending up an outsider, but I do feel that things worked out okay for me.
May I add a wrinkle? I know I made some sweeping generalizations in the original post, so let me be more precise. I see that there are, broadly, two “planes” or “realms” that academics can live in. The first is the idealist realm, where the academic sees himself/herself as a discoverer of knowledge and that, no matter how arcane, it is vital to the edification of humankind that such knowledge be found. I agree that knowledge is wonderful for its own sake, but I also think this view leads to much of the pompousness and haughtiness that see.
The second realm is the practical. I have a friend who is an accounting doctoral student who once told me that his department seems to view academic life as more of a means to an end. He said the attitude is, “Hey, we’re not curing cancer here. Most of what we do is BS. But it leads to a great job with nice vacations!” My friend has a clear career path in mind. finish dissertation, publish enough to get tenure, and then enjoy a career that gives him long summer and winter breaks, and flexible hours.
For a couple of years, my academic career pretty much consisted of doing research on the site of (photos of, articles about, history of, etc) the central image in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, that of a gigantic garbage dump in central Queens. I tracked down aerial photos, memoirs, dredging plans for the “foul little River” that Fitzgerald mentions in that chapter. I made a half-hour documentary film about the vanished garbage heap.
And I loved bragging to other academics how I was probably the world’s foremost expert on the most famous pile of garbage in all of literature. I was the King of the Heap, and other academics would write to me, asking if they might know of my most current research into this pile of crap. I still get a few letters a year.
Do you suppose I took myself very seriously? I got a terrific laugh out of spending seven years in grad school, and then seven more years earning my tenure and promotions, just to achieve renown for my insight into eleven acres of waste. I was both proud of what I’d found out, and proud of what I had written about it, and colossally aware of how silly it was. I think there are other academics like me–it would be a sad world if we lacked perspective about our accomplishments.
To a large extent, there’s also a certain amount of competition within academic departments for resource allocations, course loads, schedules, and so forth. The more a faculty member can make his own research seem important to the department chair, the more likely it is that his pet courses will survive, and the more likely it is that he’ll get the stuff he asks for. In fact, at my alma mater, the smallest emphasis within the department has garnered a disproportionate share of the department’s finite resources, even as other areas basically go begging.
It sounds like you are the type of academic I wish I saw more of!
Here’s yet another thought: Maybe I feel a bit embarrassed to be in a college whose faculty make make far more than their counterparts in arts and sciences. We’re talking up to 3 times more, for the same years of experience. The argument is that colleges of business must pay more to attract and retain faculty who could make more in industry. But I don’t really see how business research has made a single bit of practical difference to anyone’s lives. Yet they are paid more than professors whose research does impact lives. Among the famous academics out there, how many professors of business would be named? I’ll bet it’s much easier to name a famous researcher in the sciences or psychology. These are individuals who actually deserve to be rewarded for their work because it helps more than a handful of other academics.
This is not unique to research and teaching though. It seems that often the jobs that most impact peoples lives are not paid as well as the jobs that don’t. Doctors make good money, but they are paid far less than CEO’s. Grade school teachers, policemen, firemen, librarians, all these people will likely impact a youngsters life, yet all their salaries combined isn’t as much as an actor or athlete who has little impact.
You have made several good comments in this thread, but unfortunately you have dropped the ball here. I encourage you to learn a little more about business and business research in general. While business research seldom produces headline-grabbing discoveries, it has contributed to substantial improvements in many people’s lives (probably including yours).
For example, the work of W. Edwards Deming transformed manufacturing techniques, making products of better quality available at cheaper prices. Similarly, the work of Markowitz, Litner and Sharpe in the area known as Modern Portfolio Theory transformed investment techniques, allowing individuals to achieve higher returns with less risk. Grandma’s investments giving her an extra $100 a month in retirement doesn’t capture headlines, but it does improve her life.
Yes, you are correct. I did forget to mention Deming and his numerous accomplishments. He was a professor in a college of business up until his death in 1993, and lots of people outside of academia have heard of him. So I admit that I exaggerated in the previous post. Still, the list seems a little short for a college that boasts six figure salaries.
Eh…maybe it’s all confirmation bias on my part anyway. I think I’m a little too emotionally invested in the situation to be objective at this point. But thanks to everyone who took the time to give me some perspective.
I’m about to earn my Master’s degree in English, and I can tell you it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. Important from the standpoint that I’ve poured three years into this research, learning how to “close read,” learning how to write academically and in a scholarly manner.
Pursuit of higher learning, whether in the arts or the sciences, is the most noble thing a scholar can do. I know lesser humans are more involved in meeting the daily needs of keeping body and soul together; I, however, am consumed with proving that Aristotle’s principles of ethos, logos and pathos are present in today’s newspaper editorials. Balancing my checkbook is, yeah, kinda’ important, but proving that a discourse community exists among newspaper editors … well, THAT’S what I live for.
This is because of the risk involved in pursuing professions that might be high-paying and might yield no results. The careers you cite as paying less are the ones with clearly-defined paths. You complete a set of educational requirements and you get a job, knowing what you’ll make as a result. If you want to be an actor, athlete, or CEO, you have to accept that your efforts might lead nowhere, and more importantly, you have to be willing to claw your way to the top of the heap.
As far as the earnings disparity between arts/sciences professors and business professors, I assume it’s because people who want to spend their lives learning about the former are a dime a dozen compared to the latter. Think about people who major in history as undergrads versus marketing, and what their motivations are. You can attract well-educated humanities profs to $50k/year positions because there are enough of them who really love what they do to fill the positions. Very few people go into business purely because they find it intellectually stimulating.
“It’s important to them” isn’t a pat answer. If it wasn’t important to them then they probably wouldn’t be doing the research in the first place. If we’re talking about disciplines like history, anthropology, sociology, etc., the people who do that research believe they might provide some insight into the human condition. As cheesy as this might sound I think the human soul is a pretty important topic. I haven’t really come across many academics who literally think their research is going to change the world. A few of them might hope their work has some influence in their field though.
I’m calling myself on this. Poor choice of words, sorry. But I want to get across the idea that I cannot live a life devoted to survival, and no one should have to. On the other hand, a life devoted to the acquisition of material wealth is a life wasted because it contributes nothing to the betterment of humankind.
Why are you apparently so determined to make academics into a bunch of cardboard cutouts?
There’s a massive excluded middle between the two ridiculous caricatures you outline here. Most academics believe that the work they do is important, while also recognizing that not everyone shares their interests, and that the knowledge and understanding they impart through their research and teaching is often narrowly-focused and specialized. And they are also able to appreciate that the pursuit of knowledge is a good thing without getting all pompous and haughty about it.
Most also realize that they are, in many ways, very lucky in terms of their job requirements. While the tenure track can be a very stressful place, even non-tenured academics generally have considerable control over their hours of work, and the types of subjects they research and teach. Of course, this flexibility comes at the expense of salary; how many other careers do you know that require basically straight-A’s in college, 5-10 years of graduate work leading to a PhD, and reward the successful ones with a starting salary of about $50,000 a year, and a realistic career-high income of about $100-120,000?
You seem to have trouble making a distinction between “take themselves seriously” and “take their work seriously.” I know plenty of people, in all sorts of fields, who take their work very seriously, and yet don’t themselves especially seriously at all.
Maybe the reason I have identified this ridiculous dichotomy because that is all I ever see. I’ve spent a good deal of time with other PhD students and professors outside of school, and all they seem to want to do is talk shop. Maybe its mostly due to insecurity, but it happens nonetheless. So, while you correctly note that there is a difference between taking one’s work and oneself seriously, I would venture to say that many of the academics I interact with would say that they are their work (in fact, a very prolific MIS professor gave an invited talk at my university about a year ago and said that she is proud live and breathe her research).
Edit: And I have already noted in one of my recent posts that I am speaking mostly out of frustration and emotion here and am not making the assertion that I’ve done extensive research on the motivations of academics.
“Eh…maybe it’s all confirmation bias on my part anyway. I think I’m a little too emotionally invested in the situation to be objective at this point. But thanks to everyone who took the time to give me some perspective.”
Edit: And I have already noted that there is probably some confirmation bias going on here. I mentioned in a previous post that I am speaking out of frustration, and not claiming that I’ve done any research on the motivations and attitudes of academics.