That is a very familiar description, I got my wife to read it and she nodded in agreement.
Reminds me of “the narcississm of minor differences”
Yes, nepotism and even racism abound in school districts because they are enclosed community systems. My first job was a long term temp job at a district that loved the work that I was doing. I was the only tech there with an A+ Certification, and I was promised that I would be hired full time. It never happened, and they eventually let me go telling me, “We’ve decided not to hire another tech.” Within 3 months, they hired TWO new techs who were Black male relatives of Board members.
Actually, we have an excellent superintendent and an excellent principal. The problem is their bosses, amateur parent School Boards. If your district is in an upscale community, you may be fortunate to have people on your Board people who are solid corporate managers and are qualified for leadership. In poor communities, you are more likely to have people who are not.
That is definitely true in my setting at least, and it really interferes with identifying inefficiency and outrigh errors because, heaven forbid, you don’t want to trigger anyone.
Authoritarianism is a lousy management style.
I worked in K-12 education for a decade and at the college level briefly, and I think there’s a lot to the Sayre’s Law idea. I’ve always paraphrased it as, “Everything is a big deal because the stakes are so low.”
In K-12 management is definitely a problem. ANYONE can become a manager simply by taking the courses to gain the certification. You don’t have to have any aptitude at all, and many people go this route simply because it leads to a higher salary. I was even urged to do so, despite the fact that I would have been a disastrous manager. There are certainly people in management who belong there, and I was grateful for them, but I felt they were fairly rare.
In their worst forms, often superintendents, they seem downright sociopathic. Everything is top down. I remember a few start of school year meetings where teachers were given new methodology for English, math or whatever. It was presented as utterly crucial. “We HAVE to teach this new way, no exceptions! Good god, I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this yet! Everyone on board, now!”
And it would last a year or two and then go away. That kind of thing was really disheartening. The superintendents would claim this was following the research, but there’s a different between doing that and jumping on the latest fad idea. All of that is terrible for morale. Besides being an abysmal way of managing people, it suggests there is no real profession. It’s all arbitrary. In my particular field I felt very well prepared, we had a philosophy and well thought-out methods and if they would have just supported me and let me teach it would have been fine. That just never seems to happen.
The lack of support is ruinous in multiple ways. Teachers don’t get supported philosophically, financially or culturally by the families of their students. So of course they’re going to get fatalistic.
When I changed industries I became a commercial pilot. When you get trained to fly bizjets you go to a modern, shiny facility with all the tools necessary, and you’re taught by expert instructors. The goals are clear, there’s very little ambiguity and it works really well. Every time I go I say to myself, “I wish public schools could be like this.”
Maybe some places, but I know of a department where, even if the old male professors don’t hit on women (as far as I know) they are sexist is more subtle ways, like wondering why women with children are still working. Then they wonder why all the women leave.
When I worked at Bell Labs, half of us had PhDs, and we managed to get along pretty well. And our PhDs were in engineering and computer science, so not the warm and cuddly type.
I bet professors with tenure and clout from having lots of money feel the place is a lot better than those fighting for tenure with little money.
BTW, I know someone who teaches MBAs, MBAs who come from local industry. In every class one of them cheats, which is dumb of them since if they flunk they get to pay for the class out of their own pocket. Most of them don’t see that they did anything wrong. I guess that explains the high standard of ethics in our MBA run culture.
I have been asked by my bosses to “help” two coworkers with take home exams in their Executive MBA programs. Two different bosses, two different companies, two different EMBA candidates. One of whom was a lawyer who administered the Code of Ethics. He’s now general counsel of a company you have probably ALL done business with regularly (assuming you are in the US). And the universities offering the EMBA programs are both in the top 20 globally in any ranking, one of them frequently #1.
For the record, I refused to do this when approached by the candidates, and again when approached by my bosses.
I’ve worked in private industry, in nonprofits, and in government institutions.
My all-time best boss was at a university, the head of a clinical research center in a teaching hospital. Meetings were organized; experts from various fields were called in; there was palpable mutual respect among everyone from physicians to researchers to nurses to accountants to adminstrative assistants; things hummed along like clockwork.
My all-time worst boss was at a nonprofit. She was real good at schmoozing donors, but sufficiently awful that, during the keynote address of a massive fundraiser, our board president talked about her “toxic personality” and described her as “insane–no–I’m not kidding!” and still I thought he was overestimating her skills as a boss. I quit that job when I overheard her talking shit about me to a coworker, in the course of blaming me for a mistake she’d made.
But the all-time worst decision I ever saw was when I worked for a multinational corporation. where I’d written comprehensive training materials for one department. My supervisor made me gut the training materials, because she worried that people from other departments would be able to take them back to their departments for use and not “pay” her department for the training.
I’ve spent the last 17 years in public schools, where I’ve seen all kinds of bosses. My colleagues and I generally get along like gangbusters, though: we collaborate, we commisserate, we plan together, we share resources, we inspire one another. Sure, there have been terrible bosses over this time period (one superintendent informed me that “Noah didn’t build the Ark by committee” to justify his dismissal of staff concerns); but there have also been good ones.
In short, my experience is nothing like the OP’s.
Are you claiming a career path to a Ph.D has no impact on the intellectual properties / property of the Ph.D? A dozen years spent with brilliant people, absorbing knowledge, observing points of view, thinking and arguing about myriad things besides your specialty.
A common joke about the truly expert is that they know everything about nothing, but that just ain’t so.
I’ll dissect this point-by point:
- A dozen years spent with brilliant people. While this depends hugely on specialism and location, 12 years is a long time to get from first year Bachelors to ‘Dr’. In the social sciences, you can do it in 7. Even so, are undergraduates constantly surrounded (and taught) by ‘brilliant people’? By what metric?Are these brilliant people those with Ph.Ds? If so there is a circular logic, here. And we all know that a huge amount of the teaching load in universities is undertaken by underpaid and untrained Ph.D students, or miscellaneous ‘Adjunct Professors’. An average student in an average university is never likely to be in the same room as a world-leading theorist or expert in anything, much less be directly taught by one.
- Absorbing knowledge. Absolutely the same thing could be said of any young person learning the skills of a trade - do apprentice plumbers absorb less knowledge per unit of time on average than students of Art History?
- Observing points of view. This is something that we all do all the time without thinking about it.
- Thinking and arguing about myriad things beside your specialty. As exhibit A, I give to you The Internet - and this message board as a case in point. Arguing about things you don’t know about isn’t a bragging point (I should know - I do it a lot, and I’m not proud of it).
I haven’t heard that joke. But my unsolicited opinion goes thusly:
If I want to know about the evolving styles of calligraphy in Wu-dynasty China, or the socio-historical factors leading up to the German embrace of the Nazi party in the early-20th-century, or the effect that stress-timed isochrony has on the breathing patterns of late-stage Portuguese adolescents - I would totally hit up a person with a Ph.D on that subject. In said instances, I would gladly bow and defer to their intellectual superiority. But in a general sense? Like, “You have a doctoral degree [in something]: you, therefore, must be superior and wise in every sense and must be kowtowed to unconditionally”?
No.
My wife is an elementary school teacher. Here are some things I’ve seen from her that are relevant to this thread:
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As someone mentioned in this thread, the kids generally don’t really want to be there, many of them anyway. They resent having to obey authority, they’d rather not do the work. That’s hugely different from any adult environment I’ve ever experienced.
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There’s conflict regarding who the teachers bosses are. Their purpose is to help the children, but the kids aren’t their bosses. The parents think they are the bosses, the principal is nominally the boss, but the true boss is the school board trustees. They are elected officials, and like all elected officials vary greatly in quality and effectiveness.
There’s much that is true and accurate in the OP’s analysis. But (and yes, OP acknowledged this), it’s terribly incomplete and generalizing.
I’ve just retired (February) from a 35-year+ career in education (in the humanities). I started as a high school teacher, then moved to a community college where I held almost the complete range of different ranks over 20 years–college assistant (tutor), lecturer, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and tenured full professor. Also deputy chair of a department, and a college-wide director-level position. I left there for another college in the same system, where I spent another 15 years in executive-level administrative positions, finally serving as the provost for seven years.
So I’ve definitely seen it all. Granted, I don’t have much experience outside of education to compare, and I’ve seen my share of toxicity. But I’ve also seen a level of commitment, of dedication to higher goals and purposes, than I think exist in most other work environments. The vast majority of my colleagues, throughout my career and at all levels, have cared first and foremost about the students. About what was best for them and what would help them learn and succeed.
Most of us decided, early on, to have a career based on service. To make the world a better place through our work, and most of us made that choice against great resistance, at great personal and financial cost, and despite the constant struggle to find the resources to keep our programs alive and our classes relevant and rigorous and challenging and rewarding.
Honestly I don’t think education is any more toxic than anywhere else, and often, I would argue, the dedication and motivation of the people who choose this path makes the workplaces less toxic than most others.
But then, I’ve always worked in a large public university system. I don’t really know the culture of small liberal arts colleges, or ivy league schools or technical schools very well.
It’s funny, but even though that’s often true, my own experience has been that administrators who have not been teachers are even worse. MUCH worse.
Having done both, and having had no formal training as an administrator (but lots as a teacher–which is also something that most college faculty never get), I think I can safely say that it’s really hard to be a good administrator. And it’s also really hard to be a good teacher. And they are different skillsets. But to be a good administrator at a college, if you haven’t got the experience of being real faculty, you’re going to be dead on arrival. You will make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons, consistently.
Just to be that kind of English professor…Tolstoy did not have Anna Karenina say that. Anna is a character and the novel is not written in her voice. Just nitpicking. Sorry! 
(and for a slight digression–if you liked Anna Karenina, don’t miss Carmen Boullosa’s wonderful The Book of Anna).
Anna Karenina isn’t English. 
Ouch! Caught me there.
Thank you Professor. Had my research been just a bit more thorough I’d have seen the line simply appears in the book’s opening, not spoken by anyone.
I’ve always heard the version of the joke that explains the difference between physicists and engineers. Physicists learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. Engineers learn less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.
A friend of mine decided not to pursue a PhD because he didn’t want to assume the awesome responsibility of knowing everything.
I assume that’s a joke, but in my experience people who have little education, and that not very good, think they know a lot more about everything than those with PhDs. Once you are an expert in something, and can see the depths that non-experts don’t see, it is easier for you to see what you don’t know about other areas.
Forget the dozen years, and we’re talking about PhD students here. Undergraduates can get connected with famous professors, but they have to work on it. PhD students go to seminars in the department where you see everyone, famous or not.
As for acquiring knowledge, all PhD students have to pass some sort of quals which tests them on knowledge in their field. This is done before you pick a research topic, so you have to know more than a narrow bunch of material. Then there is a literature survey, which requires you to know everything written about your topic (harder to do before the internet.) Plumbers are skilled in their area, and have knowledge about parts and techniques, but are unlikely to be able to tell you about the history of plumbing and who invented what kind of pipe. (My grandfather was a plumber, so I respect them.)
I submit, with some trepidation admittedly, that a qualified plumber has just as much acquired ‘knowledge’, however you might choose to define it, as someone with a newly-minted doctoral degree.
I myself was a doctoral student (my field was the sociology of education). To say I knew everything about educational theory before I was allowed to embark on my Ed.D would be a grotesque exaggeration - I had to do a rudimentary post-graduate course on research methodology and then away we went. Huge chunks of my (obligatory) background reading was thinly-veiled Marxist propaganda - I digested, and re-regurgitated, waffle about ‘struggle’, ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ being the aims of education while fundamentally disagreeing with the entire premise the whole time. Meanwhile, my peers in the trades were learning about how to fix boilers and re-wire fuse boards. To say that, somehow, I learnt more than them - or that I came out of it at the end as a more rounded and worldly person - would be comically and offensively wrong.
A colleague who teaches in business tells me there is more cheating there than any other unit at the university. Best part: the colleague teaches business ethics.
It is of course impossible to generalize across fields and universities and businesses…but…
One factor is business is inherently hierarchical. Heck, even the word “boss” comes from the Dutch word for “master.” There is no pretense of equality, and at some point, you do what you’re told or you’re out. Deference is built-in; it’s part of how it works. So hardly surprising people act “nice.” It’s go along or get out. With the stress and anxiety and frustration that causes but must be choked down in the workplace.
Not at university, where decisions are supposed to be collegial (not congenial!), that is, in an assumed culture of equality. Add to that the problems universities face and you have a climate of anxiety, burn-out, managerialism that cuts across collegial government, and now people become petty and angry. In business, it’s if you don’t like it, quit or be fired, but in academia, there is no reward for being a good soldier who obeys orders and little punishment for being a jerk.