“A fondness for collecting a salary and getting away with as little intellectual intercourse as possible is endemic to the academic world.” Not just the academic world, I think. Working is hard work. That’s why they call it work. On the other hand, I’m doing this for free.
This issue reminds me of a discussion that’s sometimes come up about a well-known listserv participant who is (a) very helpful, and (b) very rude. Or maybe I’m exaggerating a bit: this person is (a) often helpful, and (b) often rude. Anyway, I’ve always maintained that, rudeness aside, this person is altruistic, providing free statistical help to strangers. But it’s true that answering listserv questions isn’t intellectually taxing. Sort of like writing this blog, it’s work-like without usually quite being work.
P.S. I think the point is best made by keeping the listserv and its well-known participant anonymous.
Thanks for the link. I didn't realize Joel on Software (one of her side links) had such literary cachet.
Thought afterwards that I should have emphasized that I am not using "endemic" as a synonym for "universal" (not that I think you were taking it that way, but I still thought I should have emphasized it). Like everyone who has spent time in academia, I know lots of people who go to extraordinary lengths to educate their students AND produce original research AND share what they see as interesting in the field with a wider public. There are people at every level who put in vastly more work than they need to. The system, though, puts an awful lot of people in the position of necessarily being less knowledgeable about what they teach than they would like to be, spending less time on research than they would like to do… an adjunct at the bottom of the heap is likely to find him or herself teaching a terrifyingly wide range of subjects at short notice over the years, while someone at the top may find him or herself expected to spend a lot of time on grant applications and other fundraising exercises that could otherwise be spent either on their own research or on mentoring those they work with.
The structure of the system places them in roughly the position of a prostitute working in a brothel – which feels like an offensive thing to say, but the point is, it's offensive within a cultural context in which all sorts of assumptions about sexual and intellectual labour prevail. I expect a sociologist to do better than help himself to prevailing assumptions.
Oxford dons are in the unusual position of selecting the undergraduates to whom they will teach their subject. A college tutor used to get the entrance exams of the applicants for the subject to his/her college, and summon the interesting ones for interview; these days applicants are still normally interviewed by the tutor, and subjects with a high mathematical component still have some sort of exam devised by the university to show what people can do. Generally speaking, though, it's not seen as degrading to expect an academic to teach people he or she did not select. There's no social stigma attached to doing so. But it can be at least as alienating to have intellectual intercourse with people one finds intellectually unattractive as it is to have sexual intercourse with someone one finds sexually unattractive; the fact this is under the radar is really, I think, just a mark of the extent to which our society undervalues the life of the mind and attaches an obsessive interest to humans as sexual agents.
Many people choose their fields out of love and they then offer free help, write blogs, etc. because they want their vocation to remain in important ways their avocation.
Most people don't choose their work so the line, "Working hard or hardly working?" applies.
Helen: Good points.
Jonathan: Yes, but . . . once something is a job, I think there's nearly always the temptation to shirk, especially if the duties are not clearly defined. I love to teach, but I still dread showing up to class and I don't enjoy grading at all. I actively work to avoid grading papers. If I had to blog, I'd probably be avoiding that too.
very helpful and often rude but probably only occassionally on purpose
If I have guessed the right person ;-)
But Helen if I got your Oxford story right and you passed your exam without needing any tutorials your Tutor probably bragged about you to the other tutors.
From my non-participant observation of Oxford Dons through an SCR appointment without teaching responsibilities in one of the colleges, almost all were very hard working and almost all overextended and always on the lookout for students that weren't much work. I personally believe Oxford is better for students that can learn on the own.
But you [Helen] make some very good points about overextendedness and career pressures leading to suboptimal outcomes even for those that pay a high price upfront.
My current concern is how evidence for clinical treatments gets largely ruined by career pressures that lead to selective and less than fully accurate publication of results – publication bias, selective reporting bias, multiple publication of the same studies as different studies, publication of clerical errors as results due to lack of resources to verify and time pressures to meet publication requirements, etc. Unless you know this is not happening, none of the studies can be reliably interpreted. But it is sort of the same community that is trying to get this evidence by "heroic effects to do randomized trials on ill patients" that is then undoing the value of that work. And patients everywhere don't get the treatment they should and they pay for it afterwards.
Anyways, thanks for this thought provoking post
Keith