"One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as 'slave labour.' Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. 'It isn't graduate school itself that is discouraging,' says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. 'What's discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.'"
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Several good points. I have an MA, but it was mostly out of curiosity
for a specific field rather than wanting to go into a teaching career.
The MS I would have followed up with would have aligned with my long
term goals, but I got so disgusted and stressed with the academic
machine while I was there that I ultimately decided not to follow up.
Full professorships aren't that common, mostly you have low tier
associate and assistant professors, some with a coterie of grad
assistants (varies by university, I think other universities do, as this
article states, exploit the grad students a lot more, and I think some
departments were a lot worse than the one I was in at the university I
attended.
Tenure is both a boon and a bane. Students, particularly undergrads,
are as a whole, entitled, spoiled, and nasty. And they don't realize it,
they think that's the way things are. I'm not saying they're bad people,
they're just taught (by the general culture rather than the university
itself) that exploiting the system is the norm and practically required of
them if they want to get ahead. So, a lot of very good professors could
have their positions terminated if they piss off the wrong student.
Which drastically reduces the quality of teaching among those without
tenure. They have to balance out the university's profit game with
keeping their job, and that is a conflict of interest with actually doing
their job right. The flaws of having no job protection. You have to be a
doormat in order to gain tenure. And tenure is the best thing for the
good faculty.
Too bad it doesn't always or even the majority of the time work that
way anymore. Most professors play the game until they get tenure,
then cut corners in their teaching every way they can. Leaving a few
who truly care running around behind them with the proverbial pooper
scooper, working themselves to exhaustion, and basically going
through absolute hell. The ones going through hell are usually the
good ones, but they burn out so fast. I knew so many of the good ones
who, once they hit 50, were so burned out and in such bad health
trying to serve university and students and make up for all the crap
their colleagues pulled, that they had to take early retirement. Some
had life threatening stress related illness.
I watch that happening and think, no. I refuse to be like that.
I watch the status climbing (I do still work at a university), faculty just
practically religiously indoctrinated to feel like being Department Chair,
Dean, Administration, are the ultimate goals. And they backstab,
cheat, or simply choose to believe the paranoiac worst of people in
order to rationalize kicking the others down so they can go up. These
are people who are otherwise decent outside their jobs. And they each
and every one feel that it is either their entitled right OR their duty (and
sometimes they don't know the difference) to do what they're doing.
And hatred for people who were once good friends and colleagues is
bred.
I watched my advisor feel so obligated to the university that she
stressed herself out to the point of permanent damage, including one
incident where I'm pretty sure she came a lot closer to dying than she
would have been able to acknowledge to a student. I've seen a lot of
the good faculty with chronic illness, catch everything that's going
around even more than the students, and still persevere. One passed
out during a guest lecture--she had been ill before that, and was ill for
a while after...
These were the good people, the people I admired and liked, who really
tried to do the best for students and university. They deserved their
tenure and should have taken some advantage of the liberties it
offered, at least to look after their own health.
Then there were the backstabbers, the underminers. Funny, they never
got sick. They cut corners. Ignored students, misinformed and
misdirected them. But having tenure, and knowing what people to suck
up to, never any trouble for them.
I saw what was going on around me, and once you know the extremes
you know the general patterns to look for, and thus I can make a pretty
good guess that they weren't the exception to the norm, nor is the
university I work for now (as close to outside the politicking as I can
get). And I wanted nothing to do with it. Stuck with where I was, what I
had, and walked away.
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