An economist whom I’ve never met pointed to my posts on robustness checks being a joke (here) and regression discontinuity (too many to list) and writes:
I agree with you that, unfortunately, the fact that an applied microeconometric paper is published in a famous journal does not make it correct. Alas, this lonely belief is not good for the mental or career health of an applied micro assistant professor in an economics department!
My reply: Regarding lonely beliefs, all I can tell you is that grad school can be very convivial and it can be socially isolating to be a professor (even in pre-coronavirus times). So the bit about feeling alone in your views may be attributed not so much to particulars of your department or even your field but rather to a more general social isolation. To put it another way, what is relevant is not just what percentage of your colleagues share a certain belief, so much as the absolute number of how many nearby people you can talk with.
He responded:
I think you’re right about being an assistant professor in general, but I also think there are so special challenges here. Part of what is hard is advising PhD students who will be navigating this situation. So, for example, maybe I’m in a department seminar with students and senior colleagues and a student is presenting a paper in progress. I might suggest that there are good reasons to be worried about the student’s empirical strategy. Then the student responds that it must be right because the same strategy was used by a recent paper in the AER or AEJ: Applied. The room accepts it as the right and appropriate response. Good enough, no problems here.
Could be. But I still think the biggest factor here is the loss of community that happens when you leave grad school. This is a big discontinuity, one might say!
As someone suffering greatly from “lonely beliefs”, I agree that the loss of open minded community after graduate school is difficult and sad. What puzzles me, however, is why it happens.
All these people in our departments were previously someone’s graduate school peers. Why have they changed?
I am similarly puzzled by NIH review panels. All these people making unrealistic demands (e.g., for immediate clinical impact) are the same colleagues who themselves struggle to convince other NIH panels that their work has value.
It’s like some sort of “Academic Stockholm Syndrome” afflicts people once they get their Ph.D.
Michael:
I can’t speak of this in general, but for me there were a few factors:
1. The number of grad students is more than the number of professors. So there are more possible interactions.
2. Grad students are roughly the same age with similar interests. The age range of faculty varies over decades. If you were just to restrict to profs of roughly the same age, then, again, there are very few to choose from.
3. In grad school you have other common experiences such as taking the same classes and working with the same faculty or research groups.
4. In grad school you have more free time and less responsibility, so more time to socialize and to just talk about ideas.
My experience was quite different. The history is complicated and this is a summary of sorts.
I worked for a few years before going back to graduate school. I was married and we lived several miles from campus. During most of graduate school, I had a part time job at that required about one-third of my time. I socialized little with other graduate students. As I recall, I had more social interactions in my jobs than in graduate school.
Bob76
I think it’s easier to play the game by your own principles when it’s just monopoly money in the pot. Once you’re out of school and you gotta pay your rent with a stable job, then it’s between a hopeless individual stance against the rest of the world and the seduction of citation factory paychecks. I think it’s less about individual merit and more about system organization. We are but cells in collective organisms, without wit or conscience, ignorant of all but a self-preserving will to power, yet many times larger and stronger than even the greatest of us.
I didn’t find being a junior faculty member isolating at all. I was working directly with several of my colleagues who recruited me because I was like minded. Overall, though, it’s odd how little inter-faculty collaboration there is in academia. I moved from a mid-level faculty position at Carnegie Mellon to Bell Labs and was amazed at what an open and collaborative environment it was in comparison. I had a similar experience in moving from Columbia (where I pretty much only talked to people in our group) to Flatiron (where everyone talks to everyone).
Andrew’s points are all real. CS is a younger field and I’ve always been OK hanging with older people, so (2) wasn’t such a big deal for me. Andrew’s point (4) reminds me of when our grad students would complain about how hard they have to work and look forward to the easy post-thesis life. Telling them academia just gets harder is a bit like telling a 4 year old there’s no Santa Claus. As a faculty member, I always hung out with the grad students. I still hang out with grad students and postdocs.
I think somebody’s response is also spot on. Or as Andrew likes to quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
P.S. Love the term “academic Stockholm syndrome”. It’s why we still donate all of our work to journals (or even pay them these days) and then have our universities buy the same journals back. From the outside, this just sounds ridiculous. But everyone’s so beholden to JASA, JRSS B, Nature, Science, etc., that they’ve basically delegated hiring decisions to the editors of those journals.
Academic Stockholm Syndrome – probably the perfect analogy! Review panels, manuscript reviews, seminars and conferences, – my strange transformation occurs when most of us go into those settings. As you imply, we are the problem. The good news is that we can also be the solution.
Let’s not over-complicate things. The academic world is one of the most competitive, unfriendly (except superficially), and selfish institutions we have. The games required for publication, promotion,and tenure bring out the worst in people. Add to that, teaching is a very lonely affairs – faced with a room full of people with varying motivations and you, the instructor, charged with entertaining, educating, and embarrassing yourself in front of them. Add to that the saying that academics is brutal because so little is at stake (backstabbing for petty reasons is far more common than in the business world, where backstabbing usually has a clear motive).
Of course, I generalize. Not true for all fields and all places. But I’ve spent a long time in academia, and occasional stints outside it, that I don’t think I am too far off. Unless, and until, the reward system is changed, I don’t think the loneliness of the academic will change. Let’s not overlook the elephant in the room – tenure track positions are now down to 20% of the total teaching positions. This is not the environment for collegiality and community, except the elitist cadre of the tenured part of the 20%.
Dale:
That’s funny that you say this. I don’t see academia as being competitive at all! My impression is that academics cooperate on projects. I agree that tenure can be difficult and nasty (I speak from personal experience, having been in a department where my colleagues worked hard to stop me from being promoted, by the simple expedient of lying about my research and then looking away when I pointed out to them that they were lying)—but I wouldn’t call it “backstabbing,” exactly, as these people never showed any respect for me before then!
The lonely part I agree with; I that has to do with the reasons given in my comment above. But I don’t think “competitive” is quite right. Everyone’s trying to do good work, but I don’t see students or young researchers as competing with each other; it’s more that each person is trying to do the best they can do.
How often do you celebrate when your colleagues receive stellar teaching evaluations? Or when your colleagues research receives accolades? And, if “you” do (which you may well), how many of your colleagues do you think this characterizes? I’m not sure “competition” is the best term, but I don’t think it is far off.
I’m afraid that education is not a team sport, though it should be, and we certainly pretend that it is.
Dale:
The team sport is mostly research rather than teaching. We work together to coordinate our teaching offerings, and sometimes we teach classes together, but otherwise we’re not so aware of what everyone’s doing. I think this relates to the more general problem of social isolation discussed elsewhere on this thread. I don’t see it as an issue of competition; it’s more that we’re each doing our own thing, sometimes sharing teaching materials but not much more than that.
Dale: I’ve found people to be the same everywhere. Most jobs where you’re trying to build something and sell it (like academic ideas, which are sold through publication) are competitive. If I start a restaurant, I’m competing with all the other similar restaurants in my region. If I start a software company, I have to compete with other startups and the Googles and Amazons of the world, who are merciless.
Academia varies by discipline. Computer science feels more cooperative than statistics, which feels more cooperative than biology (in my 30+ years of academic experience, only bio people refuse to tell me what they’re working on), but then bio (and physics) will organize into small labs locally and large groups of 1000s of researchers (CERN, the Human Genome project, etc.) nationally or globally.
Like Andrew, I find most academics are just rolling along pursuing their own agenda, maybe with a few like-minded souls. But then I find when I’m at a conference like Prob Prog, with all the probabilistic programming people, it’s more like we’re all on the same team.
Big physics and big bio looks different as they often put together teams numbering in the thousands (think the Human Genome project or CERN).
Dale –
> Add to that, teaching is a very lonely affairs – faced with a room full of people with varying motivations and you, the instructor, charged with entertaining, educating, and embarrassing yourself in front of them.
Early on in my career as a teacher (below the collect level), I once heard a teacher say that all teachers live in fear that someone’s going to find out what’s going on in their classroom and judge them negatively as a result. That always struck me as being quite true – it’s so difficult to have some clear system of metrics by which you can measure and prove achievement as a teacher (perhaps unlike business to some degree).
When I began teaching at undergraduate and graduate institutions I found that less and less to be the case. More and more I was able to appreciate the opportunity to be a part of students’ expanding agency and understanding of themselves
as learners – and to receive their appreciation for my role in their experiences, something that younger students hardly ever expressed.
That said, I was never on a tenure track. And despite high quality social engagement with my students, my social engagement with my academic colleagues was far more hit and miss.
But largely a result of being non-tenure track, I was almost entirely focused on my engagement with my students (most of whom were international, “non-traditional,” or older students) and didn’t have to focus much on acquiring credentials for activities outside of teaching, or focus as much as tenure-track faculty on playing politics with administrators or other academics) .
I guess what I”m wondering is whether the social-isolation of being a teacher is, to some extent, a function of whether one’s teaching is about the activity of teaching in itself, as opposed to whether it’s a necessary but less valued component of one’s professional responsibilities, and in the end not really valued much on the hierarchy of professional achievements. Similarly, if a professor is working with students who are less focused on the topic at hand, relative to their focus on leveraging their academics in their own career focus, I suspect if feels more isolating. IOW, when teaching and learning becomes more a focus on career paths, respectively, it feels more isolating.
…bellow the college level…
Saul?
Joshua says:
> I once heard a teacher say that all teachers live in fear that someone’s going to find out what’s going on in their classroom and judge them negatively as a result.
I didn’t feel that way at all. But then I’m totally fine saying “I don’t know” to a room full of people. I really like the performance experience of teaching. I would be very happy with a job that was largely based on teaching at the college level, but it’s hard to do that and teach advanced classes at a good institution.
Metrics are hard unless you’re a solo athlete. I was just happy that my students knew the material when I was done. That may have been partly in spite of me, but it got the job done. But then I mostly had graduate students in small groups in a focused Ph.D. program, so my experience isn’t typical of people teaching huge undergrad classes.
As far as my teaching being valued, I was told by my colleagues to spend less time on it because it wouldn’t matter to my tenure and promotion case.
What I did find isolating is that even teaching core graduate classes, only half the students at most ever care about a subject. It’s much more fun teaching one or three day Stan classes to a group who really wants to be there.
Bob wrote:
It’s much more fun teaching one or three day Stan classes to a group who really wants to be there.
I agree completely. I’ve done some teaching—electrical engineering/computer science, public policy—and I found the same thing.
Only once did I teach a required course. It was a different experience. The most of the students were unmotivated. It was a downer for me.
I’ve reflected on my own studies. I was a mediocre student as an undergraduate. I was a star as a graduate student. As a graduate student, I never had to take a course that I did not want to take. (I was also more mature—well, at least older—when I was in graduate school.) Maturity helped, but that was second to being interested in the material and wanting to master it. Well, on reflection, I do recall one graduate course that I had to take but that I did not want to take. But that was because I did not understand what it covered. It was (1) interesting, (2) taught me lessons that I still try to pass on, and (3) graded pass/fail.
Bob’s point—it’s much more satisfying to teach motivated and willing students—matches my experience.
Bob76
Two thoughts:
(1) Whenever I’ve been in an economics seminar, and speaker answers a question saying, “That’s the way everybody does it in the journals,” the room responds with heavy skepticism and perhaps even contempt, unless the speaker says it in a tone that indicates he knows it’s not a good answer but it’s all he’s got or that he’s doing it just to get a journal to accept it. Indeed, this can be a disconcerting experience for grad students or junior faculty, since they are much more inclined to respect published papers and less willing to buck orthodoxy (as, indeed, is right and proper at their age).
(2) One reason teaching can be demoralizing is that it is very hard to know how good a job you are doing. A second reason is that pretty much the only metric people ever use are student evaluations, which are taken very seriously by administrators and even by many of your colleagues. For someone who thinks student ratings are unreliable and knows that certain good teaching practices will hurt your ratings (e.g., hard grading, making students think out of the box, pushing down hard on students who treat other students badly, etc. ) , this can be demoralizing.