The dream of academia
(First published March 3, 2014.)
To anyone thinking of being an academic, I highly recommend it. The flexible hours, the long holidays, the international conferences, not having to wear a suit: yes, being an academic is fantastic. Becoming an academic, however, is a nightmare. That's the whole point. How could we academics feel so privileged and superior if anyone could do it? In fact, we go much further than that. We get a truly wild giddy joy from the knowledge that practically no-one can do it. How do we know that? We repeat over and over the experiment of convincing smart, creative, ambitious, hard-working young people to begin a career in academia, and then watch them fail.
Is it cruel to encourage these hopeless dreams? Not at all. Having your infantile dreams relentlessly beaten out of you is what growing up is all about. Plus, when you do finally face reality, there are plenty of perfectly fine normal jobs waiting for you. That's the difference between trying to become an academic and trying to become a movie star. Budding movie stars flock to Hollywood. They work until they drop, demean and degrade themselves, forgo any hint of a personal life, alienate their family and betray their friends, and do that for year after year after year, until finally they either give up entirely and become a gibbering loser back in their old home town; or they enter the porn industry. Academia is just like that, except that the loser bit is replaced by, “respectable well-paying job”, although sometimes still with the gibbering. The equivalent of the porn industry varies between disciplines; for failed physicists it's Finance.
Also: they are all given plenty of warning. Usually it comes just before that dire decision to begin a PhD.
I was warned early. When I was still at high school a chemistry teacher told me, “You don't want to do a PhD. You'll be 30 and still living in a dingy flat with mis-matching furniture.” But who would ever trust the career judgement of someone who became a schoolteacher?
Later, as I was completing my undergraduate physics degree, a professor called me into his office and gave me more anti-PhD and anti-academia warnings. With tears in his eyes he told me tales of idealistic and brilliant young scientists who were now many years into temporary postdoctoral research posts, with families to support and no permanent job on the horizon. I waved aside his objections and walked out of his office. If I'd stayed I'm sure he would have signed me up to go door-to-door raising money for the “Help the physicists” charity, aimed at supporting those impoverished physicists who had reached the very edge, who could barely hold on any longer and who were, quite honestly, on the verge of giving up and getting rich. He probably expected the standard response to be, “Damn, I've just given all my money to help the blind and cure cancer; I should have kept it for you!”
People tried to save me even after I moved to America to start my PhD. I was alerted to the dangers by a senior postdoc, who was reputed to be a true genius who had done incredible work in quantum gravity, but had been a postdoc for over a decade. He was holding out for the permanent job that his supervisor had promised to arrange for him, but unfortunately his supervisor's raving-lunatic act turned out to be more than an amusing affectation, and no job was forthcoming. He told me, “If you love physics and want to do a PhD just for the fun of it, that's fine, so long as you're sure you don't mind wasting five years of your life.” He clearly had no idea what he was talking about. I knew what I was doing. Not only was I being paid to live and travel in the United States, I was even given a high-speed internet connection during those blissful first years of Napster. I had my priorities clear.
Once the PhD is complete, there are no more warnings. If you don't quit then, everyone realises that you're beyond hope. Now it's just a waiting game. Will you successfully perform the mental contortions necessary to extricate yourself and at the same time believe that this was what you had planned all along, or will you just scream “Fuck it!” one day and remain twisted and scarred for the rest of your life? For the successful academics watching, this is the most tense and fascinating part. It's so rich in excessive human drama that I was tempted to write this entire blog in the guise of a frustrated and bitter ex-postdoc, venting his hilarious rage and railing against the evil machinations of the “system”. But that seemed a little hypocritical. I thought of all the ex-physicists out there who would read it and think, “Shit! We quit academia, and he's still stealing our material!”
Is success possible? Certainly. But only if you remain fantastically naive. It is essential that, at each step, you weigh your options as honestly and carefully as possible, and then choose the most irresponsible path. Your worst enemies are clear-sightedness, a level head, and a sense of perspective. Your friends are arrogance, blindness and immaturity. And don't underestimate the importance of good advice: you need something to rebel against. The darkest days will be when you've discovered that you have become obsessed, think of nothing but work, can barely sleep, you are jealous and spiteful of all of your colleagues, your wife has started taking painkillers along with the booze, your kids are in counselling, and you have become utterly convinced to the depths of your miserable soul that permanent jobs go only to those who are limitlessly unscrupulous, sycophantic, and, ultimately and most galling of all, lucky.
That's the final hurdle: the question, “If I do get a permanent job, how will I ever live with myself, thinking of those crowds of the more talented and more deserving, who didn't make it?” Fear not. The human capacity for self-delusion is unbounded. The moment you achieve academic nirvana, the full truth will be revealed to you. “Yes!” you'll cry. “The system really does work after all! How just and fair and good it is! Now, get away from me you snivelling losers!”
There may be nagging pangs of guilt, but they will soon be pushed aside by a whole new problem: the rewards of academia aren't quite living up to your exalted expectations. Yes, you can stroll into the office at whatever hour you wish, or even decide to “work at home” whenever you feel like it. But you can also stay up all night writing grant proposals, and work all weekend preparing classes, and in fact you'll have to if you want to keep doing any of that exciting research that you were so gung-ho about all those years ago. In fact, you'll have to work in the evenings and on weekends and forgo many of that generous number of holidays you've been given, even if you don't bother to try and get any research done. And meanwhile the “losers” who quit appear to be living in much bigger houses in much swankier suburbs, and instead of getting “free trips” to glamourous locations to attend conferences, they can afford to spend their own money to go to the same places to see tourist sites other than the local convention centre. The only perk you seem to be left with is that you don't have to wear a suit — at least not until you're put on an academic advisory panel, or a university committee, or... Ok, in the end, you probably get the suit as well.
At this point, we discover the true reason why all of that intellectual cannon fodder is necessary: to make us academics feel better. So long as there's a steady stream of suckers who we can ensure will always, deep down, bitterly regret that they can't be like us, we can live with the fact that they have otherwise much better lives.
Postscript
May 2024.
I re-published this unchanged from the original version. A few notes from a vantage point of ten years:
The key motivation was conflicting emotions. My path from naive undergraduate to faculty member had been long (half of my life) and far from easy, and although I emerged supposedly triumphant, there was no doubt my psychology was permanently misshapen from the experience. I was also haunted, if that’s not over-aggrandising, by the knowledge that lots of extremely good people had “quit” who I had no doubt were far more talented and worthy than me. I was uncomfortable with my fellow winners trying to reassure themselves, “If you look around, most of the good people did get jobs.” (I had not yet met the term “survivor bias”.) On the other hand, the people who “quit” usually did have jobs (outside academia), intellectually stimulating and highly paid, and the story we’d all told ourselves that scientific research was the only worthy vocation was obviously a lie, and the tortured woe-is-me self-pity was a bit misplaced. Nonetheless, after several years as a postdoc many people did work themselves into a serious fever of anguish, so we’re back at the top of this paragraph. How could I get across these contradictory impressions succinctly, and keep the full ambiguity, and also make it entertaining? You’ve read my attempt at a solution.
One immediate weakness was the tacit assumption that all academics are male and straight, e.g., the reference to suits, and “… your wife has started taking painkillers along with the booze…” After patting myself on the back for becoming conscious of my unconscious bias all on my own, after only seventeen self-congratulatory post-publication re-reads, I couldn’t think how to fix it. I wanted all academics, aspiring, recovering and otherwise, regardless of their biological or cultural history, to be able to identify with parts of what I wrote. (And be challenged by other parts.) I certainly didn’t want to alienate a sizeable chunk of readers two thirds of the way through. But I have no idea if that actually happened; see next point.
I am too embarrassed to bring up my non-academic writing with my fellow academics, so, surprising as it may seem, I have talked about this piece with almost none of them. As such, I have no idea if anyone was alienated, or pissed off, or otherwise perturbed by any part of it.
That said, plenty of people read it. It got mentioned on Peter Woit’s “Not even wrong” blog, and got several thousand hits. At the time I had not heard of his blog and was mystified why lots of traffic was coming via the Columbia math department. The only real complaint was from someone who assumed that the writer must be an aggrieved postdoc (despite a joke indicating otherwise), and was disgruntled to discover that I was in fact a tenured faculty member, i.e., the enemy.
One thing that’s clearly dated: finance is no longer the physicist’s equivalent of the porn industry, and hasn’t been for years. Now it’s so obviously AI and machine learning that it’s not even worthy of a joke. Not that that stops me.
Since COVID the universally accepted term is “work from home”. No-one would say “work at home”. I like this anachronistic reminder that, once again, academics got there first.
One correction. Since writing this, I have had the privilege to sit on a number of advisory panels and academic committees. I have not worn a suit.
Next week will be a rather belated counterpoint. If you’re an aspiring academic, tune in to get cheered up. If you’re a disgruntled ex-academic, you might want to stop here.
Hilarious!
Mark, I thoroughly enjoyed this. It certainly felt relevant to me.