Too cynical for academia?

[Cumberlandgap]

I think I’ve had it with academia. I’m in a particularly dysfunctional department so my view is skewed but I hate the competitiveness. I also hate how ‘delighted’ everyone always is ……Delighted to be presenting at x conference, delighted to be chosen for x

I also hate the continued monetisation of education. Everything is about bloody metrics because good metrics means more money…

We are under pressure to award ‘good grades’…Basically grade inflation.

I’ve had it I think. I came to HE 15 years ago thinking it was a fantastic place to be but it’s really not. I can’t play the ‘delighted’ game and I can’t award 2:1s to average students who would have scraped a third 20 years ago.

100%

Just looking at my Twitter and it's full of people saying how 'excited' or 'thrilled' they are about university work things and conferences. Sometimes I feel like I'm very dull to not find these things as amazing as they do, but then I remember it's all show for social media.

I think a lot of academic staff would struggle in jobs where it is easier to sack people. The levels of aggression and poor behaviour I see daily is astonishing. And every so often we get surveys asking us if we've seen bullying anywhere in the university, reply 'yes' and nothing happens. Why keep asking if they aren't willing to do anything about it

I think in academia there's this odd mixture of people being genuinely overworked/stress, and getting away with a lot of stuff that I don't think would fly in most workplaces. Personally, I think that the considerable freedom and autonomy we (still) enjoy is at the root of both.

DH is also in academia but they work a lot with external partners (and don't do any teaching) so the day-to-day resembles a consultancy rather than a typical university department. He's consistently flabbergasted at how in my place you can get away with deciding not to attend meetings simply because you don't like to, not replying to e-mails or completing tasks and let others scramble to do your work, dropping certain (boring) parts of the job because you're doing too much of the fun parts, etc.

I was recently at a careers event where two former industry members were at our table, and those of us with academic-only-background quizzed them about how things worked in industry. I was surprised to find that in industry you may also be leading a team of people that you don't have direct control over - one of the things I find hardest is that I'm meant to be telling big-wig Profs X and Y to do so-and-so and make deadlines and basically no leverage to get them to really listen to me. But the former industry academics said that in industry the people on the team all actually are committed to the project so it's not quite the same. I found that idea very attractive!

It is very different. On the whole I prefer the autonomy and flexibility of academia, but my academic colleagues definitely get away with far more than my colleagues in the financial services would have dreamt of.

Very interesting comments! I'm in HR and asked a Dean who I get on well with why academics all dislike each other so much and he said it's a lone wolf job, you stand on your own reputation in publishing etc.. therefore to be successful there's little need to be team players.

The amount of disputes generated that HR have to unravel far exceeds other sectors IME. Academics have basically never left school. It's a giant playground. And yes, the naive cynicism about business is funny, what do you think your students are paying for a degree for? They are not all off to work in a library.

not sure what you mean in that second paragraph, @Scyla ?

it s definitely not a lone job work. There is very little funding these days which does not call for an interdisciplinary team. However, most academics have strong opinions, and often sizeable egos.

I think she means that she finds academics' views of the private sector don't often tally with her own experience, which I'd agree with.

Many of my colleagues (business school) work alone. DH is a STEM academic and he does work with other people but still not in the way I would've done in the financial services. They don't do the sitting at a computer together to rattle through something thing. It's meeting once a week to talk about how each individual part of a wider project is going. A very different way of working.

I genuinely enjoy working in my current department/university, but perhaps I'm one of the people that everyone here regards as a sociopath...

It's not all roses, but there are more parts of the job I enjoy than ones I don't. The other month a German university paid me to travel to Berlin to give a seminar. Neither of my parents went to university and have only ever worked fairly low-level white collar jobs. Growing up I just never imagined I'd have a job where someone would pay for me to travel! I don't post about it on social media as I know how sick everyone is of 'delighted' posts, but I'm genuinely appreciative of some of the good parts of this career, the travel opportunities, the fact that I get paid to spend part of my time reading, writing, discussing - it's just a different world to the one in which I grew up.

Getting out of UK academia helped though. There is still the pressure to bring in funding, but I don't have to worry about whether my papers are 3 or 4, or whether my societal engagement is good enough to warrant an impact case study.

I suspect you are one of those members of staff who promote a “positive vibes only” culture within their department and are always “delighted to” do XYZ…

But you know what, some of those “black clouds” will never “jack it in” because otherwise there would be even less forces to stop you - or your corrosive cancel-culture - from turning more and more academic institutions into a whole new kind of grocery stores…!
🌧☁🌧