Comment by UniverseHacker
Comment by UniverseHacker 2 days ago
This seems like a biased angry rant rather than a legitimate criticism, coming from the perspective of being an academic PI running a research lab.
In what sense are an academics accomplishments not "real world achievements?" excepting cases of fraud, etc.
To get tenure you need to publish a lot of papers in good journals as the lead PI. Co-authorship means you were supervising people, e.g. effectively running a team doing novel research, even if you didn't do all of the work yourself.
You can't really publish papers in the "hard sciences" without actually doing valuable real world stuff. Running a life sciences wet lab for example means you are actually operating a biotech lab and doing real physical experiments, basically the same type of stuff one would do in industry. Computational labs nowadays are typically maintaining and releasing software along with their papers, and will often employ a team of professional software engineers (I do so in my lab). To do these experiments you need to win grant proposals which fund doing them, which means you are working on something deemed important by a well funded granting organization or agency, and you have a track record of delivering results when you've won grants in the past. For example, the NIH only funds research with clear human health implications, under priorities set by congress.
At my institution the majority of my colleagues have spun off multiple startups, and have a huge number of patents that are licensed by industry. They are in general making the same type of discoveries and research that industry is doing- but at an earlier stage, they can do things that won't pay off in VC timelines.
This response comes across as rather defensive and makes a number of assumptions that are not universal across all fields.
From my perspective, the author's basic thesis which is that a) there is a glut of PhDs b) getting tenure is political and c) publication quality is generally low is true. That doesn't mean that people who are successful in the system aren't smart or don't have meaningful real world successes. But my decade in higher ed through a postdoc made it very clear that even at top institutions, many, if not most, faculty are not doing work with significant real world implications.