The Problem with Academia: Part I

A lot of my friends in academia recognize that I'm not a typical academic in a lot of ways. One of the biggest ways I am atypical is that I don't really like the way the academic game is played. This will be the first of probably several posts "exposing" (or complaining about) aspects of academia.

The first round of complaints deals with publishing, or how you get rewarded in academia. In the real world, you can get published if there are enough people interested in what you have to say. In the academic world, that is largely irrelevant. To get published in academia, you have to say something that no one has said before.

This may not be a bad idea in the hard sciences, where it is all about discovery. Even in the social sciences, if you get new data you can often say something new. It causes some difficulties in other disciplines, though. If I am researching political theory, I am expected to come up with something that hasn't been said in the last 2500 years of political theory. This leaves me with two broad options: either I can say something so specific that no one really cares (but, hey, it's at least "new") or I can something utterly ridiculous (but new). That is how you get published in academia.

Even this wouldn't be so bad, except that in order to advance in academia, you have to publish. If you don't have a certain amount of publications in your first 7 years as a professor, you lose your job. So, in order to keep my job, I have to come up with either ridiculous things or things that no one cares about.

Granted, occasionally there are authentically good new ideas that come out of this process. Those individuals deserve to be the academic rock stars. I may be able to come up with one of those things myself, but it is doubtful. Instead, I must publish something no one cares about, or come out with something that is ridiculous that I don't actually believe (but try unsuccessfully to defend). That is my chosen career.

What's sad is that this ridiculous process is widely recognized as being ridiculous among academics. We joke about it in private conversations at conferences. And yet the ridiculousness is so enshrined that we can only mock it behind its back. Reform is just a dream.