… both academia and drug gangs are marked by an endless supply of foot soldiers willing to work in terrible conditions for a small chance at living the good life. In drug gangs, the average street-corner dealer makes $3-something an hour; given that he’s got a high chance of being arrested or shot, why doesn’t he switch to McDonalds instead where the pay’s twice as good and the environment’s a lot safer? The article suggests one reason is because drug gangs offer the chance of eventually becoming a drug kingpin who is drowning in money.
(I’d worry they’re exaggerating the importance of this factor compared to wanting to maintain street cred and McDonalds jobs being much more regimented both in the application process and performance, but they’re the ones who have talked to anthropologists embedded in drug gangs, not me.)
Academia has the same structure. TAs and grad students work in unpleasant conditions for much less than they could make in industry, because there’s always the chance they could become a tenured professor who gets to live the life of the mind and travel to conferences in far-off countries and get summer vacations off.
The article describes this structure as “dualization” – a field that separates neatly into a binary classification of winners and losers.
Scott Alexander, “Non-Dual Awareness”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-07-28.
March 24, 2017
QotD: Academia resembles a drug gang
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“because there’s always the chance they could become a tenured professor who gets to live the life of the mind and travel to conferences in far-off countries and get summer vacations off.”
The idea that tenured professors get summer vacations off is exaggerated. They get longer ones than most people, but if they have tenure it is because they have internalized a gruelling work ethic. Those who get tenure work ALL THE TIME, to the frustration of their spouses.
The benefit of this system is that professors have been able to decide what their work is and how they should approach it. This attracts the resentment of people who don’t get to do this (nearly everybody else) but professors should not be blamed for the authoritarianism that is so typical of other institutonal employers.
Comment by Steve Muhlberger — March 24, 2017 @ 14:03
Never having darkened the hallowed halls of academia, I certainly can’t speak from personal experience. Both Scott’s statement and yours can be reconciled if we agree that such privileged creatures _do_ actually exist, but that the majority of tenured folks don’t take that kind of advantage of their situation.
Comment by Nicholas — March 24, 2017 @ 14:43