One of my favorite things about my new upstairs office is that, when I go to make a cup of tea in the new upstairs kitchen (assuming that the circuits haven't been tripped and the power is still flowing), there are stacks of recent issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education to read while I wait for the water to boil. Yesterday, however, I was horrified to find, on the front page of the Careers section, an article (published pseudonymously, of course) in which a faculty member wrote that she had given up on working with grad students and regretted having wasted her time mentoring them for the past twenty years because the majority of them were only using her to help them get through grad school.
This article angered me on a number of different levels. The first thing that bothered me, of course, was the content. Isn't helping students complete their education one of the major duties of faculty members? She complained that students seemed to be more interested in finishing their Ph.D.s than in promoting academic freedom and engaging in cutting-edge research, but the fact of the matter is that there is no academic freedom for grad students (their work must be approved by their committees or they don't get their degrees) and one can't do cutting-edge research until one is taught how to do research period.
Next, I began thinking about what this type of article says about academia in general as a profession. How many other trade journals publish such negative stories about their professions? The Chronicle regularly prints articles from and about disaffected academics. An article in the magazine section, for example, detailed the woes of professors who can't get by on their academic salaries. Not only is there a ready supply of such articles, but also a huge audience for them. Finally, I began to wonder how many other trade journals allow people to publish under false names, knowing that to use one's real name given the content of the article would be professional suicide. For a profession that supposedly values freedom and critical inquiry, I'm struck by the lack of honesty.
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