This past Monday, May 8, was a public holiday in Queensland, marking Labor Day. I don't know why we don't celebrate it on May 1, but that does not matter.
In honour of the event, I post two relevant resources. The first resource is a moving video by Sabine Hossenfelder, who has carved out a post-academic income as a populariser of physics. The video is funny and sad, describing her own experience in academia leading to "Death of a Dream".
Sabine has many poignant observations about the dysfunctionalities of physics in academia, from the personal to the intellectual.
I find it sad that people who leave academia because they could not find a permanent job see themselves as a "failure." First, most of the select few who get permanent jobs do so because they are at the right place at the right time, not because they are so much more brilliant and productive than others. Second, there is so much more to life than professional success. Finally, Sabine has been an incredible success. She has been able to popularise physics far beyond what has been achieved by others with big names and lots of resources. Furthermore, Sabine has made a significant contribution to the physics community by calling out hype and BS.
The second resource to mark Labor Day is an article,
In Australian Universities, There Is No Such Thing as a Secure Job, by Danny Wardle.
It puts a specific (alarming) incident in the broader context of the history of how and why the governance and management of Australian universities have been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism. This has been facilitated by the opportunism and vanity of mediocre academics who become "managers" with million-dollar salaries.
Here is the interview of Prof Jeffrey C Hall
ReplyDeletein Current Biology journal , reference : https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0960-9822(07)02369-X
"You sound especially grumpy about scientific luminaries: why?
I can't help feel that some of these ‘stars’ have not really earned their status. I wonder whether certain such anointees are ‘famous because they're famous.’ So what? Here's what: they receive massive amounts of support for their research, absorbing funds that might be better used by others. As an example, one would-be star boasted to me that he'd never send a paper from his lab to anywhere but Nature, Cell, or Science. These submissions always get a foot in the door, at least. And they are nearly always published in one of those magazines — where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it's not always so great.
Celebrity ‘PI's,’ who are no longer Professors, have too much in the way of lavished resources — by which I mean too much money to do good work! They can and do hire very large numbers of workers, but it is at-best difficult closely to interact with and properly to supervise these bloated numbers of personnel. Such Actual Investigators (AIs) cannot easily gain their boss's attention; and the latter is unable to provide the required close, ongoing scrutiny of their research. There is huge pressure on the overworked, anxious AI to bring something ‘great’ to the boss, who wants everything to go to a vanity journal. One outcome of these antics is that some bizarre stuff is salted throughout this overly conspicuous subset of the literature.
Jeffery Hall is an experimental biologist , who shared the NL in 2017 for the work on circadian rhythm with work on fruit flies.
His mention of hire large number of workers by celebrity PI is interesting since he says there will poor interaction and then in the end as he concludes bizarre stuff being generated.
The question is why not fund small groups and avoid " group think" ( large groups) leading to follow the scientist and not the science ( Analogy would be the " Pied piper of Hamelin)
Sabine also says the same thing in a different way and surely science and performing science requires self correction.
Yes , mention of BS by this blog , by Sabine and Jeffrey Hall is truly resonating
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