Things you don't say out loud in academia [9 open secrets]

In this video, I share with you the insider secrets and what you cannot say out loud in academia – but everyone knows

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▼ ▽ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – paper contributions
1:39 – university criticism
2:57 – job applications
4:38 – reproducibility
5:46 – Arseholes
6:37 – job prospects
8:11 – failure
9:21 – big names
10:44 – trendy applications
12:04 – wrapping up

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[SkorjOlafsen]

My father and a group of his peers invented a professor to cite on their papers. They'd invent fictional references for the fictional prof, cite him as an extra citation on non-controversial items, and then track how these cites spread throughout papers in the field (communications). Turns out it's rather common to blindly copy the cites from another paper without even checking that they exist. Saves a lot of time, I guess.

[logan]

My advisor let me in on the "can't fail students" aspect. He was flustered one day and I asked what was wrong. He said something along the lines of, "I have this student who just won't do their work, but I can't fail them because my boss has warned me that I fail too many students. I can't help it if the student literally will not submit work, yet it is somehow my fault.." I learned a valuable lesson that day.

And yes, the student passed the class.

[askittenlove]

Arts and humanities here. Here’s another unspoken truth: you really only need one semi interesting idea that you can reframe, paraphrase, rework slightly for the rest of your academic career

[mike]

I would add to this list:
1) The literature review or prior work sections of papers are mostly about stroking the ego and boosting citation counts for the people who are likely to peer-review your paper. They are more likely to accept your paper if they see some of their own being cited and praised. And if you miss a reviewer's main papers, they will often give you, as part of their review feedback, a list of papers you need to cite if you want your paper accepted.
2) Minor conferences (with none or only partial peer-review) are just a way to get your institution to pay for a holiday. They mostly tend to be located in places like the Caribbeans or southern Europe.
3) Given that the objective is to publish as many papers as possible, every chunk of research work (whatever it might consist of in your field, like a new algorithm, a new math derivation, a big experiment that was conducted, etc.) will be divided up in as many pieces as possible to milk it for as many individual papers as possible instead of producing a single much more substantial paper. When doing a lit review, you will often have to cobble together several very repetitive papers from the same authors to get a complete picture of what they actually did.
4) Maybe not applicable to all fields, but I suspect it applies to most. Nobody understands statistics. There are dozens of statistical tests that can be used to tell if some results are significant (i.e., not due to random chance or some extraneous factors), and each of them are based on very specific assumptions that no one really pays attention to. Most people just try out a bunch of them, arbitrarily, until they get one that says that their results are significant.

[OntologyofValue]

Great material, Andy! I would add to this list:
1. I hired you because you are docile and you will keep on writing papers using a method I developed 20 years ago,
2. You are a cheap labor who is only as valuable as his/her publication list,
3. The only purpose for us to go to a research conference is to dance, get drunk and forget about our jobs,
4. Our methodology has become obsolete but I only have five years left till retirement so let's keep on going.

[rlativ]

10. You typically get a job in academia based on networks, rather than pure merit of your work. Having an advisor who gets invited to give lots of talks to various places increases your chances a lot.

[clivemitchell]

I worked at a university in a non-academic role and was shocked to find that 40% of our medical research grants were skimmed by the university as "admin fees" because the university was primarily a profit-seeking business. I also came to the conclusion that papers were written primarily because papers had to be published (though occasionally a paper would turn up that was actually game-changing) and that journals accepted mediocre papers because they needed papers to publish.

[tenebrousjones]

As a student, I found that the fastest way to get a prof to shut you down is to say "I disagree, " and then provide reasoning.

[ericdodson]

#10: Never admit that a fairly large proportion of star-academicians can't teach their way out of a paper bag.

[anarchoraven]

Philosopher here, all of my papers are a 100% reproducible

[korereviews]

The one thing that was absolutely verboten in academia when I was there was saying/talking about needing money - at least around profs or tenured faculty. No matter how desperately poor we grad students/recent PhDs were, as we toiled away at our multiple adjunct jobs, it was understood that we were all supposed to act like money wasn't an issue or a priority to us, because we were so passionate and dedicated to our research. Pointing out how poor you were was also considered "gauche" and rude because it made the long-time tenured faculty around us feel uncomfortable. God forbid!!! When I taught adjunct in the US, the tenured profs in my department lived in fancy houses in the most expensive parts of town, while I could barely afford rent on my ghetto studio apartment. I remember going to dinner parties at their homes, where they'd talk about the new sailboat they just bought or renting a house in Tuscany for a year with the family. They could shamelessly flaunt their affluence in front of us, while we were supposed to just smile and pretend we weren't in a completely different social class than them. Disgusting.

[thomasthornton]

Another one to add: ‘Our method is just a sham to guarantee the answer we wanted already’
I studied a humanities subject at undergrad and I was quickly shocked and demoralised by how all the ‘methods’ we were taught were just fancy ways of justifying whatever biases the academic had to begin with and reduced the world to the simplest answers without ever really gaining any insight

[samsonsoturian]

When I started the PhD program the first thing I noticed was professors trying to sound smart TO ME. I started subbing a the local high school and I'm somehow this awesome high flying academic... And that's the day I realized no one in the world has any frickin clue what they're doing.

[martinAbC]

There's also the case in which you contribute to a work yet you don't get cited at all in the paper. It happened a couple of times with me as an undergrad. I didn't mind it that much, since I half expected to not be taken seriously as an undergrad. But it did make me lose faith in Academia, and I guess it's one of the reasons I didn't stay in it.

[steveunderwood]

When I was young people would leave academia and come to work with us in industry, saying academia was too political for them. Most of us found this odd, as doing well in industry can be very political too. However, as the years have gone by, looking at academia from the outside, I'm really seeing their point.

[polemeros]

I spent a long time in academia. I have 5 university degrees, a PhD included. To say that I am deeply unimpressed by both the institution and the personnel who inhabit it would be an understatement. I agree with WF Buckley's remark that he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. Now more than ever.

[Kaha-owxt]

A lot of these apply in not for profit jobs too. It's the clash of idealism with the reality of how people behave in competitive social structures. Thanks for saying the quiet parts out loud!

[kebman]

I studied Film Science at a college in Norway, when the department head came in to brief us on career opportunities. We were of course all very excited. Then he said this: "You might be surprised, but you can actually get jobs with this education! Yes!" he exclaimed. "Like for instance a cinema director!" Everyone burst out laughing. There are less cinema director jobs in Norway than there were people in that lecture hall. It was a fun session. I think most people who study Film Science know what they're getting themselves into. Let's be real, it's pretty niche. On to other hand, I got a job based on that education really fast afterwards, believe it or not! :)

[mrgoober]

I went into Classics because my parents had filled my head with old-fashioned ideas about what it meant to be erudite. About two years in, somebody (a graduate student instructor) finally told me that competition was very fierce for academic positions in the field. Their recommendation? Go into the legal profession. They use Latin words occasionally AND they actually make money.

[rbaron]

College does a remarkably bad job of job training, my major was chemistry with a minor in computer science. What I got from college were a lists of topics:

1) those that I enjoy learning about
2) those that I didn't enjoy learning about
3) those that came easily
4) those that didn't come easily
5) ways that I can approach learning different topics if I needed to.

Most importantly, I got methods to reason about data.

What I learned from being employed is what people would actually pay me to do. No one would pay me to do anything dealing with chemistry or chemical instrumentation, despite having worked on programming for 2 different raman spectrometers. It turns out they would pay me to program GUIs and databases that generally supported business applications, financial transactions and reporting.

As it happens, in doing my job I have to analyze and reason about data and often have to learn new topics. So I found my education to be very worthwhile, though just not directly applicable.