Area	university excellence

	academic professions gary e. davis	February 7, 2019

I have a lot to say about this, serving a literature on professional academia and my own experience in several departments, but my need to resist getting into an odyssey causes me to not say much now. Graduate students soon learn that the great calling gets submerged in realities of doing the job (especially doing the teaching that research professors have tired of, though the pretense is guild training for teaching; but who gives graduate students masterful guidance on teaching?). “Publish or perish” is quite real, inflating journals that may become as insular in their domain as does a journal’s peer-review specialists who support each others’ careers (being a kind of mutual admiration club). Academia is a business, not a guild estate—though the trappings of Oxbridge leisure may keep one sane amid too many committee meetings, silly work from lazy students (who cut class a lot and seldom make use of office hours), professional jealousies, and never enough research funding. And by the way, being a department chair is often an implicit punishment (in terms of administrative burden) that shrewd professors try to avoid by ennobling a position that they don’t want. (By happy coincidence, the chair of the Astronomy Dept. at Harvard today—Feb. 5—says much the same thing: “The worst thing that can happen to me [by rejection of his eccentric view] is I would be relieved of my administrative duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science,...”)

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Be fair. © 2019, gary e. davis