I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.
I happen to be very close with the dean of arts and science of a major state university. He told me that all of his professional goals given to him by the president and provost had to do with research impact, while 100% of the money he was allocated came from student tuition. The incentives are completely out of line and the students are the ones who pay the price.
I came across this awhile ago and thought it pretty incredible and interesting:
the tone is light-hearted overall, but really think about how foolish this insufficiently rigorous statement is!
> It hardly mattered if a professor of oriental languages could read Hebrew or Arabic, so long as he had adequate seniority, and a poetry professor who wanted a raise might well be handed an additional chair in mathematics.
this is a glib treatment of seniority
> As we’ll see, they mostly failed. The rights of traditional university faculties were protected by ancient laws (and ancient lawyers)
but some genuinely funny lines too!
> Promising young scholars had to burnish their resumes with useless publications long before anyone thought of asking them to do real research.
insightful
> before any kind of institutional academic specialization
it feels a bit unsettling to read so many detailed and insightful bits of this story but then get these sort of bombastic over-summary lines that sink credibility IMHO