{"id":2568,"date":"2008-05-05T10:08:20","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T10:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/05\/on-the-bitterness-of-academics\/"},"modified":"2008-05-05T10:08:20","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T10:08:20","slug":"on-the-bitterness-of-academics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/05\/on-the-bitterness-of-academics\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Bitterness of Academics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jake Young points to<\/a> a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle<\/a> about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote<\/a> (link is a leap of faith– the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo.<\/p>\n

I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don’t like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is, I spent a lot of time noodling around doing other things while they chatted in the background. There’s just not that much value added by the video.<\/p>\n

More than that, though, I thought that McArdle, like most people who aren’t actually academics, has a seriously skewed view of life in academia. Drezner did a lot to drag her back in the direction of reality, but they still ended up some distance away from the academic universe I inhabit.<\/p>\n

The biggest annoyance, though, was a sort of ideological point. At one point, Drezner said that the biggest problem with graduate school was that it teaches people not to go for the money. They both agreed that it was a Bad Thing that people were arranging their lives and careers around things other than salary concerns.<\/p>\n

Really, this is one of the reasons I’m glad<\/strong> to be in academia– I don’t want to spend my time fretting about who gets paid more than who, or surrounded by people who are obsessed with money and maximizing their income. I like being around people who are motivated by different concerns and goals, and I think it’s not only not a Bad Thing, but a good thing for society as a whole to have a place for people who are motivated by concerns other than money.<\/p>\n

Of course, now I’m wondering where this puts me in the Watt-Evans taxonomy of class<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith– the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of… Continue reading On the Bitterness of Academics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}