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Ah, the Glamour of Academia...

By drorzel on April 8, 2006.

It's kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven't been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who's going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and I need to do a few this weekend to make sure that he's got a reasonable chance of getting results.

As you might imagine, this has me thinking all sorts of sunny thoughts about the academic life, so here are a couple of links in that vein:

1) The Dean Dad has some thoughts on generational divides in the academy. As with most sweeping generalizations about generations, I'm pretty skeptical, but there's some interesting stuff there.

2) Timothy Burke offers an excellent suggestions for administrative reform. (Here is the permalink to the Invincible Super-Blog entry he's referring to.)

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Fortunately, today I don't have to go into the lab. Basically, I'm staying home to work on a talk I have to give next week. I do, however, do some work related to my research seven days a week most of the year, whether it's in the lab, rounding on patients, writing grants or papers, or giving talks at home.

The next six weeks or so, I probably will hardly go in the lab on weekends at all, but that's because I have three grants and a grant progress report to finish by late May...

That post by Confessions of a Community College Dean is so on the money. If you follow his link to the IHE article, some of the comments are aweful such as

"Having a life" may be fine for humanities faculty. It would be dangerous for our country if that culture became the norm in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering faculties. In those fields we have to compete against a world where that culture does not exist. We cannot afford to fall behind. We are already in trouble, barely keeping up while working to the max.An "embedded professor".

This guy is nuts.

I have collaborated with French physicists and astronomers. Those people, at least, tend to take most or all of the month of August off.

Much of the rest of the world has lives, I think-- as much as more more than the "lazy young" scientists in America are asking for. That commenter is, indeed, nuts.

The sad thing is, though, that the *real* reason we have an ethic of working night-and-day and having no
life is not because of competition with the rest of the world-- it's because of internal competition. Job pressure is so huge that of *course* the people who sacrifice all else for their job are going to have an edge, and are going to be overrepresented in the few jobs that are availble.

-Rob