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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2613 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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not my professors as they are completely unwilling to talk about not academia

All of them??

I've definitely known many professors who reserve their highest respect for tenure-track professor jobs, but they'd all placed PhD students at government labs and in industry and been proud to do so. The long-term rate of academic PhDs creating new academic PhDs has to average to the population growth rate; this implies that either you're sending most of your grad students outside of academia deliberately or you're simply at the top of a pyramid scheme.

Even the ones who had zero intention of leaving academia themselves were proud of their networks outside academia. The obvious motive is that having former students and colleagues in industry gives you a constant source of blurbs to make research grant proposals sound more impressive; perhaps less obvious is that that increases their own BATNA when negotiating with their university or moving to another. One of my favorite Asimov quotes, about his conflicts as a chemistry prof and non-fiction writer versus his administration at BU:

In the course of my fight with the school, I couldn't help but notice that I became a pariah. [...] Once, however, a fellow faculty member, making sure we were unobserved, said to me, "Isaac, the faculty is proud of you for your courage in fighting the administration for academic freedom."

I said, "There's no courage involved in it. Don't you know my definition of academic freedom?"

"No. What's your definition of academic freedom?"

I said, "Independent income."

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