Academia: A Handshake Culture?

Gone are the days where the choice of the correct tweed jacket was all you needed to signal membership in the fraternity of academic teaching, speaking, and publishing. However, it seems that for every student who overestimates the depth of insight and limitless pool of expertise that their professors have, there is at least one student whose contempt is palatable.

Perhaps this is best described by misunderstanding the portion of the job that is spent outside of the classroom. It is hardly surprising that when academics present the same paper at conferences year after year without making any progress the average student sees a very low bar. However, this should not really be the case in the modern university since people willing to take the job are numerous and the typical person able to qualify for tenure craves the attention that a new publication affords them. So where does this idea of intellectual laziness come from?

Perhaps the non-tenure track lecturers are responsible? The contempt for the system might be very real among these instructors who value teaching without research (if such a thing actually exists). Perhaps students simply haven't understood the complex reward mechanism associated with tenure. Perhaps the student's immaturity makes them look at the world as who you know and not what you know.

I certainly can relate to the idea that professors are parroting warmed over insights from a instructor's manual. The incentives are such that the less time you spend on prep the more time you have for research. So even very competent researchers would have an incentive to use the teaching materials available from the publisher. An interaction between this lack of prep and lack of pedagogical instruction for the research faculty can breed the type of contempt I see among students.

But this still leaves the idea that all research grants, publications, research appointments, and other gigs on campus come from some club which is anything but transparent. As a economist and big fan of the market mechanism for revealing information, this is perhaps a fault of a system that is protected from competitive forces. However, the longer I spend in academia, the more convinced I am that there is a meaningful division of labor. Some people do very detailed work and are bad at promoting (much less explaining) the significance to the wider public. Some are very good at expressing themselves, but find the underlying research element challenging. Some are highly mathematical, good at expressing themselves, but can't publish. Still more are very adept at understanding the politics of the university and add value as administrators. Others are very effective managers over research projects and create synergies from otherwise frustrated researchers.

All of these categories are needed, but each comes with a weakness. As a student it might be easy to look at this collection of weaknesses (taking attention away from the classroom) rather than at the collection of strengths. I wish the advantages of these different personalities were more clearly defended, perhaps in something like a price mechanism. Good teachers should be compensated according to the the value they create among the tuition paying students. This might be the biggest source of the critique for students. Good researchers should be rewarded in proportion to their ability to publish. People who are able to act as good managers and increase the productivity of their research team should also be compensated. There is no one model, nor should we ever pretend that there is.

For everyone who relies on a firm handshake to get things done in academia, there need to be several others that are nose-down researchers who can rely on these people to do their job consistently and without penalty. To be an academic with no sense of politics, we need some people to manage effectively. There also need to be good teachers who can communicate effectively. Rather than denying the division of labor, let us embrace it.