Phil, you said 'Larry Summers was fired from his job as president of Harvard University partly for saying the following:'Larry was also involved in at least one serious scandal, involving paying $25 million of Harvard's money to prevent prosecution of one of his proteges, and lied to faculty about it.
-- Barry D, August 15, 2015
*The 'hazards' of the academic career trackYou say that a prof can be fired (denied tenure) at age 44 and then have to seek another job as a second-rate has-been, and you therefore recommend that he should have instead chosen a career in business rather than academia. But come now, people in business careers are fired all the time. And many people in business careers never get promoted to top management ranks. Another recommendation you proffer is that he should have become a physician, for which he would then now be a highly-paid specialist. However, I think it should be noted that nobody is guaranteed the medical specialty that they want. Indeed, every Match Day of every year, many medical students find that they were not matched into the specialty that they wanted, and therefore have to scramble into getting whatever they can (which usually means relatively low-paid internal medicine or family medicine). Regarding your other suggestion of the law, it should be said that most lawyers either can never garner associate jobs at a major law firm at all. For those that do, the vast majority will not make partner, and indeed, most of them won't even survive more than a few years in the brutal up-or-out system of a typical 'BIGLAW' firm. Most of them will also never be offered a faculty position at any decent law school. {Granted, they might obtain a faculty position at a low-ranked law school, but they pay far less than $200k). K-12 teaching is a high-stress experience due to its rigid schedules (you *must* show up on time every day for your classes: no flex-time is ever possible) and the fact that part of your job effectively involves being a babysitter for an entire class of kids. That is why the teaching profession suffers from a high rate of attrition during the first few years. Furthermore, let's be brutally honest, career advancement in a schoolteaching career doesn't seem to be a strong function of one's IQ or work ethic, but seems to have more to do with one's political skills. {And besides, what percentage of schoolteachers actually start their careers at age 22 anyway? Seems to me that most of them start their careers only after obtaining their MEd degree or other graduate teaching certification.}
The upshot is that you're comparing academics who weren't good enough to obtain tenure to somebody who actually was good enough to obtain a competitive medical residency, make partner at a major law firm, have a highly successful career in business, or can handle the constant stress of teaching K-12. That's a deeply unfair comparison. The truth is, if you're not good enough to get academic tenure, odds are, you probably weren't good enough to make partner at a major law firm either, get the medical specialty residency that you wanted, or have had a successful business career, and it's far from clear whether you would have been good enough to survive the first few years of K-12 teaching.
*General lack of a control group
Consider your quote: "The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children." However true that might be, it is also devoid of context unless you compare it to the plight of *regular* people. To quote Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Notice how Thoreau didn't say that the mass of *scientists* lead lives of quiet desperation, but rather that *all* men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Let's be perfectly honest: Most jobs are unpleasant. Most jobs have their problems. It's not clear a science career is any worse than most other careers.
[Edited for length by moderator]
-- Sam Ky, October 18, 2015
I think it should also be said that while Larry Summers lost the Harvard Presidency partially over his controversial 'women in science' comments (coupled with the Andrei Schleifer conflict of interest scandal and the Cornel West conflagration), he did not - indeed could not - lose his tenured professorship at Harvard just for those comments. University tenure confers the most powerful free speech protections of arguably any job in the country (the civil service perhaps being the only equivalent, which is why many members of the Westboro Baptist Church hold day jobs with the Kansas state government and therefore cannot be fired for their beliefs, however repugnant.} Contrast that with at-will employment in the private sector where you can be fired at anytime for anything you might say that the boss deems objectionable - and where the definition of 'objectionable' is whatever the boss wants it to be. If your support for the Boston Red Sox is objectionable to the boss because he is a NY Yankees fan, he can fire you.And that's why I must continue to fundamentally disagree with the central argument put forth here that "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States". What seems to be entirely neglected in this analysis is the value of achieving tenure, which essentially guarantees you a job for life as long as you continue to meet the bare minimum requirements: you continue to show up to the classes you're assigned to teach, you show up to the departmental administrative meetings, you don't sexually harass anybody, etc. And that bare minimum required is usually very bare indeed: departmental meetings at most occur a few times a month (often times far less than that), teaching is generally no more than 12-15 hours a week during a given term, and that's only during the terms that you teach. You get summers off. Perhaps the greatest advantage of all is that you can complete those minimum requirements *incompetently* and not be fired. For example, as long as you show up to teach your classes, you can teach them abysmally, putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into it, and still never be fired. Work quality no longer matters once you have tenure.
Now, to be fair, many (probably most) tenured professors continue to work diligently on their teaching and (especially) their research once they've achieved tenure. But that's their choice. They are under no obligation whatsoever to do so. If they choose to take what is effectively a permanent vacation with a lifetime annuity, nobody can stop them, and indeed, many tenured profs do exactly that. Again, contrast that with other careers where you can be fired if the quality of your work declines, which means that the maintenance of your career requires eternal vigilance. {Furthermore you might still be fired even if your work quality is high, and sometimes even *because* your work quality is high, as the boss may fear that you're so competent that you might replace him, so the safest thing for him to do to maintain his job is to fire you - a principle in organizational behavior known as 'negative selection'.} In contrast, tenure means never having to worry about the quality of your work.
Hence, far from being a poor career choice for women (or for men for that matter), science might actually be one of the *best* career choices for women, assuming that one obtains tenure. Like I said, as long as you show up to your required classes and meetings, you have perfect freedom to set your own schedule. You don't really have a boss with whom you have to check in every day. {You might have to meet with the department head or Dean every semester, but they're not really your 'boss' because they can't fire you.}
Granted, all of that is assuming that you actually obtain tenure. But much of the above analysis continues to apply even during the pre-tenure junior prof years. Rather than a lifetime job guarantee, you instead have 2-5 year employment contracts that guarantee your job for that time period (again, assuming that you follow the terms of the contract: you show up to your assigned classes and meetings, etc.} Most companies won't even give you a 2-5 *minute* guarantee: you can literally be fired the very same moment that you joined. Granted, if your work quality isn't high, then you will be denied tenure. But hey, at least you had job security for those pre-tenure years. You also enjoyed tremendous job flexibility for those years: if you're not teaching or having meetings on certain days and therefore decide that you would rather work from home, nobody can tell you otherwise.
Furthermore, if you determine early in the tenure-track process that you're unlikely to obtain tenure - most reputable schools will give you fair warning if you're clearly not going to make it, and may even advise you not to bother submitting a tenure packet - you still have the remainder of your contract with which to use as effectively an extended paid job search and career transition. Even if you do submit your tenure packet and are denied, almost any reputable school will then grant you a 'gap year' with which you can find another job while still being paid and have an office. How many private sector employers, upon terminating you, will still commit to paying you and allow you to use your office for another year afterwards? {Furthermore - assuming that you didn't outright disregard warnings that you won't pass review and therefore shouldn't bother submitting your packet, the fact that you made it to the tenure review process indicates that you are close to receiving tenure, so even if you don't make it, you almost certainly can obtain another faculty position at another university - or perhaps even at the same university in a non-tenure-track role.}
Besides, look at it this way. The overwhelming majority of newly hired associates in law firms, investment banks, consulting firms and the like will not make partner - indeed most won't last for more than a few years. The vast majority of newly minted US Army Second Lieutenants will not make it to even 1-star General, let alone 4-star General. All of them must pursue alternative careers with the 'stigma' that they 'failed' in their prior career. {Nor am I sure that it would really be a 'failure', but it seems to me that spending a few years as an Ibanking or consulting associate is prime training for a business career, and similarly, being a junior prof is prime training for a science career.} Many aspiring physicians will fail to match with residencies in the specialty that they most want, especially for highly paid specialties. Indeed, some won't even bother applying to their most desired specialty at all because they're doubtful of their chances of getting it and so they apply a minimax strategy by applying to one of their less desired choices to ensure that they match with *something* rather than risk having no match at all and thereby needing to scramble. Compared to those outcomes, it's not clear to me that failing tenure review is really all that much worse. At least the professor in question enjoyed a few years pursuing an intellectual topic that truly interested him while being paid to do it. Most people never get that opportunity.
-- Sam Ky, October 18, 2015