Things you don't say out loud in academia [9 open secrets] 

Great material, Andy! I would add to this list: 1. I hired you because you are docile and you will keep on writing papers using a method I developed 20 years ago, 2. You are a cheap labor who is only as valuable as his/her publication list, 3. The only purpose for us to go to a research conference is to dance, get drunk and forget about our jobs, 4. Our methodology has become obsolete but I only have five years left till retirement so let's keep on going.

My advisor let me in on the "can't fail students" aspect. He was flustered one day and I asked what was wrong. He said something along the lines of, "I have this student who just won't do their work, but I can't fail them because my boss has warned me that I fail too many students. I can't help it if the student literally will not submit work, yet it is somehow my fault.." I learned a valuable lesson that day. And yes, the student passed the class.

I would add to this list: 1) The literature review or prior work sections of papers are mostly about stroking the ego and boosting citation counts for the people who are likely to peer-review your paper. They are more likely to accept your paper if they see some of their own being cited and praised. And if you miss a reviewer's main papers, they will often give you, as part of their review feedback, a list of papers you need to cite if you want your paper accepted. 2) Minor conferences (with none or only partial peer-review) are just a way to get your institution to pay for a holiday. They mostly tend to be located in places like the Caribbeans or southern Europe. 3) Given that the objective is to publish as many papers as possible, every chunk of research work (whatever it might consist of in your field, like a new algorithm, a new math derivation, a big experiment that was conducted, etc.) will be divided up in as many pieces as possible to milk it for as many individual papers as possible instead of producing a single much more substantial paper. When doing a lit review, you will often have to cobble together several very repetitive papers from the same authors to get a complete picture of what they actually did. 4) Maybe not applicable to all fields, but I suspect it applies to most. Nobody understands statistics. There are dozens of statistical tests that can be used to tell if some results are significant (i.e., not due to random chance or some extraneous factors), and each of them are based on very specific assumptions that no one really pays attention to. Most people just try out a bunch of them, arbitrarily, until they get one that says that their results are significant.

Another one to add: ‘Our method is just a sham to guarantee the answer we wanted already’ I studied a humanities subject at undergrad and I was quickly shocked and demoralised by how all the ‘methods’ we were taught were just fancy ways of justifying whatever biases the academic had to begin with and reduced the world to the simplest answers without ever really gaining any insight

My father and a group of his peers invented a professor to cite on their papers. They'd invent fictional references for the fictional prof, cite him as an extra citation on non-controversial items, and then track how these cites spread throughout papers in the field (communications). Turns out it's rather common to blindly copy the cites from another paper without even checking that they exist. Saves a lot of time, I guess.

10. You typically get a job in academia based on networks, rather than pure merit of your work. Having an advisor who gets invited to give lots of talks to various places increases your chances a lot.

Arts and humanities here. Here’s another unspoken truth: you really only need one semi interesting idea that you can reframe, paraphrase, rework slightly for the rest of your academic career

I worked at a university in a non-academic role and was shocked to find that 40% of our medical research grants were skimmed by the university as "admin fees" because the university was primarily a profit-seeking business. I also came to the conclusion that papers were written primarily because papers had to be published (though occasionally a paper would turn up that was actually game-changing) and that journals accepted mediocre papers because they needed papers to publish.

Philosopher here, all of my papers are a 100% reproducible

#10: Never admit that a fairly large proportion of star-academicians can't teach their way out of a paper bag.

As a student, I found that the fastest way to get a prof to shut you down is to say "I disagree," and then provide reasoning.

A lot of these apply in not for profit jobs too. It's the clash of idealism with the reality of how people behave in competitive social structures. Thanks for saying the quiet parts out loud!

When I started the PhD program the first thing I noticed was professors trying to sound smart TO ME. I started subbing a the local high school and I'm somehow this awesome high flying academic... And that's the day I realized no one in the world has any frickin clue what they're doing.

There's also the case in which you contribute to a work yet you don't get cited at all in the paper. It happened a couple of times with me as an undergrad. I didn't mind it that much, since I half expected to not be taken seriously as an undergrad. But it did make me lose faith in Academia, and I guess it's one of the reasons I didn't stay in it.

I spent a long time in academia. I have 5 university degrees, a PhD included. To say that I am deeply unimpressed by both the institution and the personnel who inhabit it would be an understatement. I agree with WF Buckley's remark that he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. Now more than ever.

I went into Classics because my parents had filled my head with old-fashioned ideas about what it meant to be erudite. About two years in, somebody (a graduate student instructor) finally told me that competition was very fierce for academic positions in the field. Their recommendation? Go into the legal profession. They use Latin words occasionally AND they actually make money.

number 2 is why i cant get a job in academia. crazy that the institute that teaches / encourages 'critical thinking' doesn't want that pushed back on itself.

tbh on the advice about employability, our lecturer gave us this, but said realistically the likelihood of going into our desired field was low, so he encouraged everyone to have a one to one meeting with him before end of the first year to talk about electives and core modules that we would pick for year 2 and 3. He was open about this and gave solid advice on career progression, not just as a linear path but the side steps you can take, the professional qualifications 9and if any elective provided them at uni) etc

This is 100% spot on. One thing I would add is that these institutions are money making machines, but if you actually work there, they act like they are broke and there isn't any money to do anything.

When I was young people would leave academia and come to work with us in industry, saying academia was too political for them. Most of us found this odd, as doing well in industry can be very political too. However, as the years have gone by, looking at academia from the outside, I'm really seeing their point.

Great video! I'm reminded of this quote by Kissinger: “The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."

I studied Film Science at a college in Norway, when the department head came in to brief us on career opportunities. We were of course all very excited. Then he said this: "You might be surprised, but you can actually get jobs with this education! Yes!" he exclaimed. "Like for instance a cinema director!" Everyone burst out laughing. There are less cinema director jobs in Norway than there were people in that lecture hall. It was a fun session. I think most people who study Film Science know what they're getting themselves into. Let's be real, it's pretty niche. On to other hand, I got a job based on that education really fast afterwards, believe it or not! :)

I'm a tenured professor. The least I have done on a paper is to provide the main ideas and supervised it very closely. I do not intend to ever put my name on a paper where I've not done significant work. Unfortunately, you're right: even in theoretical physics, and even for "big names", professors do in fact appear on papers despite not contributing very much. Now, the question I often wonder about is: why do we senior academics then have the moral authority to ask students to turn in their own work?

The one thing that was absolutely verboten in academia when I was there was saying/talking about needing money - at least around profs or tenured faculty. No matter how desperately poor we grad students/recent PhDs were, as we toiled away at our multiple adjunct jobs, it was understood that we were all supposed to act like money wasn't an issue or a priority to us, because we were so passionate and dedicated to our research. Pointing out how poor you were was also considered "gauche" and rude because it made the long-time tenured faculty around us feel uncomfortable. God forbid!!! When I taught adjunct in the US, the tenured profs in my department lived in fancy houses in the most expensive parts of town, while I could barely afford rent on my ghetto studio apartment. I remember going to dinner parties at their homes, where they'd talk about the new sailboat they just bought or renting a house in Tuscany for a year with the family. They could shamelessly flaunt their affluence in front of us, while we were supposed to just smile and pretend we weren't in a completely different social class than them. Disgusting.

I felt pretty abandonned and let down by my university. I quickly realised how much of just a money machine it was, and realistically worthless the degree actual is. This has not helped that feeling, but this is great content actually saying something about these things rather than just riding it out.

On the "I wouldn't get my job if I applied for it today" front, when I was doing one of my campus visits for grad school, one of the professors said, "I wouldn't get into a program if I were applying for it today." He meant it as a compliment, but I know now I should have taken it as a warning. The elite overproduction is real. I'm glad there seems to be more information out there like this helping students go in with their eyes wide open. It's easy to tell yourself, "It's going to be different for me," but I know scholars ten times smarter and skilled than I am, and they're stuck in academic purgatory.

Here's another, "The only reason my research ideas became popular is that I refuse to work with graduate students unless they are enthusiastic about using and promoting my branded approach." It's not even a secret really. The research that becomes trendy has little to do with its quality, practical value, or genuine contribution to a field. The popularity of ideas is almost entirely due to the sheer number of graduate students a PhD advisor supervises over the course of a career. In contrast, a professor at a small college could publish stellar research for decades, but without PhD advisees to carry the torch, the research has very little chance of getting noticed or built upon. It's a very intellectually incestuous arena.

College does a remarkably bad job of job training, my major was chemistry with a minor in computer science. What I got from college were a lists of topics: 1) those that I enjoy learning about 2) those that I didn't enjoy learning about 3) those that came easily 4) those that didn't come easily 5) ways that I can approach learning different topics if I needed to. Most importantly, I got methods to reason about data. What I learned from being employed is what people would actually pay me to do. No one would pay me to do anything dealing with chemistry or chemical instrumentation, despite having worked on programming for 2 different raman spectrometers. It turns out they would pay me to program GUIs and databases that generally supported business applications, financial transactions and reporting. As it happens, in doing my job I have to analyze and reason about data and often have to learn new topics. So I found my education to be very worthwhile, though just not directly applicable.

i have been literally openly saying all those things. i am overly honest. luckily, my supervisors tolerate it and try to boost my confidence and make me own up to my "success". i am lucky. others would eat me alive.

Ha. This reminds me of my adventures with art university: 1. Everybody hates everybody else. There were groups of professors and applicants, that hated other groups. But they all fought together when the institution was at risk. If you spoke ill about the way things were done, you were an outcast. 2. Nobody said what is really important in job as an artist. And I musi say it's not your skills. The most important thing is who you know. Most important skill is the ability to kiss any high position as you can met and keep in touch. 3. Almost any art competition is won by a small selected few who are professors favorites. 4. Ability to talk bullshit is more important than manual abilities.

Seriously though i do wish that the part with "job opportunities" would be openly talked about. I was the first one to get into academia from my family, and i had the assumption that there would be a lot of good opportunities. The first semester we were even told which variety of jobs you could theoretically perform with said degree. But by the time i got my bachelors and started to consider working instead of getting my masters i was completely shook by the lack of positions and even MORE shocked by the income you would get. I have worked many partime job as a student, and it was really difficult to do so - i had to work during the night and attend courses at day. And most of those parttime jobs paid me more than fulltime jobs in my field. SAD. I probably would have gotten my degree anyway because of my love for the subject. But holy shit, i would have prefered to know the realistic outcome later on. My family were extremely mad and disappointed because they expected me to graduate and be able to provide for them. Meanwhile, i could barely provide for myself with the first jobs i gotten.

as someone who went all the way through university until I saw reason and applied for a position as technician, I wondered for years why ppl who mostly start out as decent, intelligent persons, would so fiercly defend an institution that is exploitative, breaking their back and soul, while being, well, as you told. My feeling: People sacrifice so much to get where they are, and when they are there, they have hardly any other reliable options left. So what develops is somewhere between sunken cost fallacy, Stockholm Syndrom and a religious cult. Their perception of self depends on the illusion staying intact.

Working in industry on AI. Most common work task is reimplementing research. The number one challenge in my early career was not knowing which organizations actually deliver real results with the papers. Now it has gotten fairly easier due to tracking sites like paperswithcode, but on new topics this is still an issue. I would say that around 80-95% of publications are junk, nothing authentically new or even improved, just boilerplate papers. Maybe around 50-75% on most respected journals is total garbage. And the real issue is that there are very limited amount of publications on actually challenging topics, because mainstream likes hyped research. Also maybe because of gambling, a chance to get within the (semi-)big names if you got luck on the paper and topic.

You earned my subscription. When I was going through my academic career, I always wanted to be a college professor. I loved the idea of getting to teach that sort of complex, high end content. What I slowly began realize as time passed, is that Academia has just as many flaws as other places and organization. However, the only difference seems to be that Academia puts a lot of effort into ensuring that they can never be held accountable for any of their mistakes. I had a Microbiology professor, and one day when we were talking in private I told him I wanted to be a college professor. The look and response he gave me, one of just sheer apathy and a look of almost pain in the guys eyes. He essentially told me in the nicest way possible that being a professor had it's ups and downs, After this video I now realize what he really wanted to tell me all along. I am a lot happier having used my degree as the credential tool it truly was to just create my own business, much happier now.

I got halfway through grad school before deciding that I would definitely be leaving it after I finished my doctoral degree. Every single thing you said in this video is true in my experience. So refreshing to see this level of honesty.

Once we invited a journal editor to a nice conference we organized, all expenses paid with good food and stuff. Then we submitted a paper to his journal. When the answer came back, he said 2 out of 3 reviews were negative, but he'd tossed the negative ones away and sent the paper again to 2 other reviewers. When we said we couldn't do what r2 was asking, the editor said to just ignore what we didn't like about his comments. Moral of the story: I scratch your back, you publish my paper.

I am not in academics. I will read academic papers with much, much more scrutiny with this insight. Now I understand why my academic boss regards a peer reviewed paper just as reliable as some forum post at some random web site.

As an Aspie, I always felt weird about name dropping. Thanks for clearing up that this is actually normal dishonesty for name exchanging.

I'm doing all the things the algorithm likes because I appreciate how you got straight into things.

My folks were both academics. Dad was a math. professor (period after math. because it is an abbreviation😂,) mom was a neuroscience researcher at a university med. school (PhD in pharmacology.) I watched your video to learn what you had to say…and, yes, I recognize everything you put forward here. Regarding “students as customers,” yes, indeed. I actually was aware of this (because of my parents) during my undergrad in the late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s. My second to last semester I did very little work, skipped class a lot. In the end, I had a solid D average. I received a letter from school telling me that I was kicked out for low grades. As it happened, I was getting ready to go on a semester abroad, which was an exchange program between my university and the college in Europe I was supposed to attend. Tuition, on my part, had already been paid. I also only needed 3 more credits to graduate, even with the poor showing that second to last semester, and had already been working in my field of study for 3 years, so I had loads of contacts and a line on an entry level professional position. I wrote a letter to the administration pointing out these things, that I had already paid for my last semester (which was 12 hours,) that I only needed 3 hours to graduate, and that I already had a job waiting for me which did not require a degree in anything to accept. I said that it would not benefit the university to kick me out, it would not hurt me at all, and even with my horrible showing the previous semester, I still would have an acceptable GPA to graduate. I left for my semester abroad as planned, without having heard from the administration. I told my friends who also went on the exchange about how,I had been “kicked out of school” for grades because I thought it was funny. They were all shocked and stressed about it. I explained to them that the university is a business and told them what I had written in my letter to the administration. They were astonished and dubious about whether they would decide in my favor because it did not follow the stated rules. I said I wasn’t worried. Those of us who were set to graduate together did so after completing our internships. I along with everyone else. We all laughed about it. They could not believe it worked out the way it did and asked me why I was so certain it would. I said, “both of my parents work in academia. That’s how I knew.”😂

Even in the early 80's my course, which most thought was likely to lead to a job in the field, the actual numbers were about 30%. Most graduate jobs, are nothing to do with the degree. Later on a Uni suggested I write up my job (some very technical but industry changing maths) for a PhD. Great I thought. "So, who will be your supervisor?". Me, "what's a supervisor?". It became clear very quickly that not only did I think I was the only person doing what I was doing, it seemed I actually was. No one could supervise, so, no PhD. So, since then I've gone with "well, the only reason I don't have a PhD is that the Uni couldn't find anyone who knew more about it than me" :-)

Never saying you couldn't be hired into your role today hit home for me as a web developer. I started web development in 1996. I had two years of college, a certificate in Novell Netware administration or something like that, and I was working with other people who had no related formal education. Because at the time there really wasn't any sort of thing at the time. At my last job as a web developer I was working alongside people with master's degrees and even a couple who had PhDs in some sort of computer science, data analysis or some other specific web technology or field. I was basically outclassed on paper by guys who constantly needed me to show them how to do some web publishing tasks like stripping variables or where to use and set constants or other things to avoid cross script injection or Dom manipulation things that pose security risks. Not to mention they needed me to show them command line, remote shell or scripted password hashing stuff all the time. My resume would be at the bottom of any pile if they went strictly on education certificates and credentials. But I can do just about any job involving web publishing or content management system dev or administration.

I enrolled in graduate school after several years working as a chemistry technician, with the intent of pursuing a PhD. As soon as I saw the workings of academia from the inside, I switched to a MS and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Several of these points are why I'm glad I was able to get through my masters degree really quickly. I got my bachelors degree from a university that didn't do research. All they focused on was education. When I moved on to my masters degree I got more exposure to how research is done at universities. I loved most of the people I was working with, but I hated the research environment. "Publish or perish" is a blight that has caused me to read all research with skepticism.

The physics uni profs at my uni had a workaround for the employment thing. They had a graph of every field they could get you in and how much they make. Then said you get that much because there are only 5 people employed there. In a room of like 1200 people, you can make your own estimates

I can be pretty sure my late father (PhD in Mathematics) never had his name on a paper he didn't contribute to. I can be that sure because when I looked him up, he had only 1 paper with his name followed by 3 full books through a major college book publisher. He was actually in high demand and had a tenured position because his work was quite influential (his specialty was Sheaf Theory within Algebraic Topology, and his book was literally named "Sheaf Theory") I think he might have known John Nash of Game Theory fame because he worked in the same place, knew someone who directly knew Nash, and had a handmade copy of one of Nash's board games.

Tell me about it -- it's even worse if you're a student; I was a graduate student at university that rhymes with Hohns Jopkins and a semester into my graduate degree I realized I made a big mistake as I tabulated the loans I took out and measured them against what kind of value I was getting from the coursework (I felt I was rehashing everything I had learned in my undergraduate studies, not any more intrinsically and even less pragmatically). When I tried seeking more engagement and support and failed, I was vocal about it and it didn't win me any friends with the faculty. Over a decade later (and still paying those loans) I still feel validated; while professionally successful, I feel like I received more support through my military background than anything I gained from my graduate degree. YMMV, but in my experience, these top tier graduate schools put so much money into their reputation and not enough into providing the opportunities or experiences that would make their scholars successful -- they are only successful because they attract the best and brightest by this reputation, but substantively, they are lacking.

Me too. The hardest part of my academic life was not just putting advisor's name next to mine on my papers but it was when I had to come up with ways to convince the advisor that the paper's original idea was actually coming from him (without him having done absolutely anything) so that he wouldn't gate the submission and/or my graduation. Sometimes I had to quietly undo his irrelevant edits to my papers in such a way that his ego is not hurt.

I wonder, is there any self-made scholar out there, who is so passionate about finding his answer, and does his research at home, without being attached to any university, and still be able to publish his paper in a recognised academic journal?

I grew up in a household with an academic parent (and went to innumerable department parties) so I have an inside scoop behind the curtain. One thing you can add to the list... professors can't dock a student's grade for poor writing or tell a student they write badly, no matter how atrocious their grammar and style are. When I was in high school, said parent was grading a stack of final papers and I grabbed a few that were already graded and started reading them. It was some of the worst writing I'd ever seen, and I wasn't even an adult yet. I turned to them and said "Your students can't write." and they replied, "I know."

this guy just dropping truth bombs.

Found this very interesting. I'm not an academic but when I was a student I had a lot of involvement in activism and working with more radical academics, the UCU (the main trade union for academics in the UK), and casualised hourly paid lecturers. A lot of these ring true in terms of the criticisms we had of academia, especially as it became increasingly marketised and as rankings based on publications led to the kind of status competition and gaming of the system you talk about. The 'don't criticise the university publicly' one really hits home and I think combines with the fact that academics tend to be on short term contracts and tenured positions are more competitive and less frequent. At my university short term contracts allowed a de facto purge of more politically active academics and union militants, especially in the English Literature department which used to be a hotbed of criticism of the marketisation of the university. One prominent tenured academic was suspended, for such transgressions as excessive sighing in meetings with management, but that led to a major backlash. After that they realised all they needed to do was clear out the more troublesome junior staff by quietly deciding not to renew their contracts. Also whenever we as students did activism which called into question the university's PR image of itself, you could tell it really upset them and often led to massive overreactions.

These are actually so telling about the academic system

Many sobering realizations--just one of many things I've gotten out of my Ph.D. But I don't regret it! Thanks for your super valuable content, Andy.

This is simply the most honest, most explosive presentation I have ever seen. It speaks out loud on (almost) every issue that has been screaming in my mind for decades, and which I have used many opportunities, including public fora to speak about. Fortunately, I work in a governmental university and it isn't too easy to throw me out for speaking my mind. However, I am not much liked, to put it mildly, and even my better disposed friends keep hoping that someday I will grow out of my ‘juvenile’ outspokenness. I consider that the intellectual vitality of a civilization is very critically dependent on its intellectual honesty, and essentially every one of the 9 points you discussed are instances where we compromise on this honesty either by actually lying or by remaining silent when we shouldn't be silent. As the subterfuge continues, the quality of our output - not necessarily accurately measured in any index such as the h-index - will degrade, is already degrading. It will happen all around, everyone will be complicit, and if ever there comes a time to blame the academic community for letting things slide to this, everyone will escape blame. At the same time, we would have become a less resilient, less flexible civilization. This is how nations and superpowers decline, this is how entire civilizations will decline if the intellectual vanguard, the academia, itself begins to falter, and does not even notice. A natural outcome of suppressing honest calling out. When I took this job, it was for the primary reason that an academic job is the only one where you get to keep your soul. It's no longer true now, though it's still perhaps better than the corporate world of today. Perhaps some of us who are able to see what is happening should join hands and shout louder about the dangers. This may lead to movement, even if the numbers are very small. I would be happy to join and contribute.

"Trendy applications" is an interesting term. I got a request from a journal once to reprint one of my conference proceedings papers - but they wanted the focus of their journal explicitly emphasized in my rewrite. This really did change the research just a bit - it was probably responsible for this becoming my most-cited paper to date.

Excellent work. 1 more thing I would like to add is the proliferation of shortcut papers like bibliometric reviews, meta-analysis and opinion papers (where 20 so authors put their pieces in a single article). I'm ashamed to say that many academics especially academics from South Asia who have reached editorial positions publish only this stuff and put names of less accomplished faculty for all types of favours. The travesty is that these 'academics' have 50k citations but no academic identity. While there are a lot of 'publications' coming out there's no real 'research.'

This sort of academic politics was a big factor in why I ended up leaving grad school for a change of career path. In a similar vein, I learned that you don't talk out loud about too many particulars of the project you're working on before publication. Especially not around people from other departments whose labs work on similar topics. Collaboration with others outside your own lab is essential to bring in the right set of skills and expertise, but that needs to be kept to a very tight circle of trusted colleagues, preferably colleagues who are relatively disinterested in your topic of research beyond the specific technical aspect they're helping you with. One might naively suppose that two labs working in similar areas of study could have a lot of insights and perspectives to share that would mutually advance their understanding of the matters they're studying if they were to compare notes. But in fact, those labs are competition, and tipping your hand might give them a chance to scoop you.

thx so much for debunking those elephants in the room! telling the truths, not lies, definitely helps young academics and students to have a realistic understanding of what's happening out there in the real 'academic' world, rather than some 'fantasy' ivory towers which are hugely misleading and unhelpful. I've become more and more disenchanted with the academia, after realizing it's just a business specialized in producing papers, getting grants and money for producing more papers, and attracting students to charge their expensive tuitions. but too bad and so sad that I got to know this hard truth too late. and I'm too fucking old to make a switch in my career, what a sad story....

A few years ago, I was temporarily expelled from my Masters in Education. Part of the requirements were attending four Practicums over 3 years. In the lead up to this, I had spent 10 years in the workforce, in a non-educational or academic work environment. My parents were successful entrepreneurs and employers who were VERY big on regular leadership coaching, communication and presentation skills, as well as inclusion and diversity training. I was also diagnosed at 8 years old with ASD and serious heart condition at birth, and had been through the ins and outs of the educational and disability system and their respective sectors. And while I knew going in I obviously didn't know everything (as nobody does), I was super keen to learn from industry experts and educators. They... HATED... me. And I mean... hated... to every extent that you can possibly imagine. I sat at the front of every class, wrote an insane amount of notes, and asked questions when things didn't make sense. I networked, did every assignment on time, and even had three jobs lined up before I graduated. I was essentially a model student. Then why was I expelled? A few reasons... 1) By asking innocent basic questions to better understand the material, a few faculty members thought I was questioning their knowledge. None of my cohort (or student union) thought this. 2) Several faculty members verbally bashed their workplace during classes. Concerned, I reported it, and was reprimanded for "disrupting the culture of the university". 3) I asked my Practicum Mentor for a single day to attend a small job interview (you know, to earn money to eat, pay rent and stay alive), was approved, and then reprimanded by the Practicum Co-Ordinator for not making my classes a priority. 4) On one occasion during peak COVID season, I told the faculty members I felt uncomfortable forcing elementary school students to share food during recess. I was told I was being difficult and argumentative. 5) I received contradictory feedback from two professors in the same day - one thought I was the best teacher they'd seen all year, and the other thought I was the worst teacher they'd seen all year. My teaching was viewed by both teachers at the same time. It ultimately comes down to perspective really, and philosophy. The university sided with the negative professor. 6) Lastly, and most importantly, the Co-Ordinator of the Master's Degree said verbally, and I quote... "From my experience, people with disabilities shouldn't become educators. They slow everybody else down." This woman had a Ph.D. It was weird because this quote didn't mesh well with her thesis on inclusion and diversity in children's books. Despite there being zero human characters, the Very Hungry Caterpillar is 'apparently' a racist book. She also had a son on the Spectrum. We sued the university, provided evidence, there was an investigation, and it was an easy win. I was allowed back within the university to continue. But by then, I was so disillusioned with academia, I quit completely. I wasn't 20 when I went through this. I was 29.

Regarding reproducibility in my field (astrophysics) - it depends. Experimental results are generally fairly reproducible because most data becomes publicly available relatively quickly (if not instantly as it's taken), and the data analysis tools for a given observatory are public from the get go. Where reproducibility stops being considered is in more modelling/theoretical results. In this case the codes used are almost always private and unique to each group, so you will have people saying "we fit the data and infer X" and nobody can check whether that is because of some coding issue/choice for instance, or because that is actually what the data is telling you. Another thing I would mention is that grant proposals are frankly a giant con. We always have to promise some giant breakthrough and then some. If you don't, someone comes along saying "in 3 years I will detect life on exoplanets" or something, and whatever bit of incremental work pales in comparison to that, so your application is immediately rejected.

The first time I followed my integrity to demonstrate that a student had plagiarized, I was overwhelmed with how much work this created for me administratively to prove this plagiarism. Even though the follow-up was not done by me, the burden of proof was tremendous on me. It turned out that I was the third professor to go through this process with that same student, which resulted in the student's expulsion - but I knew none of that when I made my own case, given that the record was confidential. Sadly, I now think twice before I choose to accuse a student of plagiarism, knowing how much time this process eats up; but I still need to do this when I am faced with plagiarism, because otherwise such students may eventually become my colleagues...

I once said in a LinkedIn comment that the institution I worked on has awful IT infrastructure and writing code is a headache unless you just use your own hardware. Got an email from the dean and a visit from our marketing department (that Institute has one). I left 2 years later, the IT situation was completely unchanged with the one exception of finally upping our mailboxes to 10gb from 2.

The accuracy of some of your confessions is just eerie. Every applicant even for an assistant position is publications-wise just way better than me and I feel terribly guilty about it. A former student of mine hopped from position to another your years though he knows how to publish much good work on fancy topics, all of which I don't. Man, I was so relieved when he finally got tenured, I was close to handing him my chair and everything...

I could write a paper on this video. The amount of truth being spewed is wonderful.!!

My former boss gave authorship to people simply so that they won't be peer reviewers. Rather they be in the tent than piss on it from outside.

It's so true. In my field (Engineering) this silence is enforced with "professionalism". Calling attention to these problems is "unprofessional behaviour" and having that reputation can end someone's career

Thanks. I recently walked away from “Cal State” University. I did everything u pointed out not to do. I was transitioning from a Military career to academia. Biggest culture shock of my life. Lesson learned.

80% true in France too : Universities are state subsidized so we have leniency to fail a bit more, but not as much as would be required (like 3 year students are almost ignorant of their field), and the job market is more advertised than what you describe (to the point we had an entire module on job prospect during the very first semester of university). The rest is pin point accurate.

"I did do nothing for the paper" I'm just writing one with a PhD buddy of mine and we'd actually be grateful if one of our supervisors would be on the paper for less scrutiny in the peer review process. But they don't want to be on since they only provided supervision. Fun reverse problem!

Its a catch, because everything you described involves being critical of both the ethics and environment of academia. If we want to improve the process, it takes honesty, ethics, and a critical look. Alas, no in charge actually wants to change anything because that's their gravy train. However, if we do want to improve academia, then it takes saying these quite parts out loud. However however, doing that will remove you from academia and the superstructure reinforces itself. Meaning in order to change or make academia more ethical, improve its work-life balance, or hold unethical people to account you must be a heterodox, which will get you sidelined and ignored. The structure reinforces itself, and anyone with a spine willing to be ethical, bite the hand that feeds, and improve the process will be rejected by the system.

This video is confirming a lot of rather alarming suspicions I have had as a student.

Double blind peer review: Authors: "As we previously shown [3]..."

For that last one, at least in the US that "trendy application" is part of the Broader Impact section required in NSF proposals. BTW, I had a chemist fried tell me that it's standard practice to report the best yield out of multiple trials, even if it's way off the average value.

As a soon to be PhD from an EU university, I agree with and have seen all of these. I have to add, though, that in my home country, where I graduated in Biochemistry, you better believe students were failing exams if they put in insuficient work.

While at a university as a researcher fellow, we had a subject matter working group. The understanding was definitely around getting all our names on all the papers and referencing each others works as much as possible.

Thanks Andy, your contribution was awesome and it helps people like me who are at the very first program of the PhD.

That point about not failing students who don't do the work at all is upsetting. I got a B.A. back in the 1970s. After I retired in 2015 I wnt back to school to work on a second degree. Studying is important to me. I always do the readings. I take part in all discussions no matter how tired I am. I always study hard for, and pass, the quizzes and exams, and work hard on my essays and other assignments. So, the lowest mark I ever get is a B. I figure I deserve that B, based upon my work. The thought that someone might sleep through lectures and scrabble an essay together at the last minute and barely pass the quizzes and get a B is infuriating to me. Education, for me, is about learning. Who is learning in such a situation? In my opinion you learn by doing the work, not by just living through the course.

"..if I applied today" is true everywhere, not just academia, I pretty often think of it myself, and I got nothing to do with research or higher education.

On point #2, talking bad about your organization is a no-go pretty much wherever you are, even in the private sector.

In my field in Computer Science, papers often leave out edge cases, because they want to sell their own implementation commercially that contains fixes for them. You can't simply implement what they described in the paper and then use it in a product, it'll break.

Thank you for this video. Having been steeped in Academia for the vast majority of my adult life, I 100% agree with most of what you've said. It really does feel like the University system has somehow become duplicitous.

You know what I really appreciated in this video? The very British sash window there. I'm here living in Germany with my efficient, draft proof windows feeling so homesick.

4:38 absolutely true in cutting edge medical imaging research! There is so much emphasis on novelty and potential impact instead of developing something that actually works robustly across a large population. One of the main reasons I left. Some of my other reasons are also listed in this video.

I contributed to one paper on layered goal orientated action planning. My contribution was fleshing out the core concept and proof reading. The dean attempted to strike me from the paper, himself being listed as an author, although he did nothing on the paper at all. I fixed it, but after that had zero interest in further research, given that publications were not only not required, but treated as irrelevant when it came to performance evaluations. It's a shame because I could have generated a huge amount of research output if I had been given some support. We can guess why I was not given any...

I was quite open about my disillusionment with my linguistics masters course, and boy was my department cold to me throughout!!

I got screwed out of my Ph.D in P-Chem because I couldn’t reproduce the results the previous guy used to finish his dissertation. If fact, once I got over my bias that he had to be right, it was fairly straightforward to disprove his results. My lab space was then given to another group soon after as my advisor retired to go work full time at the NSF. Honestly, I should have just skipped grad school and learned to code. What a waste of time.

in my freshman year in Fine Arts, they did tell us that statistically only two of our promotion would eventually work in the field. I felt weirdly relieved by that honesty

I think you need to toughen up in order to make it in academia. It's also not too helpful if you are just too nice of a person, because others will smell this from far far away and take advantage of that. For example in one case two PhD students were writing up a paper with one of them doing way more of the workload. They ended up sharing the first authorship (which was alright) but on top of that the other person (who did less work) asked to be listed as the first person (being supported by his PI), because he would like to stay in academia. They then promised the other PhD that there will be a follow up story of equal impact on which she could be listed first then. Well, this second paper has not been published ... This is quite a common scenario. Don't be fooled by those people who say "I plan to stay in academia, I need this more than you". Yes, it might be true that you don't want to stay in academia and you don't need as much output to "just" get your degree. However, you never know if you might change your mind in the upcoming years. I always tell this to my junior colleagues who are in a similar situation. This also explains why so many succesful scientists are actually assholes or at least not the kind of human being you like to spent much time with.

After my over 30 yrs in higher ed administration, you’ve spoken truth to power. The heard instinct among academics is pitiful to witness. The Academy is in deep trouble and there are far too few real scholars capable of saving it.

You're truthful comments certainly brought a smile to my face.

as far as your point about not being able to fail students, I think that depends on your university. I haven’t had any pushback when students have failed. I’m extremely thankful we can maintain some rigor in our program.

Remember, many scientists are in industry, not academia. Along those lines, my favorite computer professors were those who worked in industry and were teaching on the side.

you should make a video on the biggest strike in the University of California system by their graduates, post docs, and research assistants etc for their low pay.

listened only the first three, and oh my science, a'm so grateful for u saying this out loud. thank you. and respect. and i'll go watch the rest.

That happened with one of my papers. A name of a senior member of the school I was on tenure track at as an assistant prof was added to a paper my colleage and I did all of the work on so that she could get a “publication” credit for that year.

The 'can't fail students' does not apply to my homecountry Germany. It varies between states, but mostly, if you fail an exam twice, you gotta go through an oral examination where you can only pass or fail (so, you get awarded the lowest passing grade if you succeed) - if you fail that, you are out. Done with studying that program, even if you only needed that last grade to graduate. What's more, you cannot study the same program at any other public German university again.

Open Secret: There is a departmental hierarchy. Some is dependent on the University perhaps a department is well respected or known, other rankings seem to be more universal and these departments will always have a lot of power. If you aren't in one of those departments, your department will not cross them and your head may even be very obsequious to anyone in those departments.

For my Political Science dissertation, my professor (the head of the department) just told jokes and screwed around all term. It was the last thing you did before you graduated and the whole class was one paper you did independently, so I didn't think anything of it. Half way through the term, he started joking about how the school only kept the major available because they were mandated to. I asked why we don't have classes on some of the programs for campaigning like we'll need to know for that work and he answered "who's gonna pay for that? 🤣🤣". It then sunk in how useless the degree was I had pursued and I realized his layed-back attitude was because he didn't have to pretend to care with us like he did for his other classes. I got a field director job after college and asked how much my degree factored into my hire and my campaign manager answered "zero". College was a total scam and complete waste of my time. I 100% regret it.

Finally the truth! Thank you for your courage, keep your head on a swivel!