Leaving Academia

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here is an essay about a professor leaving academia. 

I went to U of I.  There were parts of it that I enjoyed, and the culture wasn't that bad.  But I can see parallels.  For me it was more a matter of looking at the way education was going, and deciding not to get involved in public education as a teacher.  It was obviously going down the tubes, and that was decades ago; it's infinitely worse now.  So too, many colleges.  :/  I couldn't stop it.  I could sure get the hell out of the way.

Comments

[technoshaman]

*sigh* when the focus become profit rather than education...

all the love goes out of it. I'm not surprised that either UI or UW (who now has as a major donor a certain extremely profit-oriented Mr. Allen) went that way. I hope Eugene and Evergreen (locally known, less derisively than it used to be, as Treehugger U) (their mascot is the geoduck. Which is about as far from being a _duck_ as you can get...)

Although, ironically, you *can* have both... I have the pleasure of knowing several former students and one current professor at the University of Chicago. Chicago is *intense*. The best classes involve the lecture spilling out of the classroom into the student centre, the local pub when that closed, and students' rooms when THAT closed... my wife knows of at least one marriage - still exant - that came out of one of the most intense of those...

But then there's MIT... whose unofficial motto-cronym is "IHTFP." I Hate This Place.

Georgia Tech, I know what they'd do come a hurricane. KEG PARTY. That's just how us Fuzzy Beez roll.

Chicago? When after the week or two of sub-zero weather it "warms up" to 20F? Snowball fights on the commons!

MIT?

They get out the monopoly boards and play for blood.

NUH-UH. Not on a bet.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Unrestrained greed can ruin pretty much everything. That's how we wound up with a medical system run by insurance suits who know nothing about health care and don't care how many people they kill as long as it improves profits. That's not health care, it's parasitism.

Same with college: Employers have bought into the idea that only degreed people are employable. You pay whatever is demanded or you aren't permitted to apply for jobs that make enough to live on, regardless of your actual skills. But then the loansharks take so much of your money, you're often poorer than if you made minimum wage but kept all of it. That's if you even get a job. Students who can't get a degreed job are just fucked, because there's no getting out of student loans. So of course, the default rate is high and the rate of crippling illness and suicide is too. >_<

I tell people, before they go to college to earn more money, ask who's going to get that money.