Mural in Mumbai, India, reading 'Life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change'

This post by Stephen Kell, an academic at King’s College London’s Department of Informatics, was on the front page of Hacker News recently. It resonated with me, even though I’m not in the same position as him employment-wise. We all have a finite time on this earth, so it’s worth prioritising getting on and doing stuff that you deem important, without bureaucracy and other annoyances (like ‘business development’!) getting in the way.

It’s time to admit that I’m in a mess… It’s a little over ten years since I boldly presented one of my research goals at that 2014 conference. The reception was positive and gratifying. I still get occasional fan mail about the talk. So where’s the progress on those big ideas? There’s certainly some, which I could detail—now isn’t the time. But frankly, there’s not enough. In the past year I turned 40… in fact I’m about to turn 41 as I write this. It’s time to admit I’ve landed a long way from the place where that bright-eyed 30-year-old would have hoped his future self to end up. […]

If not there, then where am I? In short, I’m trapped in a mediocre, mismanaged version of academia that is turning me into a mediocre and (self-)mismanaged individual. The problem is far from one-way traffic: if I were a more brilliant or at least better self-managing individual, I could no doubt have done better. But for now, it’s the mess I’m in. I need to get out of it, somehow.

Although the academic life has felt like my vocation, my current experience of it is one I find suffocating. If you care about things that matter—truth, quality, learning, reason, knowledge, people, doing useful things with our short time on this planet—you are a poor fit for what most of our so-called universities have become in the UK. Three character traits will cause particular problems: caring too much, having values and having standards.

Looking around, what I seem to observe is that whereas others can hack it, it’s an atmosphere I find I am very poorly adapted to breathing. In short, far too much of my time is spent on regrettably meaningless tasks, and the incentives mostly point away from quality. I am trapped in only the bad quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix. To the extent that my mind is “in the institution”, it makes me feel pretty horrible: under-appreciated, over-measured, constantly bullshitted-to, serially misunderstood, encouraged to be a bureaucrat “system-gamer” and discouraged from both actually doing what I’m good at, and actually doing good. There is an enormous and exhausting cognitive dissonance generated by not only the stereotypical bureacracy but also the new, non-stereotypical corporate noise, the institutionally broken attitudes to teaching and the increasingly timewasterly tendencies of [organisations claiming to be] research funders.

It’s not all bad! There are still moments when it feels like my teaching is meaningful and my research time is going on things that matter. Those moments are just too few to sustain me, given the oter stuff. […]

If I’m not just to muddle on like this until I die or at least retire (it’s scarily little time until I can claim my pension!), there’s an imperative either to get out of this suffocating environment or at least to open up a vent… perhaps one large enough to crawl out of later. However, I’m not ready to Just Quit just yet. Being a citizen of the academic world is useful; I don’t have to go for a metaphorical knighthood. My new plan is to focusing more on basic sufficiency. I want to use my citizenship to do good. There is still some will in the machine to do good, even though the the default pathways increasingly strangle such impulses; walking out would squander this meagre but still valuable capital.

Source: Rambles around computer science

Image: ShareYaarNow