Via Instapundit and Inklings:
My decision to leave isn't really about my department or university in particular, but about a perverse incentive structure that maintains the status quo, rewards mediocrity, and discourages potentially high-impact, interdisciplinary work. My complaints are really about the structural features of the university, and not about the behavior of particular people. Although I believe that my university is unusually bad in these respects, I think these structural features are quite common.
Click the link to see more: Inklings: Why I Jumped Off The Ivory Tower
Points:
- “…when it comes time to decide on salary raises, a faculty member with broad, interdisciplinary research interests is at a severe disadvantage. To put the point bluntly, interdisciplinary researchers get paid less.”
- “…in an environment where the senior faculty and administrators have been rewarded throughout their careers for toeing their disciplinary lines, there's a lot of resistance to change. Some of that resistance is due to outright hostility, but most of it is just the result of a lack of experience and imagination.”
- “We're increasingly handing over power to people whose experience would naturally lead them to a conservative, short-term strategy that's based on optimizing quantifiable financial outcomes. But worst of all, we shouldn't expect someone whose experience is in leading gigantic, dominant corporations to create an environment that rewards original, interdisciplinary, potentially disruptive research. Their previous success (such as it is), is from operating in an inherently conservative environment, running an organization that thrives in the status quo.”
