BF2S Forums AU 2: Electric Boogaloo

Well the last train outta Sydney's almost gone

Dilbert_X wrote:

Cybargs wrote:

I bet more people know about lil wayne and nicki minaj than gates and jobs. doesn't mean its a good thing. your turning this shit into a petty popularity contest.

But university lit dons are so well known and respected.

So an AFL team injected their players with pig brain extract.
What are they trying to do, create supermen?

i never argued they were "well known". i'd never base an evaluation of any career or character on fame. that is fatuous in the extreme. i said they were "respected", yes, as in it's a profession that conveys some esteem. it's a staple upper-middle class profession, as inarguable as law, or publishing/journalism, or medicine, or politics. they all involve huge outlays of initial training/investment, and all pay very well, and come with many responsibilities. they are staple salaried jobs, historically cemented near the top of the societal pyramid. academics and scholars have been respected much like the judiciary (and formerly the clergy) were, from antiquity. i don't really know what you have to argue against. your problem seems to be the professionalization and bureaucratization of academia. well, it's just the rise of the 'professional-managerial' class, which has so been to academia's detriment, which has also simultaneously made a bunch of business/finance and 'we make stuff' professions elevated to middle-class respectability. in short, the forces that dilute the academic vocation are the exact same ones that lead to engineers and industrial specialists/managers being 'respected'. so methinks you are more than a little conflicted.

also if you think edward said isn't 'influential' or relevant today because he died a decade ago, you are dumb as fuck. pretty funny too that you namedropped steve jobs in your own counter-example. he's dead too. does that mean he's no longer relevant or a good figurehead of the techy-professions? again: fame and celebrity are not 'influence'. and rightfully so. people who get famous seldom do so for their innately positive qualities. fame is far too capricious to reward people on some objective scale of merit.

i think you mean the 'etymology' of regard. etiology means the cause.

and no, nobody has to know you 'personally exist' to hold your job in high-regard. these professions are respected because they are instant signifiers - or symbols, if you will - of a certain salaried, well-educated, culturally-elite staple. i don't need to know the country's leading barrister by first name to tell you that barristers are a respected bunch. traditional professions work that way. the figure of the 'scholar' or 'academic' is just that: a figure. cultures don't need to put an individuals' face or a 'celebrity name' to recognize it. i think you are, again, being fatuous in the extreme.

and your problem, "really", is that you don't understand what academics do. that's not their problem, really. you wield the same ignorance as the building-site brickie, but then somehow wear it with an arrogant self-satisfaction that elevates your ignorance to execrable proportions. you and jay already came out in that other thread with the 'criticism' that academics' "work" only involves a few hours of "teaching" a week. every single person involved in academia told you that was categorically wrong, and that it only amounted to a 1/3rd of their overall duties. you patently don't understand academic research or the profession's everyday, quotidian responsibilities... and that's okay. i don't understand how an engineer fills 9 hours a day. but i respect my lack of insight to the profession's minutiae/intricacies, and i defer making a disparaging comment. perhaps you should learn the same humility.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-19 06:05:53)

you evidently don't, if you think their main duties are teaching. either that or you have a very selective memory. and no, i'd say i know a lot more than you. i took a research degree, not a professional/vocational degree. i've also applied for a PhD, and done plenty of research into the profession as well as my actual topic (trust me, it's not something you go into half-assedly). i've spent a lot of personal time talking to professors about their actual job. i've read plenty of cynical and jaded moaning on the internet from post-docs who bemoan the job market and structure of academia. way too much time, in fact. it is obviously something of a rational concern to me. one impression i have never got is that 'academics don't do anything', or they 'expect respect for doing very little'. on the contrary: most people give good counsel to bright young people to get out of academia and cash-in with a real job. it's much easier. academia is intensely competitive and eats up talented, very bright young people. they are grist to its mill. not many make it to professor. it's extremely dog-eat-dog. for you to make out its this casual, lackadaisical thing for privileged nonces to skip through... is hilarious. you are badly out of tune with the reality.

i don't agree with that really, at all. they have many roles - the onus for new research is an unfortunate byproduct of the new ranking system, where research output and raw citations are king (just look at the preponderance of pretty shitty american schools in the world top100, just there by dint of the fact they produce floods of research with a huge budget). quantity is not quality. 75 years ago academics had more freedom to research what they want; it was not uncommon for an oxford don to work dilligently on a very learned book-length project for 3-4 years, publishing nada in that time. nowadays it is career suicide if you don't have 4-5 journal articles, reviews, public engagements etc. a year. you really have to ask what is in the best interests of good scholarship. the exhausting demand for 'new' material perhaps befits a concrete science, on the borders of application and invention, but it isn't really conducive to great philosophy.

the point of the university (and its academics) is for more than 'producing new knowledge'. again, you really have a poor understanding of the institution and profession. you don't understand their daily tasks/responsibilities, and you completely misunderstand the civic mission of the establishment. it's like debating a child.

and LOL if you think you can produce a genuinely worthy scholarly book 'in your sunday evenings' over a few years. you REALLY have no clue. it takes me about 2 months to even produce 10,000 words of publishable-level scholarship (and i can type 10,000 words on one day of bf2s, for contrast). that's a lot of reading, a lot of cross-examining, a lot of analysis, a lot of citation, and a lot of thinking/writing/redrafting. not to mention the actual editing and publishing process, which takes over a year in-itself. you have a pitiful understanding dilbert. stop embarrassing yourself, man.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-19 06:44:32)

yawn...

i want to own an ivory tower.

I wonder how many elephants you have to kill to make one

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i think that's the source of dilbert's real frustration. he wasn't up to it.

My Professor offered me two fully funded PhDs, you can argue it out with her.

One of my housemates is currently doing a funded PhD in medical research. She's into year one of three.

lol you are such a faggot. you yourself argued incessantly in D&ST a few weeks ago that 'a PhD isn't the definition of an academic, if it has become that, then blah blah blah academia is ruefully terrible blah blah blah...'. you remember the conversation yourself, about people calling themselves "astrophysicists" without any higher qualification. i actually argued that a PhD does define the START of an academics' career. my point above follows on from that: a PhD is the basic starting point of a career. saying you were offered a place doesn't mean you just 'conquered' or 'completed' the fulfillments to being an 'academic'. being offered a PhD placement signals you are at the start of a POTENTIAL academic career. i think you may like to re-check some of the fatuous things you have said about PhD's in the past. accusing me of being the one who states "science PhD's aren't part of academia" is pretty funny...

and it depends. 90% of people who do a humanities/social sciences PhD will stay in academia. roughly half of science/tech/engineering type PhD's will stay in academia - the rest will go to the large industrial side of things. there's a complex split between PhD's in law/economics/politics etc. and 'private sector' employment, e.g. practicing professionals, think-tanks etc. so yeah, my post made perfect sense, i have no idea how you're misreading it so grievously. being offered a PhD in a science project doesn't mean you're academic material. i won't even get into the details of how many people drop-out from PhD's, and never complete / ABD...