Acabo de ver la carta que un investigador de una universidad Suiza ha enviado a la dirección de su universidad para despedirse. Es una carta llena de auténticas verdades, no se puede decir que lo que la carta denuncia ocurra en el 100% de los casos, pero el porcentaje de verdad que cubre es muy alto de cualquier forma. En resumen, la Universidad, y otros centros de investigación, no se está dedicando a hacer verdadera ciencia, sino a mantener los egos y las demandas de un sistema en el que solo prima el interés económico y otros aspectos muy alejados de la investigación
Tan interesante como la carta es también las contestaciones a la misma, podéis ver toda la relación epistolar en esta dirección:
Dear EPFL,
(or any other academia)
I am writing to state that, after four years of hard but enjoyable PhD
work at this school, I am planning to quit my thesis in January, just
a few months shy of completion. Originally, this was a letter that was
intended only for my advisors. However, as I prepared to write it I
realized that the message here may be pertinent to anyone involved in
research across the entire EPFL, and so have extended its range just a
bit. Specifically, this is intended for graduate students, postdocs,
senior researchers, and professors, as well as for the people at the
highest tiers of the school’s management. To those who have gotten
this and are not in those groups, I apologize for the spam.
While I could give a multitude of reasons for leaving my studies –
some more concrete, others more abstract – the essential motivation
stems from my personal conclusion that I’ve lost faith in today’s
academia as being something that brings a positive benefit to the
world/societies we live in. Rather, I’m starting to think of it as a
big money vacuum that takes in grants and spits out nebulous results,
fueled by people whose main concerns are not to advance knowledge and
to effect positive change, though they may talk of such things, but to
build their CVs and to propel/maintain their careers. But more on that
later.
Before continuing, I want to be very clear about two things. First,
not everything that I will say here is from my personal firsthand
experience. Much is also based on conversations I’ve had with my
peers, outside the EPFL and in, and reflects their experiences in
addition to my own. Second, any negative statements that I make in
this letter should not be taken to heart by all of its readers. It is
not my intention to demonize anyone, nor to target specific
individuals. I will add that, both here and elsewhere, I have met some
excellent people and would not – not in a hundred years – dare accuse
them of what I wrote in the previous paragraph. However, my fear and
suspicion is that these people are few, and that all but the most
successful ones are being marginalized by a system that, feeding on
our innate human weaknesses, is quickly getting out of control.
I don’t know how many of the PhD students reading this entered their
PhD programs with the desire to actually *learn* and to somehow
contribute to science in a positive manner. Personally, I did. If you
did, too, then you’ve probably shared at least some of the
frustrations that I’m going to describe next.
(1) Academia: It’s Not Science, It’s Business
I’m going to start with the supposition that the goal of “science” is
to search for truth, to improve our understanding of the universe
around us, and to somehow use this understanding to move the world
towards a better tomorrow. At least, this is the propaganda that we’ve
often been fed while still young, and this is generally the propaganda
that universities that do research use to put themselves on lofty
moral ground, to decorate their websites, and to recruit naïve
youngsters like myself.
I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic
prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest
– first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own
work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty
appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very
quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that
being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating
your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead,
you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and
to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is
given to good presentation over good content – a priority that, though
understandable at times, has now gone overboard. The “evil” kind of
networking (see,
e.g.,http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/networking-good-vs-evil/) seems to
be openly encouraged. With so many business-esque things to worry
about, it’s actually surprising that *any* scientific research still
gets done these days. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely the naïve
PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority of
the world’s academic research is actually being done by people like
me, who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you would
expect to truly be pushing science forward with their decades of
experience, do surprisingly little and only appear to manage the PhD
students, who slave away on papers that their advisors then put their
names on as a sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read the
document (sometimes, in particularly desperate cases, they may even
try to steal first authorship). Rarely do I hear of advisors who
actually go through their students’ work in full rigor and detail,
with many apparently having adopted the “if it looks fine, we can
submit it for publication” approach.
Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the
students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little,
while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded
amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are
only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The
worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and
begins to play on the other side of the table. Every PhD student
reading this will inevitably know someone unlucky enough to have
fallen upon an advisor who has accepted this sort of management and is
now inflicting it on their own students – forcing them to write paper
after paper and to work ridiculous hours so that the advisor may
advance his/her career or, as if often the case, obtain tenure. This
is unacceptable and needs to stop. And yet as I write this I am
reminded of how EPFL has instituted its own tenure-track system not
too long ago.
(3) Academia: The Backwards Mentality
A very saddening aspect of the whole academic system is the amount of
self-deception that goes on, which is a “skill” that many new recruits
are forced to master early on… or perish. As many PhD students don’t
truly get to choose their research topic, they are forced to adopt
what their advisors do and to do “something original” on it that could
one day be turned into a thesis. This is all fine and good when the
topic is genuinely interesting and carries a lot of potential.
Personally, I was lucky to have this be the case for me, but I also
know enough people who, after being given their topic, realized that
the research direction was of marginal importance and not as
interesting as it was hyped up by their advisor to be.
This seems to leave the student with a nasty ultimatum. Clearly,
simply telling the advisor that the research is not promising/original
does not work – the advisor has already invested too much of his time,
reputation, and career into the topic and will not be convinced by
someone half his age that he’s made a mistake. If the student insists,
he/she will be labeled as “stubborn” and, if the insisting is too
strong, may not be able to obtain the PhD. The alternative, however
unpleasant, is to lie to yourself and to find arguments that you’re
morally comfortable with that somehow convince you that what you’re
doing has important scientific value. For those for whom obtaining a
PhD is a *must* (usually for financial reasons), the choice, however
tragic, is obvious.
The real problem is that this habit can easily carry over into one’s
postgraduate studies, until the student themselves becomes like the
professor, with the backwards mentality of “it is important because
I’ve spent too many years working on it”.
(4) Academia: Where Originality Will Hurt You
The good, healthy mentality would naturally be to work on research
that we believe is important. Unfortunately, most such research is
challenging and difficult to publish, and the current
publish-or-perish system makes it difficult to put bread on the table
while working on problems that require at least ten years of labor
before you can report even the most preliminary results. Worse yet,
the results may not be understood, which, in some cases, is tantamount
to them being rejected by the academic community. I acknowledge that
this is difficult, and ultimately cannot criticize the people who
choose not to pursue such “risky” problems.
Ideally, the academic system would encourage those people who are
already well established and trusted to pursue these challenges, and
I’m sure that some already do. However, I cannot help but get the
impression that the majority of us are avoiding the real issues and
pursuing minor, easy problems that we know can be solved and
published. The result is a gigantic literature full of
marginal/repetitive contributions. This, however, is not necessarily a
bad thing if it’s a good CV that you’re after.
(5) Academia: The Black Hole of Bandwagon Research
Indeed, writing lots of papers of questionable value about a given
popular topic seems to be a very good way to advance your academic
career these days. The advantages are clear: there is no need to
convince anyone that the topic is pertinent and you are very likely to
be cited more since more people are likely to work on similar things.
This will, in turn, raise your impact factor and will help to
establish you as a credible researcher, regardless of whether your
work is actually good/important or not. It also establishes a sort of
stable network, where you pat other (equally opportunistic)
researchers on the back while they pat away at yours.
Unfortunately, not only does this lead to quantity over quality, but
many researchers, having grown dependent on the bandwagon, then need
to find ways to keep it alive even when the field begins to stagnate.
The results are usually disastrous. Either the researchers begin to
think up of creative but completely absurd extensions of their methods
to applications for which they are not appropriate, or they attempt to
suppress other researchers who propose more original alternatives
(usually, they do both). This, in turn, discourages new researchers
from pursuing original alternatives and encourages them to join the
bandwagon, which, though founded on a good idea, has now stagnated and
is maintained by nothing but the pure will of the community that has
become dependent on it. It becomes a giant, money-wasting mess.
(6) Academia: Statistics Galore!
“Professors with papers are like children,” a professor once told me.
And, indeed, there seems to exist an unhealthy obsession among
academics regarding their numbers of citations, impact factors, and
numbers of publications. This leads to all sorts of nonsense, such as
academics making “strategic citations”, writing “anonymous” peer
reviews where they encourage the authors of the reviewed paper to cite
their work, and gently trying to tell their colleagues about their
recent work at conferences or other networking events or sometimes
even trying to slip each other their papers with a
“I’ll-read-yours-if-you-read-mine” wink and nod. No one, when asked if
they care about their citations, will ever admit to it, and yet these
same people will still know the numbers by heart. I admit that I’ve
been there before, and hate myself for it.
At the EPFL, the dean sends us an e-mail every year saying how the
school is doing in the rankings, and we are usually told that we are
doing well. I always ask myself what the point of these e-mails is.
Why should it matter to a scientist if his institution is ranked tenth
or eleventh by such and such committee? Is it to boost our already
overblown egos? Wouldn’t it be nicer for the dean to send us an annual
report showing how EPFL’s work is affecting the world, or how it has
contributed to resolving certain important problems? Instead, we get
these stupid numbers that tell us what universities we can look down
on and what universities we need to surpass.
(7) Academia: The Violent Land of Giant Egos
I often wonder if many people in academia come from insecure
childhoods where they were never the strongest or the most popular
among their peers, and, having studied more than their peers, are now
out for revenge. I suspect that yes, since it is the only explanation
I can give to explain why certain researchers attack, in the bad way,
other researchers’ work. Perhaps the most common manifestation of this
is via peer reviews, where these people abuse their anonymity to tell
you, in no ambiguous terms, that you are an idiot and that your work
isn’t worth a pile of dung. Occasionally, some have the gall to do the
same during conferences, though I’ve yet to witness this latter
manifestation personally.
More than once I’ve heard leading researchers in different fields
refer to other methods with such beautiful descriptions as “garbage”
or “trash”, sometimes even extending these qualifiers to pioneering
methods whose only crime is that they are several decades old and
which, as scientists, we ought to respect as a man respects his
elders. Sometimes, these people will take a break from saying bad
things about people in their own fields and turn their attention to
other domains – engineering academics, for example, will sometimes
make fun of the research done in the humanities, ridiculing it as
ludicrous and inconsequential, as if what they did was more important.
(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick It Ever Pulled was Convincing the
World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in
academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?” Year
after year, the system takes in tons of money via all sorts of grants.
Much of this money then goes to pay underpaid and underappreciated PhD
students who, with or without the help of their advisors, produce some
results. In many cases, these results are incomprehensible to all
except a small circle, which makes their value difficult to evaluate
in any sort of objective manner. In some rare cases, the
incomprehensibility is actually justified – the result may be very
powerful but may, for example, require a lot of mathematical
development that you really do need a PhD to understand. In many
cases, however, the result, though requiring a lot of very cool math,
is close to useless in application.
This is fine, because real progress is slow. What’s bothersome,
however, is how long a purely theoretical result can be milked for
grants before the researchers decide to produce something practically
useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be a strong urge for
people in academia to go and apply their result, even when this
becomes possible, which most likely stems from the fear of failure –
you are morally comfortable researching your method as long as it
works in theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it
and to learn that it doesn’t work in reality. No one likes to publish
papers which show how their method fails (although, from a scientific
perspective, they’re obliged to).
These are just some examples of things that, from my humble
perspective, are “wrong” with academia. Other people could probably
add others, and we could go and write a book about it. The problem, as
I see it, is that we are not doing very much to remedy these issues,
and that a lot of people have already accepted that “true science” is
simply an ideal that will inevitably disappear with the current system
proceeding along as it is. As such, why risk our careers and
reputations to fight for some noble cause that most of academia won’t
really appreciate anyway?
I’m going to conclude this letter by saying that I don’t have a
solution to these things. Leaving my PhD is certainly not a solution –
it is merely a personal decision – and I don’t encourage other people
to do anything of the sort. What I do encourage is some sort of
awareness and responsibility. I think that there are many of us,
certainly in my generation, who would like to see “academia” be
synonymous with “science”. I know I would, but I’ve given up on this
happening and so will pursue true science by some other path.
While there was a time when I thought that I would be proud to have
the letters “PhD” after my name, this is unfortunately no longer the
case. However, nothing can take away the knowledge that I’ve gained
during these four years, and for that, EPFL, I remain eternally
grateful.
My sincerest thanks for reading this far
chapeau!!
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