Ask Lemmy

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, because academic topics and education have so much that’s good about them, and I’m probably not well placed to explain as it’s kinda raw for me still. But I’ll theow some ranting dot points out there.

1. The emphasis on assessment and running undergraduate programs like factories evidently detracts from the educational quality. Even the way topics are broken up into chunks and prerequisites to maximise efficiency can be quite artificial and hamper the ability to emphasise important fundamentals of a topic. In the end there’s a lot of focus from students and academics on winning or administering the gamified assessment system to memorise things forgotten in a few weeks and the deep insights and skills that can be learnt get pushed aside. In short, undergrad education has become an industrial complex.
2. The whole place is run by a pyramid scheme prestige cabal, albeit politely so, where everyone is or is supposed to feel very privileged to just be working in the building, because of the amazing things there and to have passed the great assessment game well enough to be allowed in. Culture problems or systemic problems just can’t be addressed. Problematic people can get away with a lot because they are senior. Whole groups or departments can have a quiet toxicity that no one does anything about, including warning or helping younger students naive to such problems, because, going through the game of and pain of the process is how you earn your position and so academics are literally personally incentivised to not make things too easy for students.
3. As a graduate research student, you are often chasing prestige and are young and eager to prove yourself. Truth is you’re likely canon fodder for the system. No one really cares about your education. Some ahead of you a few years will see you as competition. And as it’s a pyramid scheme, the vast majority don’t make it into the castle, so they’re right you are competition. But not in who’s smarter or more creative, but who stands out more or gets to work on the right project or gets lucky with the right discovery. The whole assessment mentality of finding the right people gets noxious when you start using fuzzy things like success in research as a young researcher. But the thing is a lot of research work, at least in science, depends on graduate students as a labour force to get things done. An unpaid young and eager to prove themselves labour force that will most likely never make it into academia (sound familiar?)
4. All of the above extends into the practice of research and academia itself. Academic compete for grants in a system often called “the lottery”. They’re on a treadmill to publish more and more papers instead of actually making sure their research is correct and they’re finding the truth. Ask any researcher how much they trust any paper they’ve looked deeply into. Truth is a lot research is done problematically. And then the publication system is it’s own gamified assessment system, where other researchers judge whether a paper is worthy of publication, which sounds good, except academics are overworked with research needing to publish their own papers and reviewing others papers is unpaid, and so they often make passing superficial judgments sometimes based on prejudices or impressions. What’s more, papers get published in journals which have grades in terms of “quality” which is based on the impression that the papers in those journals are impactful without really waiting to see if they turn out to be true over time.

I’ll stop ranting there and just say that much of the above may not be at all unique outside academia. But in combination with the use of students eager to prove themselves and the ideals of truth of science etc, it can all look pretty vile once you see it from the inside.