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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]College professors are some of the least talented ego-inflated hacks around, administrators are evil, & HR is stupid.

But I don't think that's a dirty secret. [/quote]

It's also not true.  I did my PhD from Harvard.  Only the best in my class (not me) had the chance to go on to faculty positions.  One of them spent ten years as a postdoc.  The ones who made it are some of the most brilliant people in the world and also the most dedicated.  If they have an ego, it's because they have earned the right to.[/quote]

In my field (in the humanities), the people who went onto tenure-track positions and now have tenure are very smart, but they are also politically savvy. This may be surprising given the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, but given how scarce the opportunity for life-time employment has become, the fact of the matter is that tenure-track positions go to those PhD students who know how to spin their research to fit the very few tenure-track positions available. They also know when and how to get their work published, and make the connections they need to in order to secure the external letters required for tenure approval from the deans/upper level administration.

I believe in the sciences that it is a slightly different game because there are so many more lucrative positions outside of academia that are an option. But in the humanities and some of the "softer" social sciences, the people who land tenure-track jobs have learned to play the game well in addition to having solid research. There are surely more "brilliant" PhD students who don't land tenure-track jobs, but due to their inability or unwillingness to play the game.

As a parent, the big dirty secret, if you want to call it even a secret, is that incentives are simply not aligned to encourage professors to spend a lot of time teaching undergraduates. You get tenure and raises for publishing, not teaching. You may get a good teacher, sure, but that is due to fortune, not because the university truly encourages it. If you want consistently excellent teaching, I always recommend the small liberal arts colleges.[/quote]

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