On surviving in academia
Dec. 26th, 2017 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
posicAnother couple of comments in the same MathOverflow thread:
"Publish-or-perish and the sense of survival present a quite different set of problems. It is my feeling that many people nowadays are working so hard to survive in the academia that they would be much less troubled (and better off, too) surviving outside of the academia. On a deeper (and perhaps more controversial) level, I would say that personal survival and doing important research in mathematics should be viewed as two almost incompatible aims, not in the sense that they cannot be both achieved, but that they cannot be pursued simultaneously.
The mathematics research academia is not there for you or me to survive in it. It is there for your and my ideas to survive in it. This presumes that we care about having mathematical ideas that would survive and prosper (being worthy of surviving and prospering) in other people's minds more than we do about our personal survival and prosperity. If we don't, we just don't belong here, and should be doing something else."
"Publish-or-perish and the sense of survival present a quite different set of problems. It is my feeling that many people nowadays are working so hard to survive in the academia that they would be much less troubled (and better off, too) surviving outside of the academia. On a deeper (and perhaps more controversial) level, I would say that personal survival and doing important research in mathematics should be viewed as two almost incompatible aims, not in the sense that they cannot be both achieved, but that they cannot be pursued simultaneously.
The mathematics research academia is not there for you or me to survive in it. It is there for your and my ideas to survive in it. This presumes that we care about having mathematical ideas that would survive and prosper (being worthy of surviving and prospering) in other people's minds more than we do about our personal survival and prosperity. If we don't, we just don't belong here, and should be doing something else."
