It’s time to rethink academic freedom
It doesn’t really exist, and that’s a good thing
PhDs who dream of being a professor often say that a core motivation for an academic career is having academic freedom.
This concept often goes unquestioned. What does academic freedom even mean?
A surface explanation is that you can do whatever research you want. But that only raises questions. What’s stopping anyone from doing interesting research today?
Outside of morally questionable work that regulatory bodies frown upon, it’s usually a matter of finance. Who is paying for you to eat food and sleep on a bed in return for your research?
The shackles of industry research
Industry research positions get (accurately) portrayed as jobs where you can’t just do any type of research you want; it has to be something that helps the organization. Darn you, capitalism! You ruin all the fun. “Even though I work in the gaming industry I’m not allowed to study what I’m really interested in, which is whale migration patterns.” -Fabricated unhappy gaming researcher
Academics contrast these industry roles with the gold standard of what they like to call job security (another questionable concept), academic tenure. The idea is that when you start out, you are technically an assistant professor “on a tenure track” who can get fired anytime, until you pass an evaluation within a few years and get awarded tenure.
What is tenure? In a nutshell, a panel of professors decide whether or not you’re cool enough to get a gold sticker that says you’re good enough at your job that you can keep doing it forever, even if you decide to start doing terrible later.
This basically means that with tenure, you can do whatever research you want without losing your job. No one will stop you from asking dumb, boring, irrelevant, or useless research questions and you’re academically free to go nuts.
Freedom is an illusion
Let’s make something super clear first. Even as a tenured professor, you do not have real freedom. First of all, tenure isn’t even a guarantee of job security; anything promised by humans can be taken away by humans and humanoid politicians. Just look at West Virginia University.
Next, for the sake of clarity, let’s define academic freedom as being able to do whatever research you want with no restrictions (outside of legal/ethical ones) and being able to make a living without someone else footing the bill, like a spouse.
Both academic and non-academic research involves someone supporting you financially for doing the research you want. There are two ways this can happen. You either 1) find someone who wants the answer your research could provide and is willing to pay you to do it, or 2) convince someone they want the answer your research could provide, enough to pay for it.
For the tenured professors who are rising up in indignation, let me ask you this: if you never received another grant again and no students were interested in working for your lab for free, how much research could you actually pull off on your own? Also, try never teaching classes or participating in university functions again. How confident are you that your tenure protects your job?
Nothing is truly free.
You either pay by tailoring your research to have value to someone else or you provide value to someone else some other way and they give you the resources to do the research you want. Either way, your academic pursuits have strings attached.
Here’s what True academic freedom looks like: Be financially independent or wealthy, and you can both feed yourself and fund your own research activities out of pocket. This is extremely theoretical. It’s like being Tony Stark except your research is probably less cool than iron man. Keep in mind, how did Tony Stark get rich enough for his side projects in the first place?
Academic freedom is not a worthy pursuit
If you really think about it, the notion of “I can do whatever I want” is a bit childish. There are always constraints and the effect of your actions on other people to consider. No matter how introverted you are, shutting yourself in a lab or a library for the rest of your life and having no one bother you is quite the extreme goal.
This is also the industry researcher in me speaking, but isn’t it nice to have some constraints? Sure, sometimes you can have ideas and questions that really get in your head and only you seem to care about. But if no one finds value in the things you do every day, what’s the point? What are you contributing to society? The filter of other people’s opinions can be a useful bar to make sure your thoughts aren’t nonsense.
This is not to slam basic research, which may not have an immediate application. But if no one, even you, can articulate convincingly how someone could benefit from the knowledge that your research produces, what’s the point?
The genius exception
What about the unappreciated geniuses out there? First, if that’s you, why are you reading this dumb article? Go do more important stuff!
Second, take a look at the geniuses you admire. What if someone stopped Isaac Newton from coming up with the explanation for gravity, or Tesla from all of his work on electricity?
Sure Newtonian physics was neat, but how useful is Newtonian alchemy? Lots of unpublished, questionable Newtonian fiction out there. And Tesla was smarter than you and me, but he also preached for 25 years that you couldn’t split an atom, and believed that the electron didn’t exist.
Being a genius does not mean you’re a genius at everything, and you can spend a lot of unnecessary time being wrong.
The case for industry research
A lot of criticism gets thrown at applied research, and some of it is fair:
- “You’re just making other people money”: Your job entails helping an organization achieve a goal, which usually involves making or saving money.
- “Your research is so limited”: The things you study often require a short term, specific benefit to an organization that has an interest in a relatively narrow problem space.
- “Your research is tainted by what other people want”: Other people can have a very big influence on what studies you run, which studies you don’t, and even what you report.
After almost a decade of applied research, here’s why I have never even considered going back to academia:
- I have my own reasons for doing the work: Making money is just a side effect of having the research lead to a decision that affected people’s lives in some way (hopefully positive).
- I can find questions that excite and challenge me in any domain. By prioritizing solving a problem, questions naturally come up that require me to flex my brain, which is really the rush I enjoy. I don’t need boundless freedom, and constraints help focus my thinking and keep me from getting bored.
- You can’t escape the influence of other people, but you have influence of your own. As long as you work with and around humans, there will always be people who want to influence what you do. There’s no clear academic/industry difference that I’m aware of, except that there seems to be a bit more space for negotiation in industry. You can learn how to better make your case, tell a story to convince a group of peers and leaders to see your point of view. Grant and publication reviewers are typically separated by distance and time, and hold an unbalanced amount of power over you.
Probably the biggest reason that I stick with industry roles is that if my job environment isn’t what I want it to be, I can just choose to leave and find something else. And I have a choice of which industry and what location. The pay ain’t bad either.
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