Follow truth wherever it may lead you--Jefferson
research interests:
social indicators
subjective wellbeing (SWB), happiness, life satisfaction
quality of life (QOL)
culture, values
religion
freedom
urbanism and nature
urbanism as a way of life
city v nature
environment and sustainability
inequality
preferences for redistribution
dominance and authoritarianism
commodity fetishism and conspicuous consumption
(social) data science or computational social science (CSS) gnu.org
data management
data analysis, mining, visualization
Python, Stata, Linux
HR is not your ally; it’s the university’s shield against you.
Join a union. They’ll bend to management, but they’re your only
defence against worse outcomes.
Universities brim with brilliance, yet administrators fear tapping
collective wisdom.
Support staff are, compared to outside options, often woefully
underpaid. Ponder the effect of this
Academic managers are often those least suited to lead. We need Cincinnatus, we get Caracalla.
What’s measured is treasured. Watch the metrics closely.
You’re not unique; you’re interchangeable. Welcome to academic Taylorism.
Work-life balance is publicly praised, and privately punished.
Your expertise will be overvalued in ivory towers but often scorned beyond campus walls.
Mock those who claim teaching excellence without research. They’re behind the curve.
Equally, deride research hermits who never teach. If nobody tells anyone does anyone care?.
Today’s frustrated junior is tomorrow’s frustrating senior. The cycle is eternal.
99% of meetings are pointless. The rest are predetermined.
Every academic is a cocktail of impostor syndrome, arrogance, and ego. The best know this.
All metrics will be gamed. It’s academic nature.
Goodhart’s Law rules academia: Measures become targets which become benchmarks which determine assessments and by then people have forgotten why they measured.
Funding is input, not output. Management will never willingly understand this distinction.
Grant writing consumes more time than research. It’s both proof of engagement and evidence of failure.
When it comes to grant determination, Innovation is too risky; derivative, politically savvy projects get the gold.
Your most revolutionary ideas (in teaching, research, module design etc) will be deemed “too radical” by reviewers clinging to outdated paradigms. Then they will adopt them and claim them as their own idea
Job insecurity is the academic norm.
Your peers are both allies and rivals. Scarcity turns friends into foes.
Academic freedom ends where controversy or unprofitability begins.
Teaching evaluations measure charm, not competence or student learning.
The adjunct-tenured pay gap widens as equality rhetoric intensifies.
Interdisciplinary work is lauded everywhere except where it counts: tenure and promotion.
Academic publishers profit from your free labour while paywalling knowledge.
Self-promotion often trumps scholarship in academic success.
Recruitment promises are as hollow as political campaign pledges.
New “supportive” technologies are designed for everyone except the end-users.
Mentorship and more generally ‘collegiality’ is expected but unrewarded and is voluntary until you decline, whenit’s a black mark.
Networking is your real job. Conferences and cocktails matter more
than your desk time.
Students read syllabi with the same attention they give to software user agreements.