In 2015, the moral and cultural failure of American academia is viewed as a fait accompli. The job market for professors is terrible and will remain so. The academy has sold out two generations already, and shows no sign of changing course. At this point, the most prominent function of academia (as far as the social mainstream is concerned) isn’t to educate people but to sort them so the corporate world knows who to hire. For our society, this loss of academia is a catastrophe. Academia has its faults, but it’s too important for us to just let it die.
To me, the self-inflicted death of academia underlies the importance of social skills. Now, I’m one of those people who came up late in terms of social interaction. I didn’t prioritize it, when I was younger. I focused more on knowledge and demonstration of intelligence than on building up my social abilities. I was a nerd, and I’m sure that many of my readers can relate to that. What I’ve learned, as an adult, is that social skills matter. (Well, duh?) If you look at the impaired state that academia has found itself in, you see how much they matter.
I’m not talking about manipulative social skills, nor about becoming popular. That stuff helps an individual in zero-sum games, but it doesn’t benefit the collective or society at large. What really matters is a certain organizational (or, to use a term I’ll define later, coordinative) subset of social skills that, sadly, isn’t valued by people like academics or software engineers, and both categories suffer for it.
Academia
How did academia melt down? And why is it reasonable to argue that academics are themselves at fault? To make it clear, I don’t think that this generation of dominant academics is to blame. I’d say that academia’s original sin is the tenure system. To be fair, I understand why tenure is valuable. At heart, it’s a good idea: academics shouldn’t lose their jobs (and, in a reputation-obsessed industry, such a loss often ends their careers) because their work pulls them in a direction disfavored by shifting political winds. The problem is that tenure allowed the dominant, entrenched academics to adopt an attitude– research über alles— that hurt the young, especially in the humanities. Academic research is genuinely useful, whether we’re talking about particle physics or medieval history. It has value, and far more value than society believes that it has. The problem? During the favorable climate of the Cold War, a generation of academics decided that research was the only part of the job that mattered, and that teaching was grunt work to be handed off to graduate students or minimized. Eventually, we ended up with a system that presumed that academics were mainly interested in research, and that therefore devalued teaching in the evaluation of academics, so that even the young rising academics (graduate students and pre-tenure professors) who might not share this attitude still had to act according to it, because the “real work” that determined their careers was research.
The sciences could get away with the “research über alles” attitude, because intelligent people understand that scientific research is important and worth paying for. If someone blew off Calculus II but advanced the state of nuclear physics, that was tolerated. The humanities? Well, I’d argue that the entire point of humanities departments is the transmission of culture: teaching and outreach. So, while the science departments could get away with a certain attitude toward their teaching and research and the relative importance of each– a “1000x” researcher really is worth his keep even if he’s a terrible teacher– there was no possible way for humanities departments to pull it off.
To be fair, not every academic individually feels negatively about teaching. Many understand its importance and wish that it were more valued, and find it upsetting that teaching is so undervalued, but they’re stuck in a system where the only thing that matters, from a career perspective, is where they can get their papers published. And this is the crime of tenure: the young who are trying to enter academia are suffering for the sins of their (tenured, safe) predecessors.
Society responded to the negative attitude taken toward teaching. The thinking was: if professors are so willing to treat teaching as commodity grunt work, maybe they’re right and it is commodity grunt work. Then, maybe we should have 300 students in a class and we should replace these solidly middle-class professorships with adjunct positions. It’s worth pointing out that adjunct teaching jobs were never intended to be career jobs for academics. The purpose of adjunct teaching positions was to allow experienced non-academic practitioners to promote their professional field and to share experience. (The low salaries reflect this. These jobs were intended for successful, wealthy professionals for whom the pay was a non-concern.) They were never intended to facilitate the creation of an academic underclass. But, with academia in such a degraded state, they’re now filled with people who intended to be career academics.
Academia’s devolution is a textbook case of a prisoner’s dilemma. The individual’s best career option is to put 100% of his focus on research, and to do the bare minimum when it comes to teaching. Yet, if every academic does that, academia becomes increasingly disliked and irrelevant, and the academic job market will be even worse for the next cohort. The health of the academy requires a society in which the decision-makers are educated and cultured (which we don’t have). People won’t continue to pay for things that seem unimportant to them, because they’ve never been taught them. So, in a world where even most Silicon Valley billionaires can’t name seven of Shakespeare’s plays and many leading politicians couldn’t even spell the playwright’s name, what should we expect other than academia’s devolution?
Academia still exists, but in an emasculated form that plays by the rules of the corporate mainstream. Combining this with the loss of vision and long-term thinking in the corporate world (the “next quarter” affliction) we have a bad result for academia and society as a whole. Those first academics who created the “research über alles” culture doomed their young to a public that doesn’t understand their value, declining public funding, adjunct hell and second and third post-docs. With the job market in tatters, professors became increasingly beholden to corporations and governments for grant money, and intellectual conformism increased.
I am, on a high level, on the side of the academics. There should be more jobs for them, and they should get more respect, and they’re suffering for an attitude that was copped by their privileged antecedents in a different time, with different rules. A tenured professor in the 1970s had a certain cozy life that might have left him feeling entitled to blow off his teaching duties. He could throw 200 students into an auditorium, show up 10 minutes late, make it obvious that he felt he had better things to do than to teach undergraduates… and it really didn’t matter to him that one of those students was a future state senator who’d defund his university 40 years later. In 2015, hasty teaching is more of an effect of desperation than arrogance, so I don’t hold it against the individual academic. I also believe that it is better to fix academia than to write it off. What exists that can replace it? I don’t see any alternatives. And these colleges and universities (at least, the top 100 or so most prestigious ones) aren’t going to go away– they’re too rich, and Corporate America is too stingy to train or to sort people– so we might as well make them more useful.
The need for coordinative action
Individuals cannot beat a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Coordination and trust are required in order to get a positive outcome. Plenty of academics would love to put more work into their teaching, and into community outreach and other activities that can increase the relevance and value assigned to their work, but they don’t feel like they’ll be able to compete with those who put a 100% focus on research and publication (regardless of the quality of the research, because getting published is what matters). And they’re probably right. They’re in a broken system, and they know it, but opposing it is individually so damaging, and the job market is so competitive, that almost no one can do anything but the individually beneficial action.
Academic teaching suffers from the current state of affairs, but the quality of research is impaired as well. It might have made sense, for individual benefit, for a tenured academic in the 1970s to blow off teaching. But this, as I’ve discussed, only led society to undervalue what was supposed to be taught. The state now for academia has become so bad that researchers spend an ungodly amount of time begging for money. Professors spend so much time in fundraising that many of them no longer perform research themselves; they’ve become professional managers who raise money and take credit for their graduate students’ work. To be truthful, I don’t think that this dynamic is malicious on the professors’ part. It’s pretty much impossible to put yourself through the degrading task of raising money and to do creative work at the same time. It’s not that they want to step back and have graduate students do the hard work; it’s that most of them can’t, due to external circumstances that they’d gladly be rid of.
If “professors” were a bloc that could be ascribed a meaningful will, it’s possible that this whole process wouldn’t have happened. If they’d perceived that devaluing teaching in the 1970s would lead to an imploded job market and funding climate two decades later, perhaps they wouldn’t have made the decisions that they did. Teach now, or beg later. Given that pair of choices, I’ll teach now. Who wouldn’t? In fact, I’m sure that many academics would love to put all the time and emotional energy wasted on fundraising into their teaching, instead, if it would solve the money problem now instead of 30 years from now. The tenure system that allowed a senior generation of academics to run up a social debt and hand their juniors the bill, and academia’s stuck in a shitty situation that it can’t work its way out of. So what can be done about it?
Coordinative vs. manipulative social skills
It’s well-understood that academics have poor social skills. By “well understood”, I don’t mean that it’s necessarily true, but it’s the prevailing stereotype. Do academics lack social skills? In order to answer this question, I’m going to split “social skills” up into three categories. (There are certainly more, and these categories aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.) The categories are:
- interpersonal: the ability to get along with others, be well-liked, make and keep friends. This is what most people think of when they judge another person’s “social skills”.
- coordinative: the ability to resolve conflicts and direct a large group of people toward a shared interest.
- manipulative: the ability to exploit others’ emotions and get them to unwittingly do one’s dirty work.
How do academics stack up in each category? I think that, in terms of interpersonal social skills, academics follow the standard trajectory of highly intelligent people: severe social difficulty when young that is worst in the late teens, and resolves (mostly) in the mid- to late 20s. Why is this so common a pattern? There’s a lot that I could say about it. (For example, I suspect that the social awkwardness of highly intelligent people is more likely to be a subclinical analogue of a bipolar spectrum disorder than a subclinical variety of autism/Asperger’s.) Mainly, it’s the 20% Time (named in honor of Google) Effect. That 10 or 20 percent social deficit (whether you attribute it to altered consciousness, via a subclinical bipolar or autism-spectrum disorder, or whether you attribute it to just having other interests) that is typical in highly intelligent people is catastrophic in adolescence but a non-issue in adulthood. A 20-year-old whose social maturity is that of a 17-year-old is a fuckup; a 40-year-old with the social maturity of a 34-year-old would fit in just fine. Thus, I think that, by the time they’re on the tenure track (age 27-30+) most professors are relatively normal when it comes to interpersonal social abilities. They’re able to marry, start families, hold down jobs, and create their own social circles. While it’s possible that an individual-level lack of interpersonal ability (microstate) is the current cause for the continuing dreadful macrostate that academia is in, I doubt it.
What about manipulative social skills? Interpersonal skills probably follow a bell curve, whereas manipulative social skill seems to have a binary distribution: you have civilians, who lack them completely, and you have psychopaths, who are murderously good at turning others into shrapnel. Psychopaths exist, as everywhere, in academia, and they are probably not appreciably less or more common than in other industries. Since academia’s failure is the result of a war waged on it by external forces (politicians devaluing and defunding it, and corporations turning it toward their own coarser purposes) I think it’s unlikely that academia is suffering from an excess of psychopaths within its walls.
What academia is missing is coordinative social skill. It has been more than 30 years since academia decided to sell out its young, and the ivory tower has not managed to fix its horrendous situation and reverse the decline of its relevance. Academia has the talent, and it has the people, but it doesn’t have what it takes to get academics working together to fight for their cause, and to reward the outreach activities (and especially teaching) that will be necessary if academia wants to be treated as relevant, ever again.
I think I can attribute this lack of coordinative social skill to at least two sources. The first is an artifact of having poor interpersonal skills in adolescence, which is when coordinative skills are typically learned. This can be overcome, even in middle or late adulthood, but it generally requires that a person reach out of his comfort zone. Interpersonal social skills are necessary for basic survival, but coordinative social skills are only mandatory for people who want to effect change or lead others, and not everyone wants that. So, one would expect that some number of people who were bad-to-mediocre, interpersonally, in high school and college, would maintain a lasting deficit in coordinative social skill– and be perfectly fine with that.
The second is social isolation. Academia is cult-like. It’s assumed that the top 5% of undergraduate students will go on to graduate school. Except for the outlier case in which one is recruited for a high-level role at the next Facebook, smart undergraduate students are expected to go straight into graduate school. Then, to leave graduate school (which about half do, before the PhD) is seen as a mark of failure. Few students actually fail out on a lack of ability (if you’re smart enough to get in, you can probably do the work) but a much larger number lose motivation and give up. Leaving after the PhD for, say, finance is also viewed as distasteful. Moreover, while it’s possible to resume a graduate program after a leave of absence or to join a graduate program after a couple years of post-college life, those who leave the academic track at any time after the PhD are seen as damaged goods, and unhireable in the academic job market. They’ve committed a cardinal sin: they left. (“How could they?”) Those who leave academia are regarded as apostates, and people outside of academia are seen as intellectual lightweights. With an attitude like that, social isolation is expected. People who have started businesses and formed unions and organized communities could help academics get out of their self-created sand trap of irrelevance. The problem is that the ivory tower has such a culture of arrogance that it will never listen to such people.
Seem familiar?
Now, we focus on Silicon Valley and the VC virus that’s been infecting the software industry. If we view the future as linear, Silicon Valley seems to be headed not for irrelevance or failure but for the worst kind of success. Of course, history isn’t linear and no one can predict its future. I know what I want to happen. As for what will, and when? Some people thought I made a fool of myself when I challenged a certain bloviating, spoiled asshat to a rap duel– few people caught on to the logic of what I was doing– and I’m not going to risk making a fool of myself, again, by making predictions.
Software engineers, like academics, have a dreadful lack of coordinative social skill. Not only that, but the Silicon Valley system, as it currently exists, requires that. If software engineers had the collective will to fight for themselves, they’d be far better treated and be running the place, and it would be a much better world overall but the current VC kingmakers wouldn’t be happy. Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley elite has done a great job of dividing makers on all sorts of issues: gender, programming languages, the H1-B program, and so on… all the while, the well-connected investors and their shitty paradrop executive friends make tons of money while engineers get abused– and respond by abusing each other over bike-shed debates like code indentation. When someone with no qualifications other than going to high school with a lead investor is getting a $400k-per-year VP/Eng job and 1% of the equity, and engineers are getting 0.02%, who fucking cares about tabs versus spaces?
Is Silicon Valley headed down the same road as academia? I don’t know. The analogue of “research über alles” seems to be a strange attitude that mixes young male quixotry, open-source obsession– and I think that open-source software is a good thing, but less than 5% of software engineers will ever be paid to work on it, and not everyone without a Github profile is a loser– and crass commercialism couched in allusions to mythical creatures. (“Billion-dollar company” sounds bureaucratic, old, and lame; “unicorn” sounds… well, incredibly fucking immature if you ask me, but I’m not the target market.) If that culture seems at odds with itself, that’s an accurate perception. It’s intentionally muddled, self-contradictory, and needlessly divisive. The culture of Silicon Valley engineering is one created by the colonial overseers, and not by the engineers. Programmers never liked open-plan offices and still don’t like them, and “Scrum” (at least, Scrum in practice) is just a way to make micromanagement sound “youthy”.
For 1970s academia, there was no external force that tried to ruin it or (as has been done with Silicon Valley) turn it into an emasculated colonial outpost for the mainstream business elite. Academia created its own destruction, and the tenure system allowed it by enabling the arrogance of the established (which ruined the job prospects of the next generation). It was, I would argue, purely a lack of coordinative social skill, brought on by a cult-like social isolation, that did this. I would argue, though, that Silicon Valley was destroyed (and so far, the destruction is moral but not yet financial, insofar as money is still being made, just by the wrong people) intentionally. We only need examine one dimension of social skill– a lack of coordinative skill– to understand academia’s decline. In Silicon Valley, there are two at play: the lack of coordinative social skill among the makers who actually build things, and the manipulative social skills deployed by psychopaths, brought in by the mainstream business culture, to keep the makers divided over minutiae and petty drama. What this means, I am just starting to figure out.
Academia is a closed system and largely wants to be so. Professors, in general, want to be isolated from the ugliness of the mainstream corporate world. Otherwise, they’d be in it, making three times as much money on half the effort. However, the character of Silicon Valley makers (as opposed to the colonial overseers) tends to be ex-academic. Most of us makers are people who were attracted to science and discovery and the concept of a “life of the mind”, but left the academy upon realizing its general irrelevance and decline. As ex-academics, we simultaneously have an attitude of rebellion against it and a nostalgic attraction to its better traits including its “coziness”. What I’ve realized is that the colonial overseers of Silicon Valley are very adept at exploiting this. Take the infantilizing Google Culture, which provides ball pits and free massage (one per year) but has closed allocation and Enron-style performance reviews. Google, knowing that many of its best employees are ex-academics– I consider grad-school dropouts to be ex-academic– wants to create the cult-like, superficially cozy world that enables people to stop asking the hard questions or putting themselves outside of their comfort zones (which seems to be a necessary pre-requisite for developing or deploying coordinative social skills).
In contrast to academia, Silicon Valley makers don’t want to be in a closed system. Most of these engineers want to have a large impact on the world, but a corporation can easily hack them (regardless of the value of the work they’re actually doing) by simply telling them that they’re having an effect on “millions of users”. This enables them to get a lot of grunt work done by people who’d otherwise demand far more respect and compensation. This ruse is similar to a cult that tells its members that large donations will “send out positive energy waves” and cure cancer. It can be appealing (and, again, cozy) to hand one’s own moral decision-making over to an organization, but it rarely turns out well.
Fate
I’ve already said that I’m not going to try to predict the future, because while there is finitude in foolishness, it’s very hard to predict exactly when a system runs out of greater fools. I don’t think that anyone can do that reliably. What I will do is identify points of strain. First, I don’t think that the Silicon Valley model is robust or sustainable. Once its software engineers realize on a deep level just how stacked the odds are against them– that they’re not going to be CEOs inside of 3 years– it’s likely either to collapse or to be forced to evolve into something that has an entirely different class of people in charge of it.
Right now, Silicon Valley prevents engineer awakening through aggressive age discrimination. Now, ageism is yet another trait of software culture that comes entirely from the colonial overseers. Programmers don’t think of their elders as somehow defective. Rather, we venerate them. We love taking opportunities to learn from them. No decent programmer seriously believes that our more experienced counterparts are somehow “not with it”. Sure, they’re more expensive, but they’re also fucking worth it. Why does the investor class need such a culture of ageism to exist? It’s simple. If there were too many 50-year-old engineers– who, despite being highly talented, never became “unicorn” CEOs, either because of a lack of interest or because CEO slots are still quite rare– kicking around the Valley, then the young’uns would start to realize that they, also, weren’t likely enough to become billionaires from their startup jobs to justify the 90-hour weeks. Age discrimination is about hiding the 50th-percentile future from the quixotic young males that Silicon Valley depends on for its grunt work.
The problem, of course, with such an ageist culture is that it tends to produce bad technology. If there aren’t senior programmers around to mentor the juniors and review the code, and if there’s a deadline culture (which is usually the case) then the result will be a brittle product, because the code quality will be so poor. Business people tend to assume that this is fixable later on, but often it’s not. First, a lot of software is totaled, by which I mean it would take more time and effort to fix it than to rewrite it from scratch. Of course, the latter option (even when it is the sensible one) is so politically hairy as to be impractical. What often happens, when a total rewrite (embarrassing the original architects) is called, is that the team that built the original system throws so much political firepower (justification requests, legacy requirements that the new system must obey, morale sabotage) at it that the new-system team is under even tighter deadlines and suffers from more communication failures than the original team did. The likely result is that the new system won’t be any good either. As for maintaining totaled software for as long as it lives, these become the projects that no one wants to do. Most companies toss legacy maintenance to their least successful engineers, who are rarely people with the skills to improve it. With these approaches blocked, external consultants might be hired. The problem there is that, while some of these consultants are worth ten times their hourly rate, many expensive software consultants are no good at all. Worse yet, business people are horrible at judging external consultants, while the people who have the ability to judge them (senior engineers) have a political stake and therefore, in evaluating and selecting external code fixers, will affected by the political pressures on them. The sum result of all of this is that many technology companies built under the VC model are extremely brittle and “technical debt” is often impossible to repay. In fact, “technical debt” is one of the worst metaphors I’ve encountered in this field. Debt has a known interest rate that is usually between 0 and 30 percent per year; technical debt has a usurious and unpredictable interest rate.
So what are we seeing, as the mainstream business culture completes its colonization of Silicon Valley? We’ve seen makers get marginalized, we’ve seen an ageism that is especially cruel because it takes so many years to become any good at programming, and we’ve seem increasing brittleness of the products and businesses created, due to the colonizers’ willful ignorance of the threat posted by technical debt.
Where is this going? I’m not sure. I think it behooves everyone who is involved in that game, however, to have a plan should that whole mess go into a fiery collapse.
