Given the intricacies of our job and the cushy lifestyle most academics live in, it disconcerting when academics use improper and incorrect analogies to describe the intricacies of their job. The latest is the idea that drug cartels and academia are similar enterprises. While I understand the spirit of the idea, the basic assumptions are insensitive and damaging. They represent the the pondering of a privileged academic stuck in the ivory tower.
Working for a drug cartel, being involved in a gang, or participating in organized crime is not a glamorous lifestyle. This should be an obvious point. This fact sometimes gets lost through the glorification of movies such as Scarface and the Godfather, or even Breaking Bad. People forget the bad guy got it in the end. To suggest that there are similarities between this lifestyle and academia trivializes the stakes of those involved in those enterprises. The constant threat of death, beatings, and jail clouds over all actions. There are real dangers to being involved in a criminal lifestyle.
To compare this to the lifestyle of an academic, where often the worst threat to happiness is enforced readings or committee service suggests that some think what we do is not a privileged lifestyle. While most do not make it to the vaulted top tier, a lifestyle teaching at what some call directional schools or a community college is nothing to sniff at. While the work can be tough, its nothing like peddling drugs or breaking sheet rock. The ego in such a comparison is astounding. Sure, graduate school is tough but to compare it to starting out as a low level drug dealer is disgusting.
Sometimes academia does not work out. When this happens, the worst case is to take a job in public or private industry, at an excellent salary – given that those put in this position often start with a Masters degree. Some even find the benefits of public or private industry superior than academia. To suggest that the process by which we get a PhD (5-10 years of study) is a “hard knock life” signals to me we need to institute summer work programs in PhD programs so that students learn what real work can be like.
This drug cartel=academia analogy also trivializes a more disconcerting part of the criminal lifestyle. Often its not a choice. The lack of education, options, and support sometimes make this career path destined for some.
The bigger lesson to be learned here is about the accuracy of analogies. To make an analogy, it has to be credible, logical, and plausible. That academia is like working for a drug cartel fulfills none of these requirements. Its a cute joke to some, but also cruel. When making analogies in class, in blogs, and in the public, we must think about the purpose and intent of our examples. Failing to do this suggests a wider failure in the teacher, not the system.
Since its Thanksgiving time, be thankful for your academic lifestyle. Be thankful the worst thing you may often have to do is read something, teach something, or engage an idea you do not like. Celebrate the life of the mind. If you want to work for a drug cartel, I am sure there are openings. I hear they are good at social media now and might need a few bloggers.
Just out of interest, did you actually read the article, or just look at the title and get annoyed with comparison? True, on a surface level the comparison might seem disingenuous and is probably used to shock. But I thought the article is actually on to something: the over-supply of PhDs is a problem – which, it turns out, is a bit like a drug cartel, where only so many people can rise to the top. Besides the odd obvious joke, there’s no mention in the article about how academic life is dangerous or criminal. Am I missing something? Or being overly earnest?
Fourth paragraph addresses the oversupply issue. In my view, the analogy does not hold because in most cases, the worst thing that happens if you exit with a Masters or PhD and get a normal job. Or god forbid, you work at a community college or something. Lets not kid ourselves with this idea that cartels and academia are alike. Both require years of training, low wages, and hierarchy, but academia holds no prospects of death or dismemberment.
I agree with Brandon. I am a big fan of analogies, but I wanted to write a post on this as well but didn’t have the time or desire to slog through the piece. Any and pretty much all sectors of the economy have a pyramidal shape to them–few bosses, some middle level folks, and many at the bottom. Academia is probably flatter than most, as the pay difference between the average full prof and the average adjuncter is probably 8x. Which is not great, but not as bad as most other industries. And, no, we do not kill to get ahead nor do we get killed if we fail. Our enterprise produces a great tradeoff–you can do what you want (what you research, how you teach) but not where you want it. Drug dealers have a wee bit less freedom and tenure for them is pretty hard to get (three books?). Not giving thanks tomorrow for this analogy.
That article struck me as a useful, brief analogy for thinking about an over-stocked labor market with a few big winners and lots of lowly paid people at the bottom. Adjuncts in many schools do, in fact, often make the minimum wage or below if you factor in the unpaid grading and prep hours — they could make more in other occupations, as can street sellers. To say the structure of that labor market is similar to academia is just an analysis and comparison, not trivializing violence — certainly no more so than any *other* study of crime would be. It is, in fact, quite interesting that some similar dynamics emerge even in the absence of the threat of violence — which of course has a lot to say about drug dealing and its organization as a business — would you think that comparing drug dealing with legitimate business is trivializing? In any event, it is nothing more than the small ‘hook’ of a much longer article — the whole thing isn’t based around the analogy, so Alexandre Alfonso is clearly well-aware of the limits of the analogy.
And don’t you think your criticism is a bit incongruous, coming so shortly after you yourself compared the political science job market to Thunderdome? Does the ‘loser’ really get killed and the winner occasionally face life-threatening problems on The Wheel? And then your endorsement a week or so before that of sports analogies for IR — holding to the standard you put out today, some would certainly call that trivialization of war and rivalry: “Yes, Palestineans and Israelis, you’re like Ohio State and Michigan”. And then there is the comparison of getting denied tenure to Dave Chappelle quiting his TV show because his work load was too heavy. Not getting denied tenure is *not* like quitting a gig that pays up to $50 million because you don’t like it. It’s more akin to being laid off — actually, it is being laid. Now, if John Mearsheimer quit and threw a temper tantrum in a University of Chicago lecture hall about it not being worth it, THAT might be like Dave Chappelle quitting — minus the money of course. But comparing tenure decisions however inadeptly to a comedy show does seem rather trivializing itself, as getting denied tenure has led to murder; most recently at University of Alabama-Huntsville.
What is interesting, however, is that analogies are useful tools for starting discussion and sometimes for carrying on a bit further. Alfonso’s has done that and a whinge about a trivial part of what is a quite serious and well-presented argument with evidence is itself rather trivial. This is hardly in the league of the recent over-extended offensive analogy-that-must-not-be-named here at Duck of Minerva….
I concur. The success or failure of an analogy depends on whether it can be used to emphasise, draw out, or help articulate significant features of your object of study. I think the analogy did so in this case.
It seems to me that Brandon objects to the analogy more on moral grounds. That is, other disanalogous aspects between the two jobs are important enough as to make the analogy unethical because it runs the risk of trivialising the much worse conditions of one job compared to the other. That’s a perfectly legitimate complaint (though not one I share) but it should not be framed as an analytical shortcoming.
Agreed 100%.
Thunderdome thing was a joke, but glad you are reading :) Key thing is the adjunct/community college life is a choice and its not a bad choice. I was faced with that recently and never considered leaving academia. I think we all know what we are getting into and the payoffs are pretty good. But the consequences of failure are not so bad either. Being in Europe I see people voluntarily stay in academia because they can think of no other job and want to delay things a bit. Its a luxury of an advanced society that one can choose to learn and participate in this enterprise.
There’s another way of looking at this comparison. If cartel members and doctoral students make similar (mis)calculations about potential job payoffs, that means extremely different people are equally poor at identifying the probability of success. This comparison doesn’t diminish or insult cartel members. Rather, it elevates them. We would assume that people smart enough to enter Ph.D. programs would know better, and select stable, profitable careers over the turmoil and unpredictability of the fast-shrinking academic job market. That they make this miscalculation suggests that the tendency to overestimate our abilities is widespread. Smart, privileged, law-abiding individuals are no better at cost-benefit analysis than criminals locked into a life-and-death industry, where there is probably little time for careful reflection. The comparison, I think, effectively shows how deluded and misguided many Ph.D. students are.
Or maybe doing the PhD is more of a compulsion than it is a calculated career choice. I find satisfaction in scholarship in a way that I just couldn’t find anywhere else.
The comparison I would make, is that those who join academia and cartels without examining the payoffs and probabilities are full of hubris. Point is the consequences of following this hubris is not so bad for the academic.
I found it interesting, as someone with no real knowledge of the organisational structure of drug gangs (or academia)
I’m not being facetious, I mean that genuinely.
Pehaps that was his target?
I will say that academics do appear to complain a lot about their profession, but that’s a different story
I agree with Brandon, that the analogies don’t fit well together, although their might be some similarities in the hierarchy, or rising the echelon to attain a higher position. But academia and criminals don’t go hand in hand in my opinion. Im just a 50 year old college student taking a few courses. I would tend to connote a food buffet to reading a good book at least it is more plausible.