The Death of a Scientist: The (self-)annihilation of Modern Scientific Community

By Alexander Vapirev

A contemporary and detailed look at the reality behind the PhD degrees and postdoctoral fellowships in academia. The book explores some of the most pressing issues and unique challenges currently facing the doctoral and postdoctoral programs both on a local institutional level and on a global one where multiple complex factors influencing and governing the academic environment take place.

The interrelated nature of these challenges together with discussions over certain historical trends and demographics offer a unique perspective on some often overlooked topics such as academic advisors and mentoring, increasing job insecurity, career prospects, mental issues, discrimination and women in science, ever growing need for funding, increasing pressure for high-profile research, internationalization of science, trends in university management,  higher education dynamics, and government policies, backed with references to published research, national and international surveys, and census data.

Today, most of the PhD programs have been accommodated to the benefit of the university with disregard to any sustainable demand-and-supply job market strategies, contrary to the original ideas behind their inception. The result is an over-flooded job market and huge underemployment rates among doctorate holders.

Infused with a narrative of a rich mix of personal experiences, observations, and impressions, all dressed in humor (mostly dark), sarcasm, irony, disbelief, and often outright criticism, this text does not shy away from asking uncomfortable questions and even attempts to provide answers to some of them. At the same time it also offers practical advice for those considering and those who already have dared to tread the PhD path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Sep 24, 2018

Book preview

Alexander Vapirev

The Death of a Scientist

the (self-)annihilation of modern scientific community

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© Alexander Vapirev 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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To Mischa and Iga

who shared the friendship

To Anastasiya

who shared the love

For we went together through hardship

to find that there is good in the world

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About this book

The postdoc experience, and for that matter the experience of the young researchers in general, in academia these days is far from pink bubbles and roses. In majority of the cases it is quite the opposite. This is an attempt to describe the contemporary academic postdoc situation based on my own experiences and observations. It also goes about describing the filthy reality about one’s struggle towards a successful career path in academia and outside of academia after a PhD. Most of the time I write about Europe and the USA since it is there where I have spent a considerable amount of time and effort to get my degrees and later work as a postdoc. There, I think, I have a fairly extensive view on the matter. Few attempts have been made here and there throughout the manuscript to touch upon other continents and parts of the world too. Although I have made an effort to cite previous works and sources I must admit that this has been nothing more but a spectacular fiasco due to the sheer number of information out there. When I started digging around for published works in relation to my own experiences I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to expect. I was flooded with excitement when I discovered that the discussion had been going on for a while, picking up the pace in recent years. My surprise, however, soon receded into a muddy puddle of a sour-bitter mix of feelings. With so much material out there - policies, reports, research - I could not comprehend why postdocs in academia still go through all that. Is all that material intended only for narrow research, used only by administrators to just tick the relevant checkbox with "done", or to only justify the money allotted for such reports? Lack of awareness maybe? People urging for reforms not being loud enough? Charles W. Eliot[1] during his speech at his inauguration as president of Harvard College said: "The University must accommodate itself promptly to significant changes in the character of the people for whom it exists." [1]. In the contemporary version of The University most of the PhD students and postdocs have been accommodated to the character of the university and to its benefits, rather than the opposite and far from what Eliot probably had in mind.

This is not a research manuscript with a million citations after each sentence justifying its existence in the text but rather a mix of personal experiences, observations, and impressions, as well as thoughts on certain topics all dressed in humor (mostly dark), sarcasm, irony, disbelief, harsh language, outright criticism. The discussion also goes over some quite sensitive subjects such as legal rights, employment, gender and equality issues, xenophobia, financial and social status, educational programs, and with all of which I have crossed paths, often to rather unpleasant levels. On each one of these there are millions of pages written and the point is not to reinvent the wheel. Thus, what has been drafted here is only a small part deemed pertinent to and directly affecting the professional experiences of young scientists. The ideas laid out here have not been developed around something I have read and which have consequently sparked a desire to write about. No. Each and every one of the topics and subtopics, each chapter and each of the numerous discussions is based on events I have witnessed, cases I have dealt with, people I have met. Not heard of, or listened to either in the pub, or during hushed behind-the-corner department discussions. No. It is all firsthand experiences. I have therefore resorted to cite example sources mainly when making certain statements and expressing opinions based on my experiences in order to support those with numbers and findings of other authors. I have to admit though, that at times the scientist in me could not resist the itch and some sections are very heavily peppered with cited literature. The sheer amount of reports, research papers, discussions - that is an ocean of information. And quite a deep one, deeper than the Mariana Trench in its shallowest point. Yet its existence is unknown to almost everyone involved in some way in higher education with the exception of the few specialists working in that area. Usage of references is probably sometimes assumed unnecessary when stating certain obvious facts, thus solely relying on the overall literacy and own experiences of the reader.

Despite some recent shifts in thinking and seemingly proactive government policies, the doctorate holders who have chosen to tread the rocky roads of pure science seem to have become nothing more but an unnecessary social appendix which might be safe to remove. And no one will ever notice if something is missing. Less attention is paid to the postdoctoral researchers in industry and in government institutions since they do not face the career doom and fate to oblivion as their academic counterparts. For young scientists the roles in industry and in government offices are better defined, the goals and objectives are clear, and the path for further career development is much wider and full of opportunities. Alas, the industrial and government postdocs still represent a very small part of the postdoc population due to the common (mis-)perception that after a PhD the only possible (a-must-have) career track lies within academia. The result is a torrential influx of super-educated and skilled young people into the abyss of helplessness and career prospect despair.

There is a lot of literature written by professionals on higher education, its structures, history, modern policies, and trends. Those however - government reports and databases, specialized articles and surveys, national policies - are highly specialized and probably known to only those same professionals. The regular doctorate student and postdoc - the people who should definitely be aware - would never suspect that such things exist. Just as a higher education professional has probably no idea that Quantum Field Theory, or Band Theory in Solid State Physics exist, not to mention the nature of the subject they discuss although they are applied in a myriad of everyday-use electronic devices. So I have tried here to touch upon (only touch upon!) and mill it in a way most people will hopefully understand and start thinking. I really hope for that to happen. Hope, according to observations, could be very contagious, often a self-amplifying state of mind, and it seems to infect only humans. Just like stupidity. When mixed, those two could lead to total mayhem. So I also hope that the stupidity levels in the following pages are relatively low and the reader will manage to make some sense of the text.

The first chapter takes a walk along the Memory Lane in an attempt to figure out why the heck are we where we are now. The second chapter lists several scenarios which will steadily push one’s career into the ditch with a thin polite sinister smile. The third chapter delves into the filth of the financial side of modern scientific research. The fourth chapter makes few feeble attempts to explain why scientists look weirdos at first, although they are still (or at least try to be) quite normal in fact, and what are the social repercussions related to that. The fifth chapter makes few references about the inevitability of the dirt awaiting academic postdocs. Up to there, the book mostly lays out the context, drafts the sketch, builds up the suspense, piles up the problems in front of the reader without going in too deep. Hence the reader will often stumble upon phrases like "But more on that later".

The last two chapters bravely venture on a journey into the wild and end up navigating in very dangerous waters - with lots of shallows, whirlpools, and underwater rocks - in an attempt to ask and point to possible answers to certain questions. Connecting the dots so to speak, with discussions, with even more cited works and reports, and probably some not so meek thoughts about possible improvement solutions. Modern trends in university management, higher education dynamics, government policies - I think the invention of the time machine is a child's game compared to understanding those. Maybe the questions are childish, maybe the way of asking them is childish. The author could not care less. After spending so much time in academia and working with academics (about 25 years or so, to be precise), after being on the end-user receiving part of the chain for decades, both from an academic and industry point of view, I am fully entitled to ask and discuss as much as I want. Not to mention that often my experiences and observations seem to be at all odds with some specialists whose works and the discussions therein are too academic and theoretical to say the least. So I, not so humbly, ask professionals in that area to muster up some dose of understanding when skimming through these pages. Hopefully, those questions will urge the ordinary reader to ask their own much smarter and much more educated questions, eventually reaching more meaningful answers.

Few more notes. There is a certain repetition of the same statements and ideas throughout the text in support of different arguments, or when attempting to crank the viewer’s perspective at an angle. And also to make sure the postdoc reading this finally gets it! The terms R&D, research, science, etc…, are often used in an intertwined and equivalent manner without making much distinction between their formal definitions - e.g., as those given by OECD - behind them unless specifically stated, e.g., like basic/fundamental, applied, experimental. Often the word them, although sometimes grammatically not very correct, is used as a collective notation for he, or she, or he/she, etc… when talking about a person, someone, who, one, etc… The reason is that a) I have really short fuses with regards to the lack of proper reference to the sexes in English as it would be otherwise implied by any other part of the speech in the sentence and thus forcing the inclusion of tons of extra annoying explanations, and/or b) I have tried to hide that information whenever relevant since in all of my little example stories (without a single exception) I talk about real people and real situations which I have personally witnessed. Lastly, maybe some of the views expressed are siding with the extreme, maybe some lack coherence (for which I apologize), maybe the language describing them is at times rather harsh (for which I do not apologize). Well, such are, too, some of my experiences - extreme, incoherent, harsh.

So, without much ado, we dig in…

Leuven, 2018

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Preface

So I suppose you have made the irrevocable mistake to delve into the depths of Philth and Darkness, aka the PhD. Maybe you have even managed to go all the way through and finish it. And now you are here - seeking answers to all kinds of questions: from such like should you try and install a new Linux distro now that you (hopefully) have a new computer, to much more important and existential topics like "what the hell is going on here that even the thought of your newly emerged from darkness financial capabilities to increase the beer intake tenfold cannot melt the thickening ice shards down deep in some unknown part of your own self". The general answer is 42[2]. Whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not. But it doesn’t matter because actually none of the answers or their explanations will make any sense. At least not without waking up and shaking the layers of thought dust, not without a change of mind, and accepting those answers as a true philosopher - "What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality" (Plutarch). But you will not do that. You simply don’t want to. Not after all what you have been through to get your PhD. Well, this text may not give, or point you to these answers per se either, but hopefully will help you to finally open your bright and smart eyes and see the surrounding world from a different angle, the reality as it is through the tear-filled eyes of a myriad of people like you, deceived by false hopes, endlessly trying to climb up the academic ladder and become professors, and gloriously tumbling down just as Sisyphus does every time when the end, the final effort, seems so close. There are exceptions of course, but every exception only confirms the general rule described by the behavior of the data and the conclusions of the theory.

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Chapter 1 – The Beginning

Grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers and theologians, …[3]

- Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol ("Viy")

That smug face

This is it! You have just graduated and have started your first postdoctoral specialization, i.e. you are now officially a member of the postdoc guild. I can see that smug face of yours ready to explode with pride, the shining eyes looking with exhilaration at the professors and the rest of the academic world as equals, and from time to time (but more and more seldom) looking down at the bloody trenches (aka, the grad cubicles) where the endlessly-suffering PhD students wage monstrous battles against time and existence, occasionally encouraging them with somewhat a big-brotherly note in the voice and snakishly shoving hints here and there that you are no longer one of them, that you have risen to Olympus, as a Hercules who has completed his impossible labors, and have become a god yourself. No more endless sleepless nights, no more late (and early) work hours, no more piles of crap being thrown at you, no more holding for dear life while waiting for the next miserable paycheck, no more drinking yourself to death - alone, or with comrades in fate - discussing what you want to do in life and how to faster and less painfully end this misery; things like "escape from the world and open a mojito bar on an island, make wine (or beer), jump out of the …", (no, that’s too bloody and messy, besides - so often used by others as a solution that it has become unrealistically dull and simple), will no more keep coming back into the conversation and into your thoughts like ever bloodthirsty harpies, like valkyries: magical, fascinating, sometimes deadly and inevitable. No more martyrdom. You have fought valiantly, selflessly, through fire and ice (a cliche - this text is peppered with them, many of them sad but true), and have finally emerged victorious from the epic battle with The Committee, which like a multi-headed Hydra, attacked with sharp guillotine-shaped poisonous fangs from all sides, wanted you impaled and then burned using the very blood-spattered pages of your own gibberish, called The Thesis, to fuel the scorching flames of your funeral pyre. You won! And now you are ready to plunge into your new and exciting life of a fresh-out-of-the-oven young (a common misconception, we come back to that later) and full of ground-breaking ideas brilliant scientist. You see yourself - and you are maniacally (if not hysterically) convinced that others also see you the same way - as a one of Einstein’s reincarnations, holding Mother Nature’s most fundamental and at the same time most evasive laws in a rear-naked choke, forcing them to finally give up and tell you all there is to know about life, universe, and everything else. Not only that, but you have also landed that coveted postdoc job offer and now the whole world is at your knees. Or is it?

Well, let me break it down for you: if during your PhD you were up to the neck in dung, now as a postdoctoral fellow (or any variation of it) you are fully submerged in it with no goggles, no oxygen, nothing to hold on to try and pull yourself out to get at least a quick breather. Not because someone has snatched all that and hidden it away from you, or pushing your head down under trying to drown you on purpose. No. It is you who have chosen to close your eyes (the brightly shining ones on that smug face from the not so distant past) and dive. And slowly, without even making a notice of it, you have been rejecting life in hope that just a little more, just one more year, one or two more papers, and the pool of stench will recede and you will finally stand on the right spot, at the right time, in the right company of old moldy influential scientists in order to be seen as the only solid candidate for one of those mythical professorships.

A history dip

In order to understand why the smartest and brightest people of today are worth less than a dung beetle (even if it were back then in ancient Egypt[4]) we need to first take a step back and delve a bit into the recent history of how faculty positions evolved into their current state, i.e. how academia from a relentlessly progressive forward-moving knowledge center evolved into a mere industry with (quite often) questionable morals. The development of the modern academic career track has its roots in the creation of an institution which makes such a career possible and supports it professionally. That is, the university is not anymore only a place where science and discoveries happen, but it also takes the role of a regulatory body of some sort, defining the rules of what is necessary if one would decide to legally transform themselves from a dreamer with crazy (or brilliant) views about the world, views reaching way beyond those of the regular folk, to a certified thinker, fountain of wisdom, pillar of knowledge, and a respected figure in the society, i.e. a professor. On that line, little has changed - one needs to spend some time in school, have some achievements in the relevant fields of human knowledge, etc... and eventually he (and as of recently also she) will be eligible to apply for a faculty job in an academic institution, be that a university, an academy of sciences, or any other type of a thought-and-mind forging crucible. The words "little has changed" however, hold the key to understanding the modern-day day situation of treating holders of doctoral degrees like tomatoes in the peak harvest season - cheap by the kilo, too many sellers offering the same, customers spending an eternity to decide the best quality-to-price ratio, sometimes buying only because the seller is known to the public and not exactly because of the quality they offer.

        Colleges, universities, and other academic centers did not simply spring out of the ground like mushrooms after rain. The process of the evolution of what has become the university of today is just as complex as its current organization on academic and administrative levels. Not to mention that once in a while, even today, religion and politics poke in just as they have always done. There are plenty of books, scientific papers, and articles describing in great lengths this evolution process and the point here is not to repeat all of that but to summarize some important moments which would hopefully help you understand, or at least rub it in your face once more even if you refuse to understand, the dry fact that PhD degrees and postdoc fellowships for their most part are only but a shadow of despair and cheap labor of highest quality [2]. I recall a story when a full tenured professor who I used to know openly argued in the hallways of the department with a colleague that (quoting) "graduate students are simply nothing more but a cheap labor". That incident is not an isolated case [2]. There are exceptions of course and we will get to them later on, but they are too few for the general picture to be viewed as a rainbow of happiness and prosperity painted in bright colors.

In the past, colleges and academic institutions were small in size and had a relatively low number of students. Due to a variety of factors - demographics, mobility, social status, etc… - many of those students would not finish their education. Still, those having successfully obtained their degrees would make a tremendous impact on many sides of life: political thinking, business, industry. The early academia was limited in many aspects in comparison with modern day science institutions but nevertheless it produced highly socially responsible and well respected by all social classes elite.

The requirements to get a job in any more or less specialized profession were not very high and a higher education degree was not a necessary condition to apply for that job. Thus, it was difficult to convince young people to ditch everything, lock themselves out and postpone all the exciting experiences life might offer at that age, and embark on a strenuous voyage of the mind for few years without actually that being needed much. The ones who have walked that path have left their extraordinary mark on civilization, but there are also countless stories of men and women without proper high-level education contributing just as much with discoveries and thoughts to the progress of the society. Indeed, very few job descriptions would require at that time a college diploma and, besides, before the industrial revolution the social hunger for relevant degrees reflecting the needs was probably not so severely realized. A diametrically opposite retrospective to the "methodomania"-style situation of today where the push for standardization in education and diplomas brings in fields which not long ago were not viewed as requiring a degree and has transformed modern education into a degree-belching industry with flexible business models allowing for continuous branding of new methods for just about everything [3]. But more on that later when we discuss the now.

In mostly rural 18th-to-early-19th century US, e.g., in New England, a college degree would get one a job either as a teacher, or as a cleric in the church [4]. The latter saw an uprise in demands especially during the early 19th century when the pastorate decided that its members, if educated in local universities which were quite often linked to the church in that region, would be more effective in conveying the faith in a form considered appropriate and/or necessary. The US educational model from that period was predominantly based on that of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges and it focused mostly on the study of classical subjects and the ideas within the Protestant movement from the Reformation period[5]  [5]. Few decades later, after the end of the Civil War[6], the essence of how colleges were created changed considerably. The colleges had already gradually started drifting away from the rigid model of British universities which focused on the broad generalist academic seeking the truths of mind and nature and had been moving into adopting some of the ideas laid down in the basis of the late 18th - early 19th German universities, putting forward emphasis on specialized research and professional achievement [5,6,7]. More freedom and higher academic status was given to the professors and the students as a whole were put forward with emphasis on the learning process, various specialized departments were established, the graduate school started to gain popularity. Thus, together with liberal-arts colleges, peppered here and there around the US and mostly linked somehow with the local churches, various other higher-education institutions also started to appear. Those colleges, often privately funded, were focused more on providing a type of education more fitting and catering to the emerging contemporary and scientifically oriented groups of the society. So came medical schools, law schools, science and technical schools, agricultural schools. For example, under the Morrill Act of 1862[7] which made it possible for states to profit from government-allotted lands if those were used for the development of modern educational programs, the State of NH was granted federal land for a local college to be built and thus the New Hampshire College was established in 1866 in Hanover. At that time it was institutionally associated with and governed by Dartmouth College. Benjamin Thompson, a farmer and a resident of Durham, in his testament left all his lands to the state for the establishment of an agricultural college. Thus, the New Hampshire College moved to Durham and in the fall of 1893 doors opened for the first 64 students who began taking classes at the new location. After a few decades, in 1923, the name was changed to University of New Hampshire.

During about the same period, universities and old-fashioned undergraduate colleges continued to appear all over the US, highly aided also by the economic growth and industrial expansion. In 1900, what added an extra boost to the popularity of the institutions for higher education was the creation of the Association of American Universities when the presidents of fourteen PhD granting universities decided that it was necessary to work together towards the standardization of the doctoral programs in the US. Those fourteen universities were soon followed by others thus strengthening the implementation of the policies for doctoral degrees either because they believed in the initiative, or simply because smaller and not so famous institutions were seeking prestige. To be part of an organization grants - with all other things - a recognition too. An important point if a university wanted to bring in more students, attract researchers, and eventually gain assets as an inevitable consequence of an increased popularity. Private organizations and agencies also started to take part in that standardization process acknowledging and supporting the already established roles and standards of the more powerful universities and dictating the rules and raising the bars for the rest of the schools. Although such a massive push for a standard in higher education degrees is definitely without a doubt an excellent idea, the entering of such privately funded organizations into the educational system on a national level provided them, among other things, with the power to influence certain important decisions related to the structural organization and social orientation of the academic institution. From that moment onwards, the University would never ever be neither fully private, nor completely public, and this exclusive status would later largely lead to the commercialization of the university education and research and to the conversion of the university degree in a product for sale. That, combined with the struggle for survival, fame, and power of the university itself, would prove deadly for the modern-day holders of doctoral degrees. We will return to that later in some more detail. Now, however, let’s make a big leap back in time and try to understand the very beginnings of the creation of universities. That would hopefully give us a clearer view of why certain academic structures are in existence today and how they have evolved in time.

In Western Europe the unification and the standardization of higher education began somewhere during the good old medieval times, richly spiced up with fear of swords and God, ignorance, illiteracy, diseases, and also humbly sprinkled with many small and rather scattered pockets of knowledge of various types trying to find some light in all that misery and darkness. The origins of the corporation, today called The University, are to a very big extent intertwined with the complex history of the Catholic Church which ruled, or tremendously influenced in various ways, all aspects of life at that time in the predominantly catholic countries [8].

The search for knowledge and desire for power are two things in the core of human nature which no government, or religious body can stop. They can slow them down, they can hinder their natural course in many ways, some more or less harmless like simply locking up in libraries and in deep dungeons the books which are considered not suitable for the common folk to read, some being much more spectacular performances like, e.g., setting up poor Giordano Bruno on fire and publicly burning him. The bright flames of Giordano’s pyre were a physical manifestation of people’s thirst for knowledge contrasting with the empty darkness of the minds of the men who convicted him. He was one of them by the way, or maybe more accurately to formulate it - an active supporter of the system, a Dominican friar who believed in God but who also thought there was nothing wrong to combine faith with a bit of knowledge. Two traits of the human spirit which coexist quite happily nowadays as they have previously done too on many other occasions. Like in the case of the colleges and local churches in the 18-19 century US. Or like in the case of King Boris I of Bulgaria (852-889) who, where due to political reasons, where because of his desire to strengthen the unity of the nation, decided to declare Christianity as the official religion and that led to the translation and writing of books, to the creation of places and centers where more people could be educated so that more books can be translated and written, and eventually all that exploded into what is now known as the Golden Age of cultural prosperity and enlightenment under the rule of his son and successor King Simeon I The Great (893-927). Or, as we are just about to see in the next pages, like in the case of the very Catholic Church supporting the idea and the creation of universities during the medieval period and onwards.

The medieval Catholic Church saw and felt that it was not in its power to stop, or at least divert in a desired direction, the global changes around the world which were taking place due to the slow but stubbornly relentless technical (and scientific!) progress and due to the haywire nature of political and military dynamics. The latter two, although in cohesion to some extent with the Catholic Church, quite often produced events which were not in concordance with its will at the time, and a few centuries later even managed to deliver some nasty blows to its integrity. Like the Crusades whose initial hidden agenda was to actually try to unite back the churches of Rome and Constantinople by disguising Rome’s real intentions as a full scale faith-driven military operation for reclaiming and saving the Holy Land from the Muslims who, by the way, were happily coexisting together with Jewish and Christian societies and other religious fractions from all sorts. Not to mention that the local princes did not have much time and desire to attack or invade any lands to the north-west off the most south-eastern part of modern Turkey (the southern borders of The Seljuk Empire, later The Sultanate of Rum) since they were quite busy quarreling and fighting among each other [9]. The historical events however took an unexpected turn and the two churches were separated even more when in 1204 Constantinople got ravaged by their Christian fellows-in-faith during the 4th edition of the Crusades. Or like the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther who in 1517 proposed an open academic discussion of some of the Church’s practices related to the indulgences for example and in the follow-up turmoil the Protestant movement began to flourish. Or about two decades later when Henry VIII decided to divorce Catherine of Aragon and the Catholic Church did not agree with it so the king renounced the Pope and the Church of England appeared.

So somewhere around the 13th century some of the more perceptive and calculating figures in the papal circles saw that it would be wise if the Pope had more official rights and de facto control over the church’s scattered chapters, congregations, and the various religious orders so that the church’s integrity can be strengthened and hence its influence increased [8]. At that time medieval universities in some form already existed, scattered around Europe. They were probably nothing more than guilds of masters and students. For example, at the times when The Notre Dame was nothing more but a hole in the ground, in Paris there were already quite a few of those studium generale[8]. It all began in 1245 with the establishment of a doctrine under a papal bull[9] - "Cum simus super"[10] - issued by Pope Innocent IV. A letter was sent around Christendom affirming the primacy of the Catholic Church and urging the different factions to unite under its wing. But that was not all. Under this doctrine each one of those factions was to be reformed into a Universitas[11] which in Latin translates also as a group, a whole, a corporation referring to a group of people associated in one whole. Initially, this proclamation was mostly theoretical, without meaning anything significant in reality, but it gave the church the legal tools to oversee those factions and chapters and protect them, should it become necessary, from the local power-hungry kings and bishops. Proclaiming all those groups and chapters, however, as unitary ecclesiastical pockets within the reach of the church had also an effect on the ways and means of bringing up and associating scholars with them [8]. It is a very complicated history through time, societies, and political events with the end result probably similar somewhat in a way to what happened many years later in the 18-19 century US when local churches and universities developed a close relationship with each other. It is not the goal to describe all that here but it is enough (and necessary) only to mention that once such a structure, or an organization, or a corporation of any sort is created, it will always seek ways to strengthen its positions and influence among the local population

Reviews for The Death of a Scientist

[dr3am3r · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A must-read for everyone who thinks about pursuing a PhD. I wish I had it in my hands long back then before entering grad school. This book reflects quite accurately on the situation in which PhD students, postdocs, and other non-tenure academic research staff find themselves in. It offers some really reasonable advice what to do and what not to do during and after grad school. The obstacles and the challenges one has to go through to after getting a PhD are as true as they can be and this guy has cited some very real examples. There are few topics which are solely in link with the author's academic experience and I cannot comment on those but there are also many others which imo are true for just about anyone who has gone through similar stuff.