Honorable Forum: Scholarship, research, science; all are endeavors of honesty. Their core is about holding one's own against the slippery slopes of bs, not about having an easy time of it. There is always some pressure to sell your soul to the power structure, to buss your way to fame and fortune--or even to scrape a bare existence out prostituting your credentials for "mere" money. It's like the old "boiling the frog" process--you keep going along with the incremental increases in temperature until it's too late to hop out of the pot. Unless . . .
Unless you make a career of hopping so much that you get better and better at it. But even then, where do you draw the line? How much bs do you tolerate, especially when there's a mortgage to pay or endure hell at home--until you lose it. Well, there's always rose-colored glasses. I wouldn't recommend it (after all, I could have been just one of the unlucky ones), but sticking tight to principles is a good way to learn a different way from the school of hard-knocks (and of acquiring a flawed resume and enemies upstairs). If you can get past probation in a govt job, or tenure in academia, you can exercise quite a bit of intellectual/academic freedom if you can become inured to the slings and arrows of outrageous hierarchies and just "do your job." Such folks are real heroes--they scrupulously stand up for the taxpayers who pay their salaries and/or succor the little students that come unto them (then cast those fingerlings upon the precipitous frothy waves of survivorship curves and hope the best ones survive rather than the worst. 50/50 would be a decent ratio, but 10/90 would probably be fortuitous . . . (Fight to preserve tenure for its original purpose: to insulate the insolent from the arbitrary hierarchy of administrations--academic freedom means academic diversity--not for economic "security.") "Consultancies" probably are the worst. These are the real whore-houses of science, spawned in the well-intentioned, but self-righteously tossed-together expediencies like EPA, ESA (Endangered Species Act, not necessarily the other ESA), and all the other little _EQA's, ad infinitum. But, the money's good, and the "opportunities" for advancement are better. A real F_ _ _ _ _ _ bargain! The best of you can either seek out the few good universities and colleges left, or better yet, if you can stand it, stick it out in one of the bigger, heavily-infested ones, gather others to the cause, and transform these sclerotic institutions into something worthy of the challenge of resisting the influence of power that is grinding academic freedom, intellectual development, and service to humanity into dusty pits of ideological conformity. Or replace them with a new generation of learning loci. The ether's the limit! Or is that asking too much? WT
