Day 17/183: Oh, piss OFF, you exceedingly privileged tosspot

[nanila]

I'm not usually a fan of the articles contributed by members of the academic community to the esteemed publication Nature, but this one really pissed me off.

"Design your own doctoral project" by Jesko Becker.

I warn you, take a deep breath and brace yourself for an onslaught of unabashed, tone-deaf horseshit if you decide to click that link. Reading it made me want to scream. A lot. Because so very few people in the world are in a position to spend months or years, as this author clearly did, doing a vast amount of unpaid labour in order to cook up a doctoral project and then chasing funding for it. You have to already be nicely sorted out for that. This aspirational bullshit is exactly the kind of thing that puts off less privileged members of the academic community (which, M. Becker, is 99.999999% of them) from pursuing doctoral work in the first place, or makes them feel like failures when they can't complete it. Doctoral work is already very badly paid, and even if you are lucky enough to land a funded position, the funding is almost always insufficient to cover the actual duration of projects. Nearly everyone with a PhD that I have ever met in the UK worked at least a couple of months on their doctoral theses without pay. It is an absolutely shite system and it is not to be encouraged. So don't go telling people, "You don't need funding, just follow your dreaaaaams!" People have to pay rent. They have to eat. Some of them have families to care for. They need money to do those things.

It doesn't just take "autonomy, determination and perseverance" to make an unfunded doctoral project happen. It takes MONEY, and not just money for the project. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM, M. Becker. You are not the solution. Bugger Off.

Comments

[silveradept]

Mr. Becker does make it sound like his own setbacks were minor inconveniences at best, instead of the sort of thing that would sink a project right from the beginning. I had enough trouble and debt from collecting my Masters' so that I could work at the entry level of my preferred work, and I can't imagine what trying to do a doctorate on top of that would be like, while working in some manner to pay the bills that would definitely still be there, even if I was accepted as a doctoral candidate (and so some of those expenses would have been covered.)

I can't imagine shopping it around as long or as much as he did until someone decided it was a worthwhile thing to do.