Why professors can be such jerks and why this matters now

When I quit my academic career and started working for a tech startup seven years ago, I initially focused on learning the technical skills that the job required. I had wrongly assumed that my biggest challenge would be my relative lack of technical knowledge. But as I soon realized, my biggest deficit was that I came from the bizarre and dysfunctional culture of academia.

Just so you know where I’m coming from, my academic career had been as a philosophy professor. After a dozen or so years as a faculty member, and a few years after receiving tenure, I quit and joined a tech startup as a software engineer.

Academia has a reputation for being petty, cutthroat, and full of jerks. Believe me, I know from years of experience that this reputation is well-deserved. Lots of people have asked me why it’s so bad in academia. In my opinion, this nasty culture is caused by a combination of the tenure system, a glut of supply in the academic job market, and an economic famine. This environment is capable of turning reasonably nice people into jerks.

For a long time, the poisonous culture of academia only affected faculty. But because of the pandemic, the factors that created this culture are now suddenly capable of destroying the university system as we know it.

Misconceptions about tenure

For those who haven’t lived in the tenure system, I’ll explain a few things about tenure and try to clear up some…