Thursday, January 22, 2015

Big Thirsty on the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy. Have YOU ever hosted it?


Starting when I was a talented kindergartener, I was often at the receiving end of jealousy from other kids. This didn't stop when I became an adult: several times during my academic career, I've had to grapple with professional jealousy.

The worst was when I was an Accursed Visiting Assistant Professor. I was the best-funded person in the physics department. The department was so dysfunctional, though, this obviated me from getting the accursed "visiting" removed from my title, amazingly. I got a tenure-track position somewhere else, but it kills me that those bastards got to keep the overhead on my grant.

Of course, when I graduated from high school and went off to a "most selective" college, I stopped being the most talented kid in the class, since I was now one among many. I got over it. In more recent years, however, there's been something new for me: feeling professional jealously myself.

So, have you hosted it toward others? More to the point, has it ever become a serious problem? How do you deal with it?

(Above is a picture I took of the Milky Way, just to make you jealous. The horizon appears to curve upward because I have a fisheye lens: eat you heart out. When I was an undergrad, I took organic chemistry and got an A in it, just to annoy all the premeds.)  ;-)

26 comments:

  1. Professional jealousy? Yes, I have (RGM - feel free to delete this).

    I was jealous of the guy who wrote a 45-page takedown of a certain CM troll's career.
    Still am!
    Not nice, I know, but one should be honest, prof.

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    1. Ok, heck yes, and it gets worse every time I go to a conference and see some teen-age looking hotshot give a dynamite talk as the featured speaker at a major conference.

      Hey, one of these won a Fields Medal recently (top award in mathematics; similar to our Nobel). so at least I recognized greatness when I saw it. :-)

      The longer I stay at my 12 hour teaching load university the more my discipline passes me by. And when I finally get some time to work on my own (pathetic) stuff, some snowflake shows up at the door explaining that they missed "my class" (which one?) because they overslept, misread the schedule, etc.

      But at least I have a job. Better people than I do not.

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    2. What Harriet said. In both comments. Sometimes I feel like I've been removed by the author.

      I took a position at a small, teaching-focused school so that I wouldn't have to chase grants; my research ideas were never all that, anyhow. But the field is certainly passing me by.

      If you teach a 12-hour load, you don't have much time even to keep up with the literature and still have a life. I prefer to have a life, but I'm beginning to regret that decision a little.

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  3. I'm so jealous of math and science professors who have "checkable" disciplines so rich in content, while I'm left with my poor humanities pals "sitting in a circle, holding hands, and singing 'Kumbaya.'"

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    1. Don't worry, the ed school is doing its damnedest to get us to teach that way, too. But of course, Dr. Johnson would agree with Alexander Pope's observation that "The proper study of mankind is Man." And as Oscar Wilde observed, "There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope."

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    2. More seriously: for the works of man to compete with the works of God, that's a tall order.

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    3. Nice call back, Kimmie. I remember that day. It was one of the times Frod quit the page. Here's the link which captures the whole insulting mess .

      I've always loved that astronomer joke in the post, too.

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    4. There's the other one about women making better astronomers because they aren't obsessed with the size of the scope.

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    5. Kids, kids, at nice. I'm genuinely sorry you feel this way. I am certainly not jealous of you.

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    6. I'd be happy for our math/science people's salaries if it meant I could still sing kumbaya and do poetry circles.

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    7. I put my (quite large) lit class in a circle yesterday to introduce themselves, and one them said "this feels like group therapy." It's clearly not their default, or favorite, idea of a furniture arrangement. (Also, we did not sing kumbaya, or recite any poetry).

      Of course, at least at my school, the up-and-coming thing, even (perhaps especially) for some scientists (especially engineers; do other scientists consider them scientists, or am I opening another can of worms there?) is the 360-degree classroom, with whiteboards and screens on all four walls, and students seated around reconfigurable group/pod tables in the middle. I actually like it (give or take the eye/neck strain involved in craning this way and that to see/hear things/people), but I'm not sure whether it will catch on. It's cheaper than a classroom with student computers in rows of some sort (which is mostly what it's replacing; students will now be expected to bring their own devices), but more real-estate-intensive, I'm pretty sure, than chairs-in-rows classrooms of various sizes.

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    8. As Walt Whitman observed, "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." Please don't think I don't enjoy poetry. You must confess, however, that some ways of doing it are better than other ways. Also, some of these ways are not conducive for the teaching of other, very different subjects, which I am presently trying to resist having rammed down my throat.

      Also, Reg and Hiram: Dick jokes? Really? Is that the best you can do? They're not even factually correct: astronomers of all kinds like telescopes with larger apertures (oh, go look it up), since they collect more light.

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    9. P.S. Stapling dicks to the floor are not dick jokes. THAT's deadly serious! (Twitch!)

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    11. I may stick around for now, just to annoy you, Kimmie.

      Say, why don't your write something and post it? I've always enjoyed what you've written, and I'm not kidding.

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  4. I don't think about it much, but when I do my professional jealousy is focused on a very small group of colleagues: my former fellow graduate students in the same research group, my "doctor-brothers". It's not intense, and we're friendly towards each other on the rare occasions we meet at conferences. They're not at vastly more prestigious places (state schools, or second-tier private), but live in liberal/cosmopolitan states or cities, within easy reach of richer mathematical environments, while I sit in an isolated, conservative backwater. They probably teach slightly better undergraduates (my state's high schools are very weak). Have they done better as researchers? No, their pub lists are no better than mine, and at this point I'm more active than most of them. But they were all promoted (to full) quite a few years back, and I haven't been. They all landed in departments with an existing group in our specialty, while I came to a place where the few people who cared about it one by one left, leaving only the opposition and the indifferent. Plus currently we have idiotic administrators who seem to base their promotion decisions on RMP (the place is not academically serious at the UG level). So I'm stuck feeling that recent or future research success would do nothing to improve my situation; and not getting any younger. Emigration still looks like a viable alternative.

    Frod, you were an undergraduate? I skipped that stage altogether.

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    1. Oh, it was lots of fun. They had these people called "girls": they were fascinating!

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  5. Because I'm region-locked, I'm the only one of my graduating class who doesn't already have a full-time teaching position. My best friend got a tenure-track job right out of the gate. Another former grad student (who was a holy terror and altogether unpleasant to be around, but that's another subject), got a tenure-track job, then left it for one that her Master's institution created specifically for her. (Incidentally, the second job is in my region, so I'm a bit angry/bitter because *I* could have gotten a position there if she wasn't so . . . infuriating).

    So . . . yes. I'm in the throes of professional jealousy right now.

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  6. I was, I got over it when I got my TT job...

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  7. That's a lovely picture, Frod! And I'm not jealous, because I have no ambition to take pictures of the milky way.

    That's the key issue, I think, we tend to be jealous only of those doing things we'd like to be able/have the chance to do. Oddly, I most often feel jealous lately of those who are get to participate in curricular assessment and/or decision-making. After 15 years at my institution, I feel like I've got some useful ideas about the subject, but, as a non-tenure-track faculty member who doesn't do service (and doesn't want to become an administrator, which seems to be the other route to having that kind of input), I tend to hear about the results of such conversations, rather than having a voice in them. I'm not quite sure how to solve that, though I do think jealousy, in moderation, can be a useful goad toward a more satisfying professional life. Of course, it can also point out structural problems which we are (as far as I can tell) helpless to solve; that feeling of helplessness is (according to actual, published studies, I'm pretty sure) definitely *not* conducive to a satisfying professional life.

    Although I'd like to have more time to spend on research (and would really, really, like a sabbatical, or at least a summer off, for a whole host of reasons), I don't feel tremendously jealous of those with lighter teaching loads and research requirements. Maybe that's because I'm able to devote enough time to research to make slow-but-steady progress in my current situation (and because I'm in a field that, thankfully, doesn't require tremendously expensive resources for research, and work for a school with quite good library/digital resources, and live in a location that offers relatively close and inexpensive access to even more). Or maybe it's because I spend much less time talking and hearing about research than about teaching/curricular matters; I'll have to check my internal jealousy meter next time I'm at a conference.

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  8. I don't suffer it myself, but I see it in a small handful of colleagues approximately the same age as me whose PhD supervisors were (and still are) rock stars in our field (we're still young enough that they're either still active or just now on the verge of retirement); they desperately want to be at the top of their field too, and get the recognition and respect that their former supervisor does, and despise anyone else our age who shows any promise of rising to the top. This one colleague, whose PhD supervisor was nationally considered the top in the field for a couple of decades, is a particular basket case of jealousy and envy. My own supervisor is renowned (interviewed often on national media etc.), but luckily me and all of his grad students sometimes had discussions pointing out what he had given up to get there (no serious relationships, no kids, etc), which we admitted we weren't willing to give up ourselves, and because of all that we have much healthier perspectives about our own achievements (or lack thereof), and we've all got no problem saying 'good on ya' to any of our colleagues who really shine.

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  9. I'm not jealous so much of academic achievements, as I am of inequity in load: our department has some stellar slackers and I'm not one of them. I see how year after year, because of their personalities or their lack of abilities, they are allowed to continue to slack. This makes more work for me, and because I'm not a slacker, I do the work.

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  10. I'm in Big Science (tm). These days barely in, what with a 12 hour load and all, but still. My dissertation data was taken over a long summer; alternating time on the equipment with two other projects. That's not usual, but we'd been thrown together when the Program Advisory Committee (AKA Big Science God) declared that none of the projects had quite enough manpower alone but we could go ahead if we collaborated. No one wanted to go last for fear that the machine would break partway through.

    Any way, the other two thesis students had sexier projects than I did (mine had been plenty sexy when I agreed to it and the theorists we're saying we had a good chancing of making the fist observation of [esoteric science thing], but in the mean-time they'd moved on and now predicted a null result which we got to world-class high precision).

    The other two students were also smarter than me. And better scientists, too.

    And I might have a wee little bit of imposter syndrome, but I am still convinced that one of them really and truly is by better in those ways, and the other is no slouch.

    So I was jealous even then. Badly.

    Oddly, life's little vicissitudes and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have left me the last of us still in the game.

    It may be a triumph of stubborn mediocrity, but it has taken some of the edge of the jealousy.

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  11. Whenever I feel a pang of professional jealousy, I think of a man of my acquaintance, a renowned and accomplished Hamsterologist. Despite his highly-cited publications, his prestigious appointment, and his stratospheric salary, he nursed a lifelong grudge: He was never awarded the top honor in his field, the Capybara Medal. He died wealthy, celebrated, and embittered.

    Reflecting on this man's life and career makes me count my blessings. You could say I'm content in my mediocrity. I would counter that I'm happy to bloom where I've been planted. And I get a lot of fulfillment from seeing the accomplishments of my best students.

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