My hunch: tenured arbitrary behavior is the biggest barrier to alt-ac, and healthy academic communities.

I've been thinking to my own experience with arbitrary behavior from tenured professors, which has been an extreme form of common dynamics (no continuity in feedback and random "shoot from the hip" reversals of course, delays in reading emails, etc.).

I've also been thinking to my going out to apply for and interview for non-academic jobs, and the confusion that I've encountered.

Since people there are mostly familiar with undergraduate and masters degrees, they simply don't get how I can be working on a project for years, and be unsure of where I'm at or what I need to do to complete it or what my timeframe is for finishing.

(My hunch is that if they have encountered people writing long papers, it's at the masters level, which has pretty standardized timeframes for capstone projects.)

So, what I'm increasingly realizing is, is that the arbitrary behavior of tenured professors is a *huge* barrier to this "alt-ac" employment, reducing the effectiveness of students' candidacy; if they make it to the interview stage with non-academic jobs, they're simply not taken as seriously, because of the confusion due to the huge difference in professional standards.

Thus, it doesn't really make sense to pursue a Ph.D. degree for academic jobs, and it doesn't make sense to pursue it for "alt-ac" jobs; although it seems like a program might have their shit together and you could get out in time, departmental cultures can easily shift over the time it takes to finish coursework and exams and hit the diss phase, and thus it's just too big a risk, if you're worried about employment.

Thus again, it seems like tenured professors are creating a hell of their own making.

If they simply got their shit together, they could attract smart people, who they enjoy interacting with.

But, most of them won't, and so they're driving out better candidates, and are attracting naive sycophants and the crazy rich...

People on my campus are already commenting that so many entering students are just naive, or just rich and busybodies and crazy troublemakers.

I would hate to be a tenured professor right now, it must be getting so increasingly unpleasant.