Encounters with (tenured) people.

The other week I was talking on the phone with a friend in psychology who got his Ph.D. when he was like mid-career in another sector, and is now (tenured) at a decently rural regional campus at what I thought was a decently-funded and well-run state university system.

He's tried to make it work and has gotten tenure, but he hasn't really made it work for the long-term for years, and he hasn't found the right opportunity to transfer into a professorship in a major metropolitan area.

He's now stuck it out through his first sabbatical, and he was telling me that he's coming back to the city this summer onward and is going to scope out other jobs that might let him switch out of academia and move back.

We were also talking about coronavirus effects, and he said that his classes can't get too much larger, and if they do, or if they ask him to teach another class, he's out.

I was pretty floored, since I had thought that he had had it pretty good, all things considered.

A few weeks before that, too, I caught up with a friend from my Master's who now has tenure at a top-tier university in a major metropolitan area, and though she's happy with her family, it seems like she has malaise, and is just kind of stuck working on her book that expands ideas from the last chapter of her first book.

I also saw a research notice for an old professor of mine, and they were still making some same point about their research that they were making years ago, like it was some ground-breaking thing that absolutely everyone should know and that should change the way that absolutely everyone thinks.

It was like my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) observed to me last year, that you lose track of people you know who remained in academia, and then you find them years later and they're still saying the same thing, it's kind of sad.

He also said that that's apart from the sadness of the content of what they're saying, since all too often it's something that's pretty simple but is just dressed up to brand themselves or to make themselves look like they're some kind of movers and shakers, and they're just like this for years at a time.

"It's kind of pathetic," he was like.

. . .

(He was saying this in regards to lifelong learning; he was saying that people he knows who aren't in academia have continued to learn and they learn even more stuff and more vigorously and more rewardingly so than the people he knows who remained in academia.)