After I read How to Leave Academia by
Rani Neutill, I can see why this week’s theme is “You Are Unwise to Lower Your
Defenses”. This reading follows her journey from being a professor in academia for
16 years and being treated unjustly by being denied tenure until she finally decided
that she wants to leave academia. She wanted to leave academia for a multitude
of reasons but particularly because she thought it wasn’t good for her mental
health and she didn’t like the cutthroat environment. Through this week’s
reading I finally understood why there is such a prevalent cutthroat
environment in academia, it is because there is such a competitive field to get
a job in, so people want to make sure their own job is secure. I finally got a
sense of how professors are feeling when they have worked so hard to finish
their postdoc education, hustled to get a job, and then finally face the
hostile environments within.
For this week’s video I connected
Neutill’s piece on the competitiveness of getting a job in academia with the
competitiveness and pressures a lot of Asian students will feel about their
academics. So below is a video of how this intense academic stress causes
students to the extremes of suicide. Hence, my question is how do we get rid of
or reduce this competitiveness to a healthy amount without escalating it to become
a cutthroat and hostile environment?
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