guess what? when people get jobs, their poverty levels improve. no, really. people in academia do research on that.
Let me start by saying that I loved being in academia. Even though graduate school was incredibly difficult since I did it while raising three kids, there were aspects of it that I really loved. I would’ve stayed in academia, if I’d been able to find a job there. It was painful turning away and moving back to the other world. I adored teaching and conducting my research, analyzing data, writing papers. There were certainly parts I didn’t like – the incredibly petty squabbles, the politics, the lack of perspective – but I’d have taken that life if I could’ve gotten it.
I must also acknowledge that people might ridicule my research, even though I found it terribly fascinating. I wasn’t trying to cure cancer, of course, but I thought my research questions were very interesting, and the data were often compelling. Still. I studied pronoun use and what it reveals about us, psychologically.
So I stand in my own glass apartment and throw a little pebble at this line from an academic paper I edited yesterday:
There is strong evidence that the drop in neighborhood-level white poverty rates in central cities has been caused by the decline in neighborhood-level white unemployment rates.
Really? When people get jobs, their poverty levels drop? REALLY? I am certainly not disparaging the writing (academic-style, such a wimpy passive voice but it’s how it’s done), or the discipline (sociology), or the finding (though I could’ve told them that). It’s just so ……… academia.
.
Yes, I’m in academia, and I frequently think that. My field, library science, especially seems to have a lot of “well, duh!” research, but I see plenty of it in medicine, too. My favorite was that they decided that people who get migraines frequently get many other types of headaches, too. Gosh – all they had to do was ask me to find that out! However, I guess even the obvious needs to be appropriately documented…
On her own blog, janna just wrote a post titled..Yay- Snowden!
i agree…..my discipline, social psychology, seems among the highest on the “duh factor.” but then again, processes need to be documented, and anyway, lots of counterintuitive findings emerge when you least suspect them.
STILL. As people get jobs, their poverty levels improve. Still. Dude.
Apparently there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but it would appear that sometimes there is.
I can’t tell you how hard this made me laugh. I still giggle when I remember this comment.
Oy. I’m trying to think of something really insightful and incisive to say here, but I’m not coming up with too much — and maybe that’s the lesson here: when one doesn’t have anything to add, perhaps one ought not to say anything at all.
On her own blog, Jocelyn just wrote a post titled..As promised
BINGO! That’s the best point of all.
(note: i get a little bit of an embarrassed feeling when I remember some of my own papers…..some were fantastic and important, but one or two,…)