How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
19th May 2017
And not in a good way.
Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders.
Much like the nomenklatura of the old Soviet Union, and I suspect the resemblance is more than coincidental.