Sanction of the victim: professors

"Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors."
        -H.L. Mencken

I think that some of the smartest people I have ever met are professors.

Wait. I need to clarify. Many of the dumbest people I've ever met were professors. In fact, I believe the absolute dumbest man I ever ran across was a professor at the university where I study.

Anyway, there are some smart guys in there, too. Some of the greatest inventions have come about because some professor at a university somewhere spent long nights working on a problem with his graduate students. Some of our conveniences exist because a professor somewhere, or maybe a graduate student, had an itch to make some cool idea happen. By the way, "graduate student" is another way to say "slave." A graduate student is nothing more than a very smart person who is being paid the same as if he was working as a waiter, but is in fact working as a highly skilled engineer, designer, or analyst. A university is a business just as much as any other business you've ever heard of; they just try to hide it a little bit. And their low-level employees, the ones who do the grunt work and keep the company running, but get paid the least, are graduate students.

So anyway, I think that professors really get a raw deal. Most professors probably don't break a $100,000/yr paycheck. Don't get me wrong, that's lots of money. If you design something really great in a university setting, though, you usually don't end up getting the same compensation you could get in a business setting.

Imagine if Bill Gates had been a professor at a university when he created Windows. Imagine that Windows was a university-funded project, something basically owned by the university. Imagine that Windows ended up being just as popular as it is today, but Bill Gates didn't get the company and all that jazz. Instead, he kept getting a $200,000 paycheck every year. Doesn't that seem about equal to you? The amazing thing is that Bill Gates took a chance on his vision, on his own great idea, and made so much money that he can compete with royal families or the Rockefeller family, who have been amassing money for generations. Gates has more than them, and he did it in his own life time. That last observation is a page in the book of my buddy Rob Beck, but I thought it was insightful so I included it.

Well, this is the main reason that academia was never very appealing to me. The return that you get for really great research just seems really limited: you get to fly to a conference, watch a bunch of other really smart dudes talk about their projects, tell them about your own, and have job security.

Job Security. For some reason it's really important to have job security. I guess if you're not a risk-taker, and you just forget to leave school, you become a professor. I guess that taking the initial risk, doing research with no income for a while, is where the big money comes in. I lost my job a few months ago, and I admit that I was scared, because I didn't have another job lined up. I was terrified. But I think that anyone with a decent set of skills and some work ethic can find a job that at least pays the rent and provides food to eat.

Anyway, the reason I say "sanction of the victim" is because any of those guys could go do his own work somewhere and make a ton of money, but they all allow the University to push them around. They become the victims, but only because they are afraid to make major changes to their surroundings. They are the victims, but not at gunpoint. They are the victims because they choose to be. They sanction their own victim-hood! It's really sad, but at least we as a society get some cool stuff out of it, like the TLB in your L2 cache. I don't sanction taking from a man that which is most intimately his - his inventions, ideas, and creations - but if he throws it at me willingly, I don't sanction wasting it either.

To learn more about the whole "sanction of the victim" thing, I recommend reading a book or two by Ayn Rand. I just learned the other day that "Ayn" is not pronounced "Anne," but it's actually like the word "eye" with an 'n' on the end of it. Start with The Fountainhead, and then read Atlas Shrugged. Or, if you're a real book lover, start with "We the Living," then go to the other two.

I would only be a professor if I didn't care at all about money. I think I can make much more money being an entrepreneur than a professor. If you are doing it because you love it or because it is your life-long dream, that's respectable, but don't let the university push you around.

Don't support the machine, man!