I agree to some extent, but the whole "culture war" dimension of this question is far less important than people think. It has much more to do with corruption and broken incentive structures than with the identitarian critiques being pumped out by poorly-funded humanities departments. Until getting so much attention recently, they were at worst a minor check on what really has been an undeserved intellectual hegemony of STEM. Sticks and stones really. There are certain critiques that have been accurate enough to stick, and STEM should learn from those. The rest are noise.
I think even now the Confused Critique Industry is largely just a distraction from the deeper, internal issues: No jobs for new graduates, abuse of grad student labor, no innovation, too many labs lazily churning out incremental work just to secure their own careers in a climate of precarity, and so on.
After all, the real target of these kinds of articles is obviously the supposedly right-wing extremist "science deniers" who reject the critical theory stuff even more strongly than scientists themselves do.
We need to clean our own house. I can't even keep track of how many brilliant people I personally know who have left academic research. It's really very tragic and our duty as citizens should be to ignore all the petty distractions and focus on doing what needs to be done. If the institutions are lost and beyond reform, we need to work on building new ones that work for us. The current crises could be great opportunities for this.
The real reason so many have left academia is that it requires loads of work and skill but pays like shit.
I don’t think it’s even vaguely to do with any of this “lack of free exchange of ideas” nonsense that a particular group of people love to bang on about.
Plus if they have something currently implementable as opposed to far theoretical why not go into the private practice to actually do it and learn more?
I am one of those (adjective intentionally discarded) people who left research to become a software developer.
I do agree with most of what you said, though. I left a PhD program without finishing after six years because:
1. I wanted financial security to start a family
2. I was not dealing well with the stress of navigating the Kafkaesque graduation process
3. Turns out market salary outside of research is pretty high even if you don't finish the degree
And I do feel vindicated in that as a software developer I'm getting positive performance reviews and feel like I'm making an impact on the organization.
One thing I want to add:
People's perception of scientific institutions will always be inextricably tied to their perceptions of schools (all levels of schools!) and K-12 schools are troubled institutions that mistreat a lot of young people, to say nothing of teaching misleading content or outright falsehood in (e.g.) history class. I, with my early-blooming aptitude for everything bookish, privileged college-professor parents, and serviceable athletic talents, had a pretty easy time in school. So trust in institutional science came naturally to me and eroded only painfully.
People from different backgrounds have harder times, and those with the least aptitude for (say) science have the hardest time.
> After all, the real target of these kinds of articles is obviously the supposedly right-wing extremist "science deniers" who reject the critical theory stuff even more strongly than scientists themselves do.
The National Basketball Association, with its overwhelmingly liberal player base, has all kinds of trouble with the conspiracy theories its players wind up believing and talking about in public (shape of the Earth, moon landing, and of course all kinds of stuff about Coronavirus).
I mention this, not just out of contrarianism, but because K-12 teachers famously mistreat young black men with athletic ambitions (if you follow the human interest side of the NBA you will hear a lot of stories to that effect), and because as they get older they discover what amounts to a conspiracy to cover up wrongs done to their ancestors (it was and maybe still is possible to get a K-12 education in Tulsa without ever learning about the Tulsa massacre for example).
Which is all a long-winded way to say that we're reaping what the education system has sown as well as the institutions of science.
I think even now the Confused Critique Industry is largely just a distraction from the deeper, internal issues: No jobs for new graduates, abuse of grad student labor, no innovation, too many labs lazily churning out incremental work just to secure their own careers in a climate of precarity, and so on.