Academic mediocrity not surprising

As someone who currently teaches at an Ivy League school, sadly I must say the optimism regarding America is premature and exaggerated, while the pessimism regarding Israel barely scratches the crisis' veneer.

For years now, the humanities and social sciences are going in circles around themselves in an endless cycle of ongoing chatter, without saying anything original. It is no coincidence that in recent decades it is difficult to point to a philosopher, sociologist, or any academician who left a mark on our lives.

Professors and their students publish unreadable articles packed with big words: Deconstruction, hybrid interpretation, and of course, the "posts" – post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-Zionism – which mostly express increasing frustration towards society.

Frustration

It is easy to understand the frustration and to realize why academic thinking has reached a nadir when we examine the ridiculous salaries paid to thinkers. In the US, a humanities professor at the start of his career makes 40-45 thousand dollars a year.

In the social sciences the starting salary of the same professor is 45-50 thousand dollars a year – and this after he earned three degrees and sometimes even a post-doctoral degree.

On the other hand, if that same professor would have ended his studies after one degree only, instead opting for a managerial position, his average annual salary as a college graduate would stand at 51,000 dollars. Had he chosen to work in the financial markets, he could have doubled this sum.

In other words: The return for two advanced degreed, a PhD, long and poor student life, and endless investment in demanding research is a dramatic decline in salary.

Turning into Chinatown

Those who think the problem only exists in the humanities and the like should abandon this illusion: Not many people will perform demanding biology or physics research in order to earn less than those who manage a small investment portfolio. A talented American aspired to reach Wall Street, not Harvard.

Therefore, it is clear who will be America's next professors: Immigrants, foreigners and locals who have no chance of finding work in the free market.

American universities are turning into Chinatown and Little Bombay – ethnic ghettos. The Americans, who are used to transferring low-end jobs to the Far East are not concerned even when they turn into strangers at the institutions they themselves established, as long as they deliver the goods.

And they will deliver the goods even if they don't shine, as long as the standard of living in India and China remains too low to tempt those foreign professors to return home.

In Israel the situation is even graver, because professor salaries are low even compared to the pathetic salaries they can secure in the US.

This leaves local academia replete with those who cannot immigrate. Instead of taking advantage of the serious crisis faced by US academia in order to keep our brightest minds at home, encourage PhD studies in Israel through generous scholarships, and nurture a generation of young tinkers free of worries of how to make a living, we encourage them to get drawn into academia's Chinatown.

The salaries there, even if ridiculous in American standards, are still a goldmine in Israeli terms. Do not be surprised that under such conditions only frustrated and not particularly talented individuals aspire for an academic career. The same economic reasons that saw the status of teachers deteriorate are doing the same to the status of professors, so do not be expecting an end to the crisis

The writer is a lecturer at Cornell University and at the Jezreel Valley College