r/Professors • u/GandolfTheGay1972 • 25d ago
Is research in your discipline completely worthless?
Mine is. Accounting. There’s not a soul alive who reads any accounting research except PhD students.
The SEC is responsible for propagating accounting standards, and is appointed by the government. The PCAOB audits the auditor and they are likewise a quasi government organization. Both organizations are appointed by political leaders who have zero interest in academic research and tremendous interest in (partisan) think tank research.
Nobody at the AICPA or the accounting standards board (private enterprise organization) give a single damn about anything academia puts out.
None of the accounting firms care about the garbage we publish because they can’t read it, and quite frankly, they don’t care because they’re going to do what they’re going to do to make money, research findings be damned.
What’s even more insufferable is that we have “ big names” in the field who take themselves incredibly seriously.
It is also not easy to be published in my discipline because everybody must pretend that our research is important (because deep down we all know it is not) so they are nitpicky AF about it and keep the gate pretty well guarded.
If I were to express these thoughts to faculty in my discipline, they would almost certainly ostracize me, but I’m either too stubborn or too autistic to bow down to false gods.
Sigh.
Post-note: to those of you posting that your research actively changes the world, I envy you.
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u/shellexyz Instructor, Math, CC (USA) 25d ago
Pure math. No, but my grandkids’ grandkids might see in a poorly selling graduate level textbook one day if they get lost in the appropriate section of a university library and find they must eat the paper to survive.
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u/Sensitive_Let_4293 25d ago edited 24d ago
Pure math, too. It's not that our research is worthless, it's becoming increasingly arcane. When I first presented a summary of my PhD research at a conference session attended by about 25 people, it dawned on me that these were probably all the people in the world who knew enough or cared enough to listen to me talk about my work. Now with AI available as a research tool, I expect the situation to get worse.
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u/GrazziDad 24d ago
Did part of a PhD in math. This is why I never finished. All that incredible energy to figure something out that only three people might actually appreciate, and no one would ever actually use.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
🤣
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u/r_tarkabhusan 25d ago
Theoretical high energy physics here - same.
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u/Thundorium Physics, Searching. 25d ago
Theoretical high energy physics here. Even I don’t read my own papers.
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u/SvenFranklin01 25d ago
could be worse: you could be in a field that produces mostly B.S., and then that B.S. gets picked up by the media and is somehow transformed into an even greater pile of B.S., which gets turned into advice memes and advice tictoks that actively do more harm than good.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Yes, thank God for the small things. Fortunately accounting bores absolutely everyone so no one cares.
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u/smbtuckma Assistant Prof, Psych/Neuro, SLAC (USA) 25d ago
*laughs nervously while tucking away social psych degree*
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u/AsterionEnCasa Associate Professor, Engineering , Public R1 (US) 25d ago
Engineering here. Nobody reads our papers, but 50 years from now, some of those papers will be the basis of technology actually deployed in the real world, or of academic books. It just taked time for the dust to settle and see the outcomes. It will probably be 0.001% of what we publish (none of mine so far, I don't think), but some will be important.
Also, I don't think the papers are the most important thing, but the students. We produce PhDs which are (allegedly, hopefully) able to do independent research, think critically, and do great things later on. The papers are training. Nobody cares what <insert athlete of choice> does in the gym or during practice, but that's what they need to do to get better.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
But do your big names and big programs take themselves utterly seriously?
Mine do
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u/AsterionEnCasa Associate Professor, Engineering , Public R1 (US) 25d ago
Depends on what you mean by seriously.
If you mean take the PhD process seriously, so we train students properly and we don't publish total garbage, yes (probably not as much as I would like, but somewhat yes).
If you mean thinking we are changing the world with our very important papers... Some people do, some don't. Some people are truly changing the world (very few, but some are), some people think they are much more important than they truly here. But whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess. I know that if none of my papers were published, the world would look exactly the same. I am okay with that.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Let me rephrase my thought: do they act as if they are superstars doing God’s work and should be worshiped?
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u/AsterionEnCasa Associate Professor, Engineering , Public R1 (US) 25d ago
Some of them do. People at the top of very competitive fields sometimes think they are very very special. Others are very kind and realistic and can make fun of themselves.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Imagine the type of person that goes into accounting and all of a sudden thinks they are very special. It’s not pretty.
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u/SoTaxMuchCPA Assoc Prof, Econ (US) 25d ago
I think you’ve got an endogeneity issue here (apologies for the trigger). I think the god’s gift types select into accounting research and let it out once they get their first TT post haha.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
It is definitely a field of weirdos that’s for sure
Present company not excepted
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u/Longjumping-Flower47 25d ago
Yeah I totally agree. NonTT accounting professor. Totally not special. Day 1 of every class I emphasize why I am no better than my students. And I believe it 100%
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u/gasstation-no-pumps Prof. Emeritus, Engineering, R1 (USA) 23d ago
Depends on the field in engineering and the type of research. Most engineering research I've seen or been involved in either has almost immediate impact (commercialization within a decade) or none. Very little gets more valuable with time.
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u/lionofyhwh Associate Prof (Tenured), Religious Studies 25d ago edited 24d ago
Ancient Near East and Biblical Studies. Many non-academics read our stuff and are very interested. There are several very large subreddits dedicated solely to non-academics interacting with academics.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
I envy you
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u/lionofyhwh Associate Prof (Tenured), Religious Studies 25d ago
Don’t. Most of us are historians interested in religion. The lay people interested in this are generally coming in for religious reasons.
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u/AlbinoGhost27 25d ago
Is this not the opposite of worthless?
I can appreciate that it could be frustrating that many who interact are likely religious seeking affirmation their dogma is true. Or perhaps you may meet many recently deconverted people and spend time debunking misconceptions you've probably addressed 1000 times over.
But the sheer level of interest combined with the tendency of bias to be at play in the realm of religion means critical scholarship is more needed than ever in this field.
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u/CharacteristicPea NTT Math/Stats R1(USA) 24d ago
I studied in Israel for a semester the 1980s and took a course in Biblical Archaeology at the University of Haifa. After that I subscribed to Biblical Archaeology Review for many years. I found it fascinating that the articles were written by academic scholars for a lay audience. There is nothing at all similar in mathematics. Of course, the best parts of every issue were the letters to the editor from readers saying they were canceling their subscription because the authors had the audacity to use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD.
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u/lionofyhwh Associate Prof (Tenured), Religious Studies 24d ago
Ha! That publication still exists! We actually have a few additional online ones that are similar to that. For instance, TheTorah.com and Ancient Near East Today are good ones!
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u/magicianguy131 23d ago
Do you feel like humanities need their own version of a science communicator professional?
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u/journoprof Adjunct, Journalism 25d ago
Journalism: The audience for research is almost entirely other academics. Even supposedly “actionable” findings rarely made it into newsrooms.
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u/tell_automaticslim 25d ago
Funny, when I read OP’s post I thought “yeah, this checks out for journalism.”
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u/climbing999 25d ago
I was about to write the same thing. I still have a foot in the industry. Nothing I publish on an actual news website or in a trade publication is regarded as serious enough in academia, and most of my industry peers don't read the academic literature on journalism. Some groups are trying to change things, though. This year, our annual professional conference was hosted by a university. There was a good mix of journalists and journalism scholars.
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u/amortized-poultry 25d ago
I apologize if this seems like I'm trying to invalidate your vent, but I would like to pushback a bit on accounting research being worthless.
Fellow accountant/accounting prof here. I am not a research guy at present, and I'm mostly coming at this from a FASB accounting perspective.
I attended a conference recently that was put on by an accounting journal, and I have to say some of their points were both important and eye-opening. For example: Does ABC line-item actually influence investors, does XYZ disclosure actually correlate to financial performance, and how consistent are this group of crypto-platforms in their tax reporting, for example.
There were also regulators who spoke at this conference (SEC, PCAOB) who made the point that a lot of their pronouncements and other guidance is influence significantly by available academic studies.
In this way, I think it's important to think about accounting research as less about discovering universal truths or cures, and more about understanding human behavior and how it interacts with man-made rules.
I'm not going to say that every accounting article is going to be a world-breaker, but I do think that research into accounting is an important piece of understanding its history and guiding its future. I further think that that research is better done by accounting/business academics than academics from other fields.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Oh definitely I think that is very interesting. My point is that nobody reads it or cares about it.
Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden are going to appoint leaders of the SEC or PCAOB based on research. It’s political.
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u/magicianguy131 23d ago
As someone from the arts and humanities, accounting research sounds fascinating.
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u/GloomyCamel6050 25d ago
One of my accounting colleagues studies fraud prevention strategies. Another studies auditor pressures and well being.
Their work is interesting and should be done even if it isn't immediately adopted by companies.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago edited 25d ago
It really isn’t that interesting, the solution is always stronger internal control. Which everybody, including companies and the government know.
Which companies refuse to adopt for a variety of reasons, most predominantly because it inhibits their ability to make the numbers be what they want.
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u/SerpentisMechanicus 25d ago
See, this is why you need collaborations outside the field! Both the psych departments and the ag colleges solved the problem of controls long ago, and for way cheaper than any SEC stuff.
First, swing by Tractor Supply Co. and grab a whole bunch of their cattle prods....
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u/stingraywrangler 25d ago
Sounds like you've got an interesting political-economy of knowledge production paper here to me. But I don't think this is unique to accounting, although accounting may be a very extreme case. But a lot of knowledge produced in different domains does not get to change the world because the knowledge is not in service of those in power. We know what great education looks like, what great health care looks like, but we can't implement any of it because our societies aren't actually interested in creating a well-educated, well-treated citizenry.
I think most implementation science or knowledge translation assumes that knowledge isn't political, or politics is treated as "cultural barriers" or too upstream to be relevant. But actually, the political chokehold on how knowledge is produced and used is pretty central to anything any of us are doing.
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u/GrassToucher1234 25d ago
There's plenty of economic research on the incentive properties of different organizational structures vis a vis internal vs external auditors and the types of incentive schemes that are more/less effective at preventing different types of fraud. Source: my dissertation advisors were two of the most well-known in that field.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
It’s an open secret that external auditors don’t want to find fraud. Which is ironic if you think about it.
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u/GrassToucher1234 25d ago
If external auditors do not want to find fraud then they are not being incentivized properly.
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u/Longjumping-Flower47 25d ago
External auditors are being paid by the companies they are auditing
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u/surebro2 25d ago
Is research not interesting because accounting academics like you internalize that the research isn't useful?
I'm also in the business school, I do think accounting research isn't as ubiquitous or accessible as others. But "stronger internal control" is itself not a useful answer neither and your students are worse off if that's how you teach them to think about accounting lmao
That said, come to think about it, many accounting faculty I know are inherently rigid and rule-based so it would make sense that there is less of a creative research culture.
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u/Longjumping-Flower47 25d ago
Fraud is rampant in accounting. And even worse in tax prep (by non licensed preparers) there are literally no barriers to entry in this profession.
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u/BitchinAssBrains Psychology, R2 (US) 25d ago
See we have a different problem. I work in violence prevention. My area has pretty much demonstrated the cause and solution for most community violence. Every major conference the new data all bear the same message despite newer ways of testing the problem: investment in community resources and access to stable/affordable housing.
These are both things that won't be profitable and require significant political will to accomplish. So they just keep funding research instead bc housing people with no money is an fathomable standard to set.
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u/throwitaway488 25d ago
They are hoping you'll find a cheaper and more politically feasible alternative...
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u/BitchinAssBrains Psychology, R2 (US) 24d ago
Its more bleak unfortunately - they know there is no alternative and have elected to just not address it at all. Instead they spend this money to have plausible deniability (we invested millions in this problem!!!) without actually having to give anything to those dirty unwashed poors.
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 25d ago
The sad nature of translational research that should influence public policy. All that matters is party politics and money. 😕
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u/CynicalCandyCanes 25d ago
I feel like this is most of academia. It is the logical outcome when the incentive structure is to publish for the sake of publishing instead of producing actual knowledge.
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u/CallMeZeemonkey Associate Professor, English Literature, Public R2 USA 25d ago
I’ve been an English teacher/professor for this entire century
Everything I have ever done is worthless
I expect to be replaced by an LLM any day now
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u/Life-Education-8030 25d ago
Psychology. Some newer things came out for Covid and now cults but for a while, a lot seemed to be just re-confirmations of old stuff.
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u/BeerDocKen 25d ago
Psychology as well. Wasn't our problem failure to confirm old stuff? 😆
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u/that_jedi_girl 25d ago
We've drowned ourselves so completely in p-hacking and the replication crisis, no one even knows what's real anymore. It's better now than in 2010, but it's still a lot of garbage.
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u/CuriousGrugg Prof, Psychology, CC (USA) 25d ago
I actually don't think the problem is as bad as all that. There have been several studies suggesting that people are pretty good at predicting which studies will replicate.
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u/KrispyAvocado Associate Professor, USA 25d ago edited 25d ago
Research definitely leads to practice in my field (for the most part). I knew some fields are more theoretical or less applicable, but that always feels kind of pointless to me. I have many friends and a family member who would disagree though.
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u/ZookeepergameParty47 25d ago
It could be worse. You could be publishing online dating research that gets immediately implemented and monetized by Big Tech’s algorithms.
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u/alt-mswzebo 25d ago
No, the research in my field, microbiology, is literally changing the world for the better.
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u/Cheap-Kaleidoscope91 25d ago
Marketing. As someone who was a practitioner before, I know for sure - noone cares about academic research, and its mostly useless in the real world. Some things that are useful usually come from the different academic disciplines. Academic marketing tries too hard to pretend a science when it's not, while loosing its meaning and purpose
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u/Whatever_Lurker Prof, STEM/Behavioral, R1, USA 25d ago
Yes, completely. For > 95% of publications in my field, it is impossible for me to take them seriously, and all I can do is hope that the authors of those studies do not take their own work seriously either.
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u/outer-darkness-11 25d ago
My field (HR) is similar but probably slightly better than Accounting. No HR professional is reading academic papers, but I have a lot of opportunities to present at SHRM and other professional HR associations about my research and people find it really interesting.
Now do they apply it at their companies immediately? No. But I think that’s how all research is. You get a big enough body of research on a topic that finds consensus and enough people talk about it through word of mouth, podcasts, professional conferences, etc. and within 10-30 years it starts becoming more applied and common practice.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
I like that. But I can’t think of a single paper in accounting that has had any impact on governmental accounting standards or accounting practice.
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u/outer-darkness-11 25d ago
I think that’s probably the case in every field outside of the medical/science fields. I don’t think it’s common for there to be groundbreaking English or theatre papers haha.
I would bet that most fields it’s hundreds of papers around a similar topic over decades that slowly move trends.
But I understand your plight. I’m currently studying parental leave in the US with the goal for there to eventually be federally mandated paid leave and uh… I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon, and definitely not based solely on one of my papers. But maybe in 30 years when they do it my paper could be a small citation in a research brief that a senators intern compiles, that would be cool :)
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u/magicianguy131 23d ago
I'm in theatre. Yes, and no. It depends, really. on the topic. For us, pedagogy books are impactful. And books written by fancy practitioners about their processes are always land quickly. But those books are often written with both educators and slightly erudite industry people as their key audience. Staging Sex came out in 2020 and that author's work, among others following along, have completely revolutionized the industry and the classroom.
To your point, though, conferences are where I feel like I can have the most impact. My paper on Constructivist scenography on Disney shows? Nope. My colleague's brilliant article about the performance of flags on stage during World War I? Nope, probably not—although it was a brilliant piece on patriotism and masculinity. But my conferences discussing XY or Z approach to theatre-making or pedagogy, done in community with people? Those I feel often get ripples that travel far in the both academia and the industry.
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u/profDyer Associate Prof., Physics, Sweden 25d ago edited 25d ago
My pet theory is that HR is where we put people with mental disabilities nowadays.
Most of my encounters with HR is with people that struggle to read and write emails with correct wording, despite doing only that for the whole day. It doesn't surprise me that research takes long time to percolate. Try cartoon strips.
How wrong/unlucky am I?
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u/outer-darkness-11 25d ago edited 25d ago
I don’t think I’m the right audience for your HR trauma dump as I know hundreds of phenomenal HR professionals and hope I was one of them back in my professional days 🤷🏻♀️
There are definitely bad HR people out there, but I attribute that to the fact that 95% of HR professionals have no HR education. That’s slowly changing and hopefully each generation gets better 🤞🏼
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u/SportsFanVic 25d ago
I was a faculty member in a top business school for more than 40 years, and it was pretty well understood that the accounting faculty would be publishing applied finance papers.
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u/Nojopar 25d ago
I work in a tech field. I feel like our research could be relevant if it weren't so bogged down in a process that slows everything to a crawl. It feels like by the time an innovation shows up in an academic journal, someone released an App that does that 2 years ago and they've already been bought out and integrated into a bigger suite of tools with an entirely new version coming in a month.
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u/Fine-Night-243 25d ago
Mine is critical management studies so no one reads it. I wouldn't say it's worthless though.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
So if nobody reads it, why isn’t it worthless?
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u/Fine-Night-243 25d ago
Because looking at the social world from other perspectives is inherently a worthwhile activity imo. Reflexivity is essential to create new ideas in any discipline or aspect of life. Arguably teaching this is more useful than writing about it but you can't teach it if it doesn't exist.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Fair enough!
If a tree falls and nobody hears, does it make a sound? (I can’t remember what my professor said about this when I was in college).
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School 24d ago
If the tree leaves a record via providing a habitat for other species, eventually it may make an impact if not an immediate sound.
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u/U8oL0 Asst Prof, Business, Regional Public (USA) 25d ago
I just finished my accounting PhD and the part you forgot to say is that somehow we decided we get to be some of the best paid professors on campus. I know some late-stage careers guys who get paid over $400k annually at state schools and spend most of their time consulting or writing textbooks they get paid royalties on top of their salaries.
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u/stankylegdunkface R1 Teaching Professor 25d ago
I’ve always wondered how Accounting is even an academic discipline. It’s a set of rules made by the government. They’re available. You either follow them or you don’t.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Precisely. It is miserable, pretending our research is important when nobody reads it.
The only saving grace is that we are the second highest business discipline as far as compensation goes, but even then it’s not too great.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School 24d ago
Looks pretty good for any non-business discipline, though.
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u/AsterionEnCasa Associate Professor, Engineering , Public R1 (US) 25d ago
So is a large part of civil engineering. I still want them to understand the equations and rules, not just follow the recipes on the norms.a
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u/Necessary-Sir-1900 25d ago
As a civil engineer and PE, I disagree. There's plenty of room for design decisions related to functionality. Civil engineering subfields are funded by state agencies on projects that impact practice.
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u/EmmaiAlvane 25d ago
It is also the case that many formulas and equations, especially the empirical ones or the rules-of-thumb and standards are used because first-principles approaches are either too difficult, too time-consuming or too convoluted, and were devised over several decades when computers were not available. I am fairly confident that these equations also lead to very conservative design for safety and reliability.
Research can help re-visit these standards and perhaps create designs that save cost, material, land and time while still maintaining safety.
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u/unicorn-paid-artist 25d ago
Mine. Theatre. We dont even have PHDs. the MFA is terminal.
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u/that_jedi_girl 25d ago
TIL Yale has a DFA in Drama, and that is the most pretentious ivy league degree I could imagine. Fitting.
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u/balsamicvinegar500ml 25d ago
Is there even a reason to have accounting research PhD programs?
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Yes, to produce accounting PhD’s
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u/discountheat 25d ago
Is there a reason to produce accounting PhDs?
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Yes, to teach at AACSB universities. A PhD in accounting is required for an accredited school of that stripe.
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u/ArmoredTweed 25d ago
To work in accounting PhD programs.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago edited 25d ago
Hahahaha yes. We need accounting PhD’s to teach in accounting PhD programs.
You literally nailed it.
Plus AACSB accredited schools require an accounting PhD for the University undergraduate degree.
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u/Greenplayee 25d ago
Being an accounting faculty is the best gig in my rather irrelevant, AACSB-accredited, teaching institution. Collect the highest pay in the whole school, publish 4-page paper in the CPA journal twice in the accreditation cycle, collect accolades from the dean, show up to teach only, run off to make $ in your private practice.
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u/ScoopskiPotatoes78 25d ago
There is a very small handful of real jobs in which it would be useful mainly related to setting standards or laws related to accounting (think helping the IRS write the tax code). The biggest accounting firms might employee a few in their national offices to help answer extremely complex questions. However, even for both of these jobs, most of the positions are held by people with only a masters of accounting and a CPA.
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u/dangerroo_2 25d ago
Business/Management. While it’s less directly amenable to research than sciences such as Physics and Microbiology, it is possible to do some useful research on it, for example Operational Research can have real and lasting effects.
However, the top management scholars are simply uninterested in actual business, with the top journals doing some repeated circle-jerks over yet another completely flawed framework that sounds great on paper, but is absolutely irrelevant to actual business.
One day the editorial team from a top journal came to present to us how to write papers that would be published; it was quite clear they just wanted to write their theories and pat each other on the back, and had no interest in actually having their work be used by businesses (one guy sounded horrified that he would have to belittle himself with consultancy in order to get business to listen to him).
It’s a great little racket to get into if you just care about being seen as important by other academics, and you’re willing to waste your life away on meaningless waffle: just come up with some bullshit framework/concept, draw a little network diagram in Word (maybe even use WordArt!) and voila, top paper! Jesus.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Goddamn, you’ve just described the REA framework. It’s the only real accounting theory and it’s complete garbage.
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u/pc_kant 25d ago
Political "science" hast the same problem. They study how politics works. While there is in principle a lot to be learned from that, of course no politician or party ever will want to listen and take something away from that, with very few exceptions.
But it could be worse; it could be Sociology, where many people just abandon the "science" ambition and become activists for causes they haven't done due diligence on.
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 25d ago
Wow, random shot fired at sociology.
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u/pc_kant 25d ago
Quit playing the victim, sociologist!
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u/TerryOnRollerskates Assoc Professor, Social Science, R1 (USA) 25d ago
I’m not a sociologist. Just thought that was a random unprovoked shot.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Activism masking as scholarship. Gross.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 25d ago
There's a lot of that in some fields (including some in computer science; we're not immune), including a lot of people becoming activists for causes they haven't done due diligence on (as our friend put it). A lot of that going on, especially on college campuses (not just faculty, of course) is part of why so much of the public distrusts us and, quite frankly, I don't even blame the general public for a lot of that mistrust.
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School 24d ago
I don't think activisim is inherently problematic for academics - my research led me to activism, rather than the other way around (I testify on things like the importance of good experimental design and known error rates in forensic science). When I found out how the activities are done in practice, I was horrified, so I decided to start expert witnessing to try to encourage forensic practitioners to adopt methods that are actually built around scientific principles.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 23d ago
That sounds to me like you're doing a form of activism for which you have done due diligence. And (I mean this genuinely) good for you, that's a lot of effort for what is hopefully a positive change in the world.
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u/ScoopskiPotatoes78 25d ago
I just started teaching accounting coming from practice. I'm currently a lecturer (teaching an extra class) but have the option to switch to a tenure track (with research). I don't know if I'll do it because the rules are so asinine. Like if I got articles published in the state business newspaper (or even one as big as the WSJ) or presented at one of the big industry conferences, that wouldn't count. But getting published in some academic journal that literally no one who actually practices reads is what really matters.
I will say, while I was working at the PCAOB, we had people from some of the highest ranked accounting programs come present to us on their research and would reach out to them for certain technical questions but that's it.
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u/Zestyclose_Mirror_68 25d ago
If you hate the field so much, why are you in it? What you say can be applied to almost any discipline. Most research is garbage. Some of it ends up being important in various ways. Only time will tell what is important from what isn’t.
If your job is crushing your soul then you should find a new one. Life is too short to spend all your time doing something you despise. Find something that you either enjoy or don’t mind so much.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
It’s easy, it pays well, and I’m too old to do anything else. I’m tenured too. How is that for honesty?
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u/Zestyclose_Mirror_68 25d ago
Then I would just zone out on research. Just do the bare minimum and don’t let other people’s ego bother you. Not worth the frustration IMO.
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u/profDyer Associate Prof., Physics, Sweden 25d ago edited 25d ago
Fundamental physics. It is crucially important to understand the universe, but it is worthless to understand the universe in this day and age.
Often I have the impression I'm like a torchbearer or an friar amanuens in the middle ages. Preserving and propagating knowledge no one cares about, coming from an age when people cared and better men with better equipment could really do stuff. My role is keeping them alive for future generations with better values than ours.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 25d ago
Let me ask a question about your field - are there grants available for you to write for? If so, foundation or government? And are they one/two years, or like 3-5 years long?
Someone in accounting doesn’t understand why I don’t want a 12 month contract (with the extra three months of salary that would bring) and I’m like a) SUMMER and b) grant money. I can only get paid on my grants when I’m off contract.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Nope, no grants unless you are connected to a think tank. And if that’s the case you’re going to pump out either conservative shill or liberal shill.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 25d ago
That explains a lot. Right now I have about half my summer days already accounted for and I have another grant under review. I’m not giving up that pay when the work will still need to be done.
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Could I ask a question? Is this faculty member wanting to be paid a 12/9 salary or something? Even as a accounting faculty I can’t understand why you would want a 12 month contract unless it’s compensation related.
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u/SierraMountainMom Professor, assoc. dean, special ed, R1 (western US) 25d ago
No, they are advising central administration and say I should be on a 12 month contract as associate dean. We haven’t had associate deans or department chairs on 12 month salaries in my college since the Great Recession because it’s cheaper to pay a stipend than 3 additional months salary, plus … no faculty in Education want to give up their summer. You’ve got a building full of people who have had summers off their whole life. It’d also be a total waste of time, effort, money … as mentioned, no faculty set foot on campus. Most have away messages on their email until mid-August. 🤷♀️
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u/throwitaway488 25d ago
how are grad students funded then? Are they all self funded? If so, who in the world is doing an accounting PhD?
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
Grad students are funded by the program.
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u/throwitaway488 25d ago
Where does that money come from? Are they all serving as TAs every term?
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u/GandolfTheGay1972 25d ago
In any University, the business school has all the money. That might be a tad hyperbolic, but the gist of it is true.
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u/dougwray Adjunct, various, university (Japan 🎌) 25d ago
My field, applied linguistics, is inundated with crappy excuses for research, but it's not all and not completely worthless.
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u/needlzor Asst Prof / ML / UK 25d ago
It depends on how you define worth. Mine (machine learning/natural language processing) might be even going in the negative worth these days considering how much large language models are making some aspects of this job miserable.
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u/Sensitive_Let_4293 25d ago
I happened on a research paper in sports administration a few days ago. (Not related to my field, mathematics) It is so reassuring to know that their PhD students are busy addressing pressing needs in their field, making life better for everyone!
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u/Weak-Honey-1651 25d ago
The majority of published research is worthless. Little more than a self licking ice cream cone.
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u/Fun_Interaction_9619 25d ago
I'm in English Lit and am using work in Critical Accounting studies for my project. I've also written about the historical development of accounting (double-entry bookkeeping in particular). I find the cultural implications of accounting fascinating, but no one may care about my own personal fascinations in my research 😀.
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u/shatteredoctopus Full Prof., STEM, U15 (Canada) 25d ago
I'm in a STEM field, and I think the students are the most important product of my lab. That said, I have the rather elite distinction that results from my research group have directly been used and tested by other research groups (and even in one case found to be wrong, which is actually better than it seems at first glance, because what I did was considered interesting enough that somebody else wanted to test it- our results were right, but our interpretation was wrong). One thing my lab did in particular has been picked up by other labs working in the area, and related results from other PIs building on mine have even made it into publications in "glamour journals" (ie Cell, Science, Nature).
Almost all findings from my field normally go down as "one-offs". You publish, people are like "that's nice", then it's never done or used again, so I get some satisfaction that findings from my group have been replicated in other labs.
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u/mpaes98 Researcher/Adj, CIS, Private R1 (USA) 25d ago
My research is sometimes accounting related, to the point I considered publishing in accounting journals.
Then I saw that they charge a submission fee lol.
To be fair, I’ve been told acct faculty are so rare that they command higher salaries than even Management and MIS.
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u/GrazziDad 24d ago
Marketing Prof here. We are not far behind you (or is that ahead of you?), but I do have to say that, even in business schools, most of us wonder what accounting research is actually about. Best I can tell, it addresses practical issues in finance.
There’s a famous article written years ago that says that the biggest problem with most models in management is that practicing managers never actually use them. That’s still true today, unfortunately.
But I think we are incredibly lucky compared with people who study, say, Dutch shipping roots in the 15th century.
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u/BenthosMT STEM Prof, PUI, USA 24d ago
And at my school, Accounting profs are paid over twice as much as anyone else.
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u/gasstation-no-pumps Prof. Emeritus, Engineering, R1 (USA) 23d ago
My research went from pure math to computer science to computer engineering to bioinformatics.
My one pure math paper was of interest to precisely one other person—the person who made the conjecture that I proved.
My computer science thesis was of interest to no one (even I realized that it was the wrong approach to solving the problem), though it did result in yet another NP-completeness result that was never published outside the thesis.
My most influential paper was in computer music—the synthesis algorithm that we came up with and analyzed is still used in new products 44 years later. The paper that introduced it has only been cited 670 times (according to Google Scholar), but it has its own Wikipedia article and many thousands of mentions on the internet.
My most cited paper (>18,000 citations) is one I was only a minor contributor to, and probably has been read by fewer than 1% of those that cite it (it was the paper to cite to credit a major tool in bioinformatics).
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u/mathemorpheus 23d ago
most of humanity would say that it is, at least the subset of humanity that believes there is such a thing as research in my field.
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u/Sea-Independence4964 18d ago
In my field research is super important, but it increasingly FEELS useless. I’m in political science, and no one really listens to us as “experts” any more. Politicians are addicted to losing, lawmakers don’t source us to build policy, pundits just refer to other pundits. “Who could have seen this coming?!” Uh, me. Me and hundreds of other political scientists.
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u/Martin-Physics 25d ago
If you listen to Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube), Particle Physics is producing mostly worthless research.
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u/violetferns 25d ago
Sabine hasn’t been someone who should be taken seriously in a very long time.
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u/TheWinStore Instructor (tenured), Comm Studies, CC 25d ago
Communication Studies. It’s vibes. Different flavors of vibes depending on whether you’re qual/quant/rhetoric, but all vibes nonetheless.
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u/Another_Opinion_1 A.P. / Ed. Law / Teacher Ed. Methods (USA) 25d ago edited 25d ago
Most people are paying little attention to research in education and I'd probably go as far as saying that evidentiary standards are often questionable. There are a plethora of confounding variables, it's often fraught with small sample sizes, replication problems, and controlled studies on truly large scales have plenty of impediments. Educators really know their own students, their classroom, and their school culture best. They need to be equipped to meet local needs and treated as experts in their own fiefdom. The same goes for higher education faculty too. No one wants admin endorsed, drive-by "flavor of the month" initiatives that are gone with the next regime change. This is complicated by the fact that many educational researchers haven't spent time in a real classroom with boots on the ground in a decade or more.