opportunity, etc.
But then I thought about it some more and it occurred to me that perhaps I should have answered "yes" or maybe "qualified yes." Not that I do not like what I am doing, but rather that my expectations about work in the academe were very different form what this work actually is - or perhaps has become recently. What is more, my graduate school did not teach me the skills necessary to succeed in this new brave academic world.
My expectations about the nature of academic work, reinforced by graduate education, were pretty much 19th century. I imagined it was about advancement of learning & knowledge, and honing my research and paper writing skills (stressed in the graduate school) were essential for a successful academic career. It turns out, however, that my expectations were wrong and that I should have learned a different set of skills.
Most of the latter day academe is not about producing knowledge, but about selling intellectual commodity - just like Hollywood and TV. The ability to sell that commodity is written into academic job descriptions. Most academic position announcement mention bringing outside funding as an important job qualification. The faculty is divided into two echelons. The upper echelons are those who bring outside funding, the lower echelons are those who do not. The former are demi-gods in the academic pantheon, the latter are just a tiny notch above teaching or research assistants. That is particularly true about private institutions, but I suspect that public colleges follow the suit.
Academic publishing is no fundamentally different than writing for commercial publishing industry. You do not have to have any particular research skills - all you need is entrepreneurial skills to procure a contract with a publisher and then muster a bunch of grunts to write and submit contributions which you then repackage and sell under your own name (as so and so, ed.) An important element here is the ability to sense what will sell, which typically entails regurgitating what paying customers already know and want to hear. Ditto for successful research grant proposals.
So the skills that they should emphasize in graduate schools are those of a used car salesman not that of a researcher. It is not that research is not important in the academe - it is, but only to a point. To really make it, one must be a used car salesman, ideally but not necessarily with research skills. Entrepreneurship can effectively make up for any shortage of research skills by hiring grunts who do the actual research.
I believe this is true of most workplaces in the US - producing things will not get you very far, selling them will. I imagine that this is even more pronounced in the IT industry - there are many grunts extremely skilled in
code writing, but those who make it salesmen who package and market other people's code. This realization negatively impacts my job satisfaction. I thought that academe offered a refuge from this neo-liberal hell, but this turned out to an illusion.
Wojtek