Reflections of 2024: Part 1

Man, what a rough year.

I knew it was going to be wild during the second half of 2024, with the double-loading teaching with a brand new course and 4 conferences (3 international and 1 local) and too many climbing competitions. But I didn't expect it to take such a huge toll on me. In particular my motivation to keep going in an academic career has taken a huge dip. Not great timing given that I am supposed to go up for promotion and tenure next year!

What is the point of academic research?

In the world of academia, the only promotion that matters in your career is getting tenure. On paper, it means being promoted from "assistant professor" to "associate professor", which doesn't seem like much to the layperson. To academics, this promotion is really important for two main reasons. The first reason is the obvious practical one. Getting tenure essentially means having a job forever (until you die or choose to retire or get retired by a country's laws on the retirement age). This sounds like a deal too good to be true. But this sort stability matters for people's lives and provides a nice foundation for a good life.

The second reason is a bit more nuanced, but getting tenure also means you are recognized as a legit person of the field of research that you are committed to. Seniors and peers and colleagues and important university admin people agree that your research contributed important scientific knowledge about topic X. Not getting tenure is like a major rejection from the community that you have associated yourself with for the past 10+ years.

It is not easy to get tenure at many institutions, including my own. Heck, most academics do not even have an opportunity to go up for it if they did not manage to land a tenure-track position after their PhD. These sorts of circumstances over-inflate the value academics attach to getting tenure, and to be honest, it warps the research program and goals taken by the individual. I'll admit this sort of thinking has permeated my own research: I think in terms of "years to tenure" and explicitly strategize for publications, ensuring that I always have at least 1 or 2 papers published in each calendar year (and these are papers for which I am the corresponding author on, not just the "middle author" because these do not count).

In 2025 I will submit my materials for Promotion and Tenure. In those materials you are supposed to write about how all of my publications led to important breakthroughs in your field, which forces some kind of self-reflection of my "accomplishments" thus far. I think I have a reasonable narrative to tell, but I also cannot help but also feel that none of my research has any actual, true, meaningful real-world impact. Do my papers spark new ideas in others? Do they inspire others to build on my findings? Do people actually read my papers nowadays or is the content simply being helpfully plagiarized, I mean, summarized, by ChatGPT?

When I look back at my own body of work as a senior academic, will I feel a sense of having contributed something meaningful to the field of psycholinguistics? I am not sure if I will, especially when my own body of work so far has been so piecemeal, short-sighted, and desperate? But to build something, anything, you need time. You need space. You need the freedom to do what you think is actually important, and not chase a metric for your own ego. To be blunt, I don't feel like I am in the right environment or mental state to pursue what I think is important. In fact, I am not even sure I know what I think is important, since I haven't had any time in recent years to simply sit with the literature and have a slow mull about it.

Personally, I am also pretty convinced that major climate change will cause widespread decline and destruction of global civilization as we know it, possibly as soon as 2050, given the rate at which human activities continue to destroy the environment. When that time comes, who will fucking care about network models of the mental lexicon?

Looking ahead to 2025: I am not sure if my pessimism is warranted, but I am increasingly doubting the value of my research program and my ideas. Practically speaking, I will continue with my current career plans, which is to do my best to publish good papers in the short-run for promotion and tenure, and keep my fingers crossed that I am accepted by the academe. If that does happen, I really want to try and develop language research that is long-term and meaningful (to me, at least) and not rush this process. If the academe rejects me, it would be a nice opportunity to explore a different career. I don't plan on trying again at a different institution.