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Katrina Gulliver's avatar

The issue here (aside from the incentives of social media itself) is the nature of academic funding. Academics are to a significant extent expected to "earn" their own salary in the form of external grants. And one of the factors grant givers look for us outreach and engagement. They don't want to know you plan to write a book for an academic press that will be read by 9 people. They want to know about your plans for public focused work, your op eds in major papers, your participation in policy discussions, how you'd work has been adopted by some agency or institution.

And of course there is a political element, for a while it seemed anyone could get a grant if they could link their project to climate change (which is fair for oceanographers or whatever but honestly produced a lot of tendentious crap in the humanities).

But the grantsmanship pressure is real, I've seen people sacked for not bringing in enough money....don't hate the player, hate the game.

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Walking Home's avatar

And where do we end up ? Trump

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