20 Years Later and Academia Isn't the Same
20 years ago I more or less finished my practical work on my Ph.D. and began writing my thesis. I was 23. I also resigned from my job at Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) around the same time so that I can focus on writing, not just the thesis but also my Web site. A year later this site started (unlike my personal site, which is still active, this site dealt with issues like patents and software companies).
A lot of my inspiration came from Chris Taylor, my supervisor, who is still active in his 80s (or thereabouts). He still seems sharp and charismatic. Prof. Taylor taught me the value of hard work, good manners, and celebration of science. In 2006 when I sat next to him in the bus in Washington DC (we travelled to present papers) he spoke to me about sports, too. Prof. Taylor has been in the Victoria University of Manchester for over 61 years. He started there as an Undergraduate Student in September 1964 (I started in September 2000). He's still publishing or co-publishing many papers. So does Prof. Cootes, whom I co-authored papers with. Cootes is Taylor's "creation" (from the PDM breakthroughs of the 1990s).
Many students of Taylor became high-profile folks. When I started as his student one of his other students committed suicide (Gareth) and another one later quit due to pressure (Kate), then another did the same. No doubt, he was very demanding!
20 years ago I discussed with him (Taylor) what I wanted to do with my life. He said that to be a postdoc means working above and beyond 40 hours a week and I told him that I wanted to do that only part-time so that I can continue to write articles online. He focused on what that meant financially, insisting that putting food (or "bread") on the table would be hard if working pro bono.
20 years have passed and I'm still doing the same thing. There are no regrets.
I did in fact work as a postdoc for a few years. I felt like that had become somewhat tainted by corporations' growing control over universities (professors wearing corporate hats) - a subject recently tackled in this excellent post in Gemini:
Unlike many graduate students, I never dreamed of being a professor. When I was finishing my undergraduate degree in computer engineering, I was depressed by the state of my field. The impression I had was that the jobs and money were not in actually trying to improve peoples' lives in any meaningful way, but in manufacturing widgets that would weasel their way into the daily life of as many people as possible. By making a product feel indispensible, clever developers (and they do have so much more in common with property developers than engineers) can sell ads, sell incremental updates, or best of all collect a monthly subscription.I wanted no part of this, and instead found a research assistant position developing software in a music technology lab. As I was realizing that the university environment created a space where it was seemingly possible to work on niche problems faced by real people, I also took a class on human-computer interaction that greatly expanded my vision of what computer science or software engineering could be. Because of these two experiences, I became a graduate student hoping to find a way to stay as a research assistant on projects I felt would have a positive impact on people.
That says "I never dreamed of being a professor". Neither did I. As an undergraduate student I saw my tutors having to do lots of meaningless, wasteful tasks (this was more than two decades ago). Instead of letting domain experts focus on what they do best (research, maybe some teaching on the side) they let them write grant applications (constantly trying to secure funding), do exams, check exams, deal with all sorts of paperwork/forms (administration), and rehearse stuff instead of focusing on what's new. Universities don't need parrots, they need entrepreneurs and people who break barriers.
Academia today (2025) is very different from what it used to be. Heck, universities seem to be teaching "clown computing" interfaces instead of actual computer skills and there's a growing focus on buzzwords (industry-induced hype), partly because of grant applications or lookout for sponsorships. For instance, revisit this: Microsoft 'Studies' Again? Leon Musolff is Writing Papers With Microsoft. (A scholar promoting plagiarism for Microsoft, on Microsoft's payroll!)
Academia is sort of dead to me. I left it in 2012 and made no effort to get back to it. I keep hearing about people who quit academia; Andy did that for ethical reasons or on ethical grounds. The University where he worked just didn't care about ethics; or nobody would dare bring that up.
Society deteriorates as corporations take over everything, even over the large media companies. This means the population isn't properly informed and is being marginalised while people-hostile "tech" gets promoted as "inevitable". It should be considered commendable to push back against all that. █