Steven M. Cahn, From Student to Scholar. A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor. Columbia UP, 2008

Precious few books live up to the laudatory reviews on its back cover. This is one of them. The author packed in its 84 pages pretty much everything there is to know about life in American academia. The only two omissions-- one being recognized by the author in the preface-- are peculiar to the fact that Steve Kahn's field is humanities. Hence, the grant writing and managing scientific collaborations and co-authorships, ubuquitous in natural sciences, are omitted.

I spare the reader usual the superlatives about the book and pass to what it says on the current state of American science. The purpose of book is "descriptive", what the things are, not what they could or should be, or whether the current state of affairs is sustainable.

The sad fact is, though American graduate school is still #1 in the world, it is much too happy with its present ways of doing things-- the ways, which were the results of the explosive growth of academia as a result of Cold War and Sputnik-- and its career tracks became too formalized and stereotypical to be productive. For instance, in 1940s-1950s all the professors of the elite (Ivy Leagues+Chicago, Stanford, Caltech and the like) schools were graduates of other elite schools simply because only they had PhD programs.

However, if you look at the careers of the professors of the elite schools who started in 1960s and 1970s, their peers still predominate, as it should be, but quite a few faculty had degrees from lesser schools. I suspect that these are, on the average, an order of magnitude brighter than the rest of their peers to win that kind of uphill battle. However, in 1990s and 2000s, because of shrinking tenure opportunities (PhD programs grew at the breakneck tempo in 70s and 80s), the Olympus of American academia closed again. This means that no one not showing promise before age 14, or being a family member of another Ivy graduate, or, of course, a Wall Street banker or a Hollywood celeb cannot reach it. "Cabots talk only to Lodges and Lodges only to G-d." Cambridge brahmins so carefully circumscribed their own exclusivity that it can be destroyed by their own profligate inbreeding-- as were the dinosaurs or the European Royalty.