It is shocking to read Max Weber’s talk on Science as a vocation. You can find an English translation of the resulting paper at this link. Wikisource has the original German text.
The writing is clear-eyed and direct. He describes so many problems in academia that, until now, I had assumed to be modern.
The reason I searched out this paper, was the following quote 1 about the harm that academia can cause. It is hard to read, because it is so accurate.
So academic life is wild chance. When young scholars come to ask for advice about [academic tenure], the responsibility of encouraging him is almost impossible to bear. If he is a Jew, of course, one says to him: lasciate ogni speranza [abandon all hope - quoting Dante]. But one must also ask everyone else: do you, in all good conscience, believe you can bear it that year after year, mediocrity after mediocrity rises above you, without becoming inwardly bitter and corrupt? Obviously, in every case, one gets the answer: Of course, I live only for my “calling”. But I have found that very few endure this experience without suffering spiritual damage.
I prefer somewhat literal translations, so I built this translation from the original German by combining the output from https://www.deepl.com/translator, the translation linked above, another translation, and my own rather weak knowledge of German.↩︎