Doing research that makes a difference

[Leherself]

I guess that's the trouble with academia - I know several people who have given up the idea of tenure entirely. They work in industry or government, in positions where they feel like they make a real difference and stay on the leading edge of their fields, and then they adjunct mostly for the joy of teaching. A friend with a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology told me that he wasn't interested in becoming a full time professor, because it would take too much time away from the projects he considers most important to him (working with small communities' native language revitalization projects, for instance). Of course, it doesn't help that he's a Linguistic Anthropology specialist in a University that is primarily interested in Archaeology. Heaven forbid a social scientist be interested in working with living people...