I don't quite know how to say this or if anyone actually needs to hear it, but if you're a student, beware twitter threads of advice/justice/fairness/professionalization/success written by academics. Including this one (I originally was going to put this on twitter but thought against it).
Now that I've been in this racket for a while, I realize that online, nobody can tell that you're a dog. The world doesn’t sort people simply into categories. Not everyone's a dog, but some are. Not everyone's a dog all the time, but are sometimes dogs. But there are definitely dogs out there.
Not always, but sometimes, I see a fiery twitter thread about higher ed, injustice, fairness, what people should be doing, how some people are good people who do good things and I should do those same good things too etc. And I read it and think, "Yeah!" But then as I'm putting on my shoes to run outside and change my life and behavior in response, I see who wrote it and think, "Hold up...I know how you treat your graduate students."
Or, "Wait...I picked up the slack in this situation because you did X and benefited from it."
Or, "Wait...you were literally born into the Ivy Leagues. This is how the elect have figured out how to play the game for personal ends."
Or, "Wait...you're under university investigation for illegal behavior."
Or, "Wait..you got hired because your advisor is super famous and connected. And you didn't look at me at that conference until your buddy told you my affiliation."
It's weird. Sometimes twitter threads have really, really good advice. But similarly, sometimes you boot up Limewire and think you're downloading Three Doors Down's "Kryptonite" because that's what the file was labeled, but all you did was download a virus and a 10 minute loop of Bill Clinton saying, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." The internet is weird. Not always. Sometimes five hours later you open up that .mp3 and you're rocking out all afternoon with the 3DD. But sometimes you have to tell your dad that the computer won't turn on anymore.
I wish that we could base advice quality on the emergent consensus of academic social media's likes and engagement and number of followers etc. But academics as a whole have a weird repressed and convoluted infatuation with line leaders, I've noticed. I've seen smart people get behind prominent bad advice. I've seen awesome advice get like 5 likes and disappear. You kind of have to know where to look and what to look for. You also need to read people deeply and broadly to understand their personal biases and biographies. So…basically you know which advice is better and worse after you transition to the associate level. Which is not a good system for training and professionalization on the fly for young and impressionable graduate students / early career academics.
Of course, people who behave badly in their professional lives can give good advice, and a person’s character and personal habits don’t alter the truth status of their advice and claims. Otherwise, big tobacco could have just hired a bunch of arsonists to say that smoking is bad for one’s health, and the rest of us could cackle and say, “Look at that hypocrisy! This point’s obviously invalidated.” And yet…advice threads are often framed as: “Here is how to act like I did so you can attain the same outcomes as I did.” Or: “I have identified the ways that other people must adjust their behavior for the world to improve.” That is, the advice provided is often prescriptive. The advice provided is often sold as a decontextualized packet that can be applied to a new context, as if professional advice were akin to getting LaTeX to work on your computer. Of course, that’s not how things work.
So just, like, be careful out there. Academic twitter is probably more like early 2000s Kazaa than we let on. Lots of great stuff floating around for free but also lots of nasty viruses and malware mislabeled. I don't have good advice for what to do instead other than, "I really hope you find someone locally who's good with a good track record who works for you and helps you out." To keep this metaphor moving: it’s better to have somebody’s cousin who’s used Kazaa a long time download a bunch of songs and burn them on a CD for you. But that requires quite a bit of luck and local context. That’s probably not what you want for your career. To which I can really only sadly say, “Yup. Good luck.”