Delegating in academia

If you take a look at Nobel prize laureates, one pattern you can observe is that the overwhelming majority of people who have won the award win only one. There are the select few (five in all) who have won two, but typically people win one and call it a career. The reason behind this is that Nobel prizes–or rather the ideas associated with them–are very difficult to come by and they, I suppose most of the time, require a lifetime of work for one to even conjure up anything that’s worthy of consideration.

This got me thinking about ideas in academia. While it’s true that advancement in academic institutions requires one to put forth a lot of work in the beginning. Once a person, or professor in particular, nears the end of their path, it’s really more about generating ideas and then delegating the work to others, namely students to continue working on the projects. This way, academia works in an inheritance kind of way where you start at the bottom and then gradually work your way to the top.

For Nobel prize laureates who have effectively reached the pinnacle of achievement in their respective fields, it is, thus, not really necessary anymore for them to continue putting in the work. Therefore, the process of delegating ensures that good ideas are further developed and that the reward is largely spread out amongst your colleagues within the academic institutions. In other words, professors all look out for each other in a kind of familial–versus professional–way.