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science.sciencemag.org

141 pointslemoncurd37 comments

>> After all, the number of available tenure-track faculty slots is essentially fixed—at MIT, there are approximately 1000. To create room for a new faculty member, an existing one has to leave. But after a brief dip, we thought, retirements should return to normal, creating room for new recruits.

I would have hoped for better intuition from professors at MIT. To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you'll need replacements at a lower rate.

To me it just pointed to the fact that there are more people looking for such positions as there are positions. The later retirement just made an existing problem worse.

I was hoping to find this comment here. Exactly my thought as well. I mean, a professor at the MIT, that is someone supposed to be a smart person, right? But still so dead wrong about the obvious here. Pains me a bit to see, honestly. I wonder if this is a case where the "intuition" is influenced by the classic, you know "it can't be true, because I don't want it to be true"..

Just because the average retirement age moves later does not necessarily mean the average term of tenured service is longer. (The average age at earning tenure could well move up.)

> To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you’ll need replacements at a lower rate.

I feel dumb right now that it wasn’t obvious to me. I was thinking in terms of throughput vs latency, and how for a single pipe, increasing latency doesn’t affect throughput. So why would it change for multiple pipes? My bad intuition was that letting people stay longer would drop throughput until everyone that was in the pipe during the latency change retired, and then throughput would restore to the same as before.

Doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to see why you’re right, but because it wasn’t obvious to me, I’m not surprised it wasn’t obvious to others. Or at least it makes me feel better...

Think of waiting in line for an amusement park ride. If the ride runs 4 minutes, you'll have to wait in line longer than if ir runs 3 minutes. Same thing, if the guy in the office will leave after 30 years instead of 40 the line waiting or it will move much faster.

And don't feel dumb. We all get hit with it at times ;-)

I'm waiting for a headline that describes what the article is about.

It's about an old dude just realizing that by staying in his job past 65, he's put 9 people out of work.

Not 9 people; he realizes he removed 9 years from someone else's career.

Somewhat unrelated but this article reminded me about a passage from "The Book of the New Sun" where the protagonist of the book meets with the master of the guild of librarians. The library is pitch black and the librarian in his old age has gone blind but still holds onto his position as master librarian and his apprentice who is now a balding man in his middle years still attends him waiting for his master to pass away so that he can assume the mantle.

The master in the story still exceeds at his work despite his blindness and his blindness is actually what enabled him to discover via touch that the material of the books themselves was just as impressive as the contents :)

I imagine the result of removing something like forced retirement ages is similarly nuanced

What is the impact outside of academia? Are there similar effects in the corporate sector?

Not sure about the corporate sector, but it certainly seems to at least have an impact on American politics. Some 2014 statistics [0] have the average age of representatives and senators at 57 and 62, and several current senators have served for well over 25 years (3 senators right now have been in their offices for over 35 years) [1]. I'm sure it's hard for even the brightest young politician to oust someone who's been in office since before they were born, especially if they're in the same party.

[0] https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/0b699eff-adc5-43c4-927e-f6304...

[1] https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm

Tenure is a pretty artificial condition intended to prevent controversial research from being eliminated out of fear of losing your job. It seems in the corporate world execs do something controversial, get fired and get paid off. I believe average length of tenure in c-suite positions is actually decreasing, so moving in the other direction without any law limiting it.

Naive question: why can't they just have more tenure positions?

Money.

Then they 'd have to enroll more students.

Or stop one-upping each other by building ever more expensive sports facilities?

Schools that don’t do this still have the same money problems.

You're referring to MIT's championship football team?

I'm referring to all the times I've heard on HN that US universities one-up each other in building sports facilities.

I heard sport facilities are actually a source of profit for the universities?

It sounds like his pay as a "professor, post-tenure" was reduced to 49% of what it was before, so it's almost certainly a money problem.

I mean a school like MIT must be able to afford opening more tenured spots, right?

You do get some growth by increasing the number of students you have and if research budgets expand but I'm guessing that is a function of inflation and population growth. Technology also allows you to teach more students with less faculty input so maybe you get productivity gains there.

But these post-tenure 49% positions are the new thing to encourage people to go -- the previous option was emeritus, not only 0% but also unable to be the PI on grants etc. So they must have found a magic money tree somewhere to pay for them.

Not mentioned yet is the change from defined benefit pensions. If you had a final-salary pension, then there was no financial incentive not to go emeritus, in the good old days. Whereas on a defined-contribution scheme, retiring a year earlier does literally cost you (or your estate) a year's salary.

Large and famous universities sit on very large piles of money. They just choose to invest them differently — or maybe the monies are granted on particular conditions to spend them.

need more management:

https://sandiegofreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/MSM...

https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BJ720_NONCLA_G...

It doesn't matter--the number of PhDs is an order of magnitude larger than the number of tenure positions opening.

MIT graduates about 400 PhDs per year and only has about 40-50 tenured positions open each year.

I suspect every other program is similar. There are simply too many PhDs being graduated, but the universities are dependent upon them for slave labor.

I am not tenure material but I am working towards a plan - I intend to self fund my own tenure (at least 6 months a year), just to work on the stuff I want to.

One day (not really UBI) we shall all self fund tenures ...

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, how do you plan to do this? Grants? Investors? Trust fund?

If you can sustain yourself longer than 6 months, have you considered just starting your own lab/business?

The plan is basically early semi-retirement - not tax payer funded tenure. That seems to have come across wrong - the idea is to find a way to fund myself (through my own earnings /savings /business) so Incan do the things I really want.

this goes into the "obviously" column

Slightly off-topic, but isn't it a bit weird that Science Magazine isn't running on HTTPS?

Article isn't paywalled. Did not need me to login/register. They did not ask me for my email. Don't care about http/https. Should I ?

If you are on a public internet connection you should. I could theoretically replace the content of that page with whatever I want. A crypto currency miner, some zero day JavaScript exploit that will download a key logger on your computer etc. Https helps to mitigate these sort of man in the middle attacks, even on static content.

I'm on a public internet connection, but I'm not too worried because to perform such an attack, you would have to compromise some physical network infrastructure between me and sciencemag.org, and do it in a such a way to not get yourself in trouble with the law.

It's possible sure, but it seems difficult enough to not worry about.

You don't even have to go that far, it's usually done between you and the router.

It's easy for an attacker on your WiFi network, in some cases.

Your WiFi network might be encrypted, which might be a broken encryption, or might be unencrypted to discourage excessive use.

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