Longest-Serving Professor at Cornell Reflects on Journey Through Academia | Hacker News Reader

Longest-Serving Professor at Cornell Reflects on Journey Through Academia

cornellsun.com

125 pointssbolt24 comments

Interesting quote here:

> The university, although still of substantial size back then [50-60 years ago], operated in a bottom-up manner, Nerode told The Sun. "All the faculty in all departments met in the auditorium to decide the future of the university. It is now top-down, but that is also the case everywhere else," Nerode said.

I wonder, is this bottom-up (professor-led) vs top-down (administrator-led) shift a real thing felt by many old-time academics? It seems like this may be happening in a lot of different industries (e.g. medicine) and leading to "cost disease"[1].

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

When your university is pretty small, it looks more like a faculty and it is somewhat more common for the latter to be professor-led.

Can confirm. When I mentioned to my professor at a small university that the registrar's office made a mistake on my record, he just said let's talk a walk and we walked to the registrar's office. They were all polite to him (and he was to them). The issue that the registrar's office had told me could not be fixed right away because blah blah blah got fixed right away.

This worked for me as a student at UT Austin (population in the low 40ks) in 90s/00s: be polite, ask for a change. Most administrators don’t care what your story is (so I never bothered to explain mine), but they do understand the system isn’t perfect. EDIT: and they really want written documentation.

I knew the former chief court reporter in our California county. He told me the judges used to run the court system, setting their own calendars, etc. The state changed this by creating positions for professional court administrators. I think sometime in the 1990's.

I've seen this play out in some heavily funded (mechanical engineering) organizations as well.

Some are incredibly top-heavy, with decisions being flipped from the experts to the administrative staff who have at most 3-5 years of experience at the company and industry, but often less.

The organizations that are self-funded from selling specialized products and not either government bids or wealthy backers are usually much more bottom-up organized.

That’s a organizational pattern common in outsourcing scenarios. There’s a small cadre of people who know what they are talking about to some degree, who build whatever and define an operational process.

Then the operators do whatever they do, and usually aren’t empowered to do anything that changes the process.

It would be smart for all professional people to not allow themselves to be managed by outsiders, top down or otherwise.

The current intellectual climate at today's US universities is one of near total ideological "purity"--the kind of purity Adolf Hitler and Stalin would be proud of, mind you.

I understand how academic people allowed it to happen. It has to do with being poor but proud. Collectivism is like a drug to these kinds of people because they just want to enjoy their research, live in a bubble, have no profit motive, and generally get along in life attempting to not offend others. They extrapolate that lifestyle like a template for all. After all, it works for them, why would anyone disagree? They crave consensus. Those who don't go along are cast out, but usually "gently" and with as little conflict as possible. Never mind that some of those cast out are destroyed by it, that isn't the concern of these elite minds. They judge who is unworthy.

Honestly, if you can't change a flat tire on your car yourself, how smart are you really?

Not old-time, but tenured professor for 10 years. I definitely saw this happen in my time. The university has a faculty legislature that at one time was the administrative core, but it's largely a symbolic gesture at this point, kind of like the opposite of the royal family vis-a-vis parliament etc in England.

I do think this is a problem everywhere, in academics, in medicine, and probably other fields that I have less knowledge of. I think income inequality problems are really less of a problem per se (although still definitely a problem) than the power inequity problems that income inequality reflects. Some of it is rent-seeking monopoly problems, but I think there's a broader trend societally (as reflected in right-wing authoritarian trends globally) toward a lack of skepticism about power differentials, whether the inequalities we see are really justified in the magnitude we see them, and whether other power structures would be better.

I personally think with academics it's particularly problematic because the endgame (supposedly) is acquisition of knowledge where we don't really know what's going on, and I happen to believe the best environment for that is one where it's everything goes, closer to a democratic-libertarian-deregulated kind of environment.

My impressions of the time I was tenured are very close to what this guy is saying, although I think it's the tip of the iceberg and a lot of problems are being brushed over (appropriately I admit given that it's not really the right piece for it).

'Animal Farm' phenomenon?

This top-heaviness seems strongly correlated (and possibly causally related) with the drive to brand "administration" as a specialized skill needing its own experts, and keeping away bottom-up domain experts who would evolve into these roles (keeping one foot in the domain and another foot in administration/management).

This also means a greater degree of centralization in decision-making, which Herbert Simon already observed in 1991: Suppose that [“a mythical visitor from Mars”] approaches the Earth from space, equipped with a telescope that revels social structures. The firms reveal themselves, say, as solid green areas with faint interior contours marking out divisions and departments. Market transactions show as red lines connecting firms, forming a network in the spaces between them. Within firms (and perhaps even between them) the approaching visitor also sees pale blue lines, the lines of authority connecting bosses with various levels of workers. As our visitors looked more carefully at the scene beneath, it might see one of the green masses divide, as a firm divested itself of one of its divisions. Or it might see one green object gobble up another. At this distance, the departing golden parachutes would probably not be visible. No matter whether our visitor approached the United States or the Soviet Union, urban China or the European Community, the greater part of the space below it would be within green areas, for almost all of the inhabitants would be employees, hence inside the firm boundaries. Organizations would be the dominant feature of the landscape. A message sent back home, describing the scene, would speak of “large green areas interconnected by red lines.” It would not likely speak of “a network of red lines connecting green spots.”

It is interesting to try to relate that phenomenon to the "cost disease".

There was actually a study done by Todd Lu at UCLA that studies this exact thing at https://scaleatucla.weebly.com and it covers the entirely of the UC system's change from 1993 to 2014 as it shifted to administration-led. Most significantly it shows the downgrading of teaching to increasingly done by adjuncts.

[0] https://scaleatucla.weebly.com/ucla-senior-management-growth...

In the USA, colleges are in an arms race with each other to attract students. In some ways it is like cities trying to attract professional sports teams or big corporate headquarters: each college tries to outdo the other ones with fancier and fancier extras and services. That results in more administrators to run things.

Ironically, I would prefer a minimal university that only offers education, and not all the other crap, which I prefer to sort out independently in life. Administration is overbloated and needs to be reduced.

My impression is also that everything at universities are much more formal than they used to be. (This is based on my experience -- I've been tenured ~10 years at a state university -- and have spoken to older acdaemics about this topic.) I don't know why, and don't think there's a single cause. My guess is that in part universities have come to depend on federal grants and private gifts much more than they used to, for better or for worse: donors don't always give money without attaching strings, and federal grant-making has also become much more formal and bureaucratic. A second possible reason, related to the first, is that federal regulation (both those that deal with education and with research) have become much more complicated, so that a university now has many more employees who are not instructional faculty (tenure track, tenured, or adjunct), and governing from the bottom up is just not practical. Yet a third reason is the constant possibility of litigation -- e.g., related to tenure and all sorts of other things -- so for legal reasons processes like hiring and promotion are highly scripted, whereas they used to be more formal.

"I learned how to acquire new subjects because I had to walk into class and pick up everything that the people had done before," Nerode told The Sun. ... Nerode remarked that "there was no such thing as an academic advisor for people going to college."

This is important. A fellow like Nerode could walk into any university and be fine, and his background is a major reason. Nowadays, universities are open to much wider swathes of the population, and these people need support services, or they'd fail out. Everyone who complains about the growth of the administrative hydrocephalus must consider this fact.

Sorry if I'm being dense, but assuming you mean this definition of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus

What is the analogy between that and the academic administrative layer?

Big head = Mostly self-serving academic administration, providing little value to students.

I think over the last 2-3 decades standards have fallen across the board because ideals behind the original purpose of such services, to prevent underperformers from failing out, have morphed into a general administrative goal. I went through college in the early 10s, and there was a very clear implicit bias in all grading - failing students didn't look good for professors, departments, or schools in general now. The result was a consistent sort of unspoken grade padding. The goal of making college accessable to increasingly greater swaths of the population is amicable, but it rests on the again implicit assumption that a simple change of environment allows everyone to thrive equally - but the result is overall reduced rigor and a general watering down of the very meaning of a college degree.

More people may be going to school, but the distribution of talent hasn't changed much, and by the time you're entering college there is a minimum level of intrinsic ability necessary to really grasp technical degrees that no amount of tutoring will mitigate.

but it rests on the again implicit assumption that a simple change of environment allows everyone to thrive equally

This is emphatically not true. The SCS Noonan Scholar program is a very successful program for underrepresented minorities. Initially, they tried just giving money and a seat at an elite institution (Harvard, Amherst, that caliber), and they found that their students failed out of STEM subjects with regularity. So now they offer summer programs where they teach the subject and soft skills, i.e. time management, networking, & so on. This improved outcomes enormously. At Cornell they do the same. For some admits their summer program is mandatory.

You're talking about Ivy League institutions which sample from the tail end of the performance distribution. What works for the cream of the crop, whatever disadvantaged background it may come from, does not necessarily work for the rest. I the concept of distribution statistics is sorely lacking in much of the theory that underpins modern Western social policy, and the negative results are gradually accumulating.

Then again, even if we had sound statistics backing our policy, the facts would be dismissed in favor of the ideology backing the social policy.

He had some great observations as a young man. I studied physics decades later but the attitude was still the same.

The professor got up for the first session and said look to your right, look to your left, one of you won’t be here next semester,” he said. “I found that to be the attitude of physicists towards students: to cut down the number of students as much as possible and deal only with the ones that they wanted to. I just did not find that a very humanistic thing.”

My academic grandfather.

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