University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty
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I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees.
Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-ou...
This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
It's gone so far that the SF school board is more worried about names of their schools named after American greats than they are re-opening schools (which have been closed in California since March).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-francisco-mayor-london...
Your second paragraph is about schools, not universities, and I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to this discussion.
Some of the "ism" culture war teaching in academia is indeed trite and silly.
But it's far less silly than Fox News and the entire right-wing media machinery - which most recently somehow managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that a valid election was stolen, that Covid is a hoax, and attacking your own political representatives is a valid expression of democracy.
Honestly, compared to that having to pay attention to pronouns or learn something about black history is a complete non-issue.
I heard it from a Rastafarian in a documentary and I have cherished it ever since.
If you’ve been out of school for >10yrs, I’d strongly encourage you to look at the current cost of your alma matter - it may well shock you.
I certainly agree that there are people who teach because they can't do, but I don't think that teaching because you can't do is even part of the kernel of teaching.
As for admins... this is a huge problem right now. They are threatening to destroy the host. But a healthy host does have a trim, effective, and dedicated group of admins.
Clearly there are lots of people who genuinely choose to enter teaching, but in certain subjects, for some people, it is the de-facto profession if you cannot use your degree to do something else. See Avenue Q's "What can you do, with a BA in English?".
This is more about high school than university-level though.
[Note - I was mistaken - please see the clarification in post below!]
Lol I think you’ve got that backwards!
The marketing slogan was a play on the common criticism of teachers which is a quote of Shaw from around 1900.
(I always heard it as "those who can't teach, consult" but I like the administrate introduction...)
Oh, you must mean rubber duck debugging, where a programmer pretends to teach a rubber duck about a bug for the purpose of doing the job of revealing the fix for it in the process.
I absolutely love rubber duck debugging, too!
Do you tend to start a bug fix with it, or do you reserve it for times when you get stuck? I feel like I should use it way more often, or at least way earlier than I tend to. That would probably eliminate a lot of headaches.
Anyway, great to see a fellow rubber duck debugger here on HN! You know I bet if we tried teaching each other about rubber duck debugging we'd reveal even more techniques to become more efficient at doing our work.
So much to talk about! So much to teach and do!
I love HN!
Do note that I'm fitting this to pre university, though the constraints are relaxed a bit once you bring in the higher statused tenured profs.
At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc).
The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000.
Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. Facilities and Plant, Campus police, not to even speak of the big ones like DoIT. (DoIT is all the IT people. Network support, web developers, DBAs etc.) I get that. At the same time, that's almost a 10 to 1 ratio. Keep in mind, the University of Wisconsin is one of the more frugal universities out there in this regard.
Again, I don't question that some of this is necessary, how much? I don't know. But having the numbers and the positions these people are employed in does put us in a better position to, at a minimum, have an informed discussion of the subject.
I know that if the University of Wisconsin shut down the math department because the web developers and DBAs at DoIT had to be paid, I would definitely be someone who would assume that to be an unwise decision. Just putting myself in the shoes of the people who care about the subject university.
If students don’t seem to be getting benefit from education by professors who focus solely on mathematics, then that problem needs to be understood.
This is the second time this has happened according to the tweet, and the professors have been unable to defend themselves both times.
Maybe someone should offer to assist in improvement of the program. It’s probably a fine place to work if they want to stay there this much.
The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg."
2020: why is our medical system running at 90% capacity in normal times?! Why don't we have some idle capacity for emergencies (natural disaster, pandemic, war)?
Professional training is not the same as hiring people to idle. See how emergency response services mobilize in case of any emergency scenario, and how that does not involve hiring armies of firemen and police officers to idle by.
This seems like a smear of people who care about social justice by implication. Why do you suppose they are not interested in education and research?
This is only shallow because you have made it so. I could also say “shallow hot topic issues like bra burning”. Drop the strawman.
The ideal business is then one that actively inflates the credential's value while lowering the difficulty of achieving it. The best way to do this is to increase selectivity/restrict supply, raise prices, lower difficulty (grade inflation), and increase the time required to get the credential, while providing alternate activities for those who are inclined to do something other than receiving an education.
Heck you can get degree credit by virtue of living in a foreign country via a study abroad program.
The other activities a university may participate in like research, or educating only matter to the extent they enhance the "prestige" of the credential or to benefit the minority of students who value academic rigor more so than the credential.
A mission that the Ivies are well on their way with. The average grade at Harvard is a 3.67 (as of a 2013 source) and the prices have never been higher (though that's an individual thing, what with scholarships). They only need to make it a 5 year program with a MA/MS tagged in to get really going; degree-inflation hopped onto grade-inflation and dollar-inflation.
Somehow, you then have to work Ultimate Frisbee or chess in there too, an athletics-inflation and club-inflation (?), so to speak. Kinda like Laurie Laughlin's daughter did with the varsity-blues scandal for admissions. I'd guess that's already happened then.
What do you end up with besides an empty savings account? A 22 years old with a very good resume and a very bad taste in beer and jazz.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/9/stats-grade-inf...
Modern universities are a mix of two contradictory ideas. It's a place for "higher learning"; trying to fit the same role as institutions from hundreds of years ago where academic learning was much rarer and was fitted for the aristocracy. While simultaneously being something that you need for a job to make money. Oh, and also the people doing the teaching are more interested in their research than actually teaching. Forget teachers putting in 100% of their effort into teaching and making sure people really get the material (here's some slides the T.A. made, deal with it), you're lucky if a professor is a half-way decent orator.
There are so many better ways to get different kinds of education, particularly for humanities. There are books, online videos, etc. that provide a better education on writing, philosophy, etc. than what a single professor charging thousands of dollars can provide.
This works out to roughly $250 per student per semester. It's difficult to price the work of T.As as they are often students themselves, but assuming each student requires an average of 2 hours per week of dedicated grading/tutoring time, then at $20/hr the total cost of providing a first tier class should be $730 dollars.
This number is roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 the cost of a class at a community college, 1/6th of the effective cost per class for UMass Amherst, and roughly 1/10th the effective price per class of MIT.
I can assure you that the lecturer at your community college is not making 300k either. But this calculation does show that most of the tuition costs do not end up in the hands of the teaching staff, and that providing a first rate education could be done for an order of magnitude lower cost than current first tier universities charge.
Or hell, offer professors 1 million per year and still charge 1/3rd the price of MIT.
This epiphany acted as a catalyst for me to leave academia.
Takes a lot of admins to recreate the upper class bubble for the poors.
I can’t really blame people for wanting this security for their children. Ultimately I don't think it will change until (at least in the US) we address things like universal healthcare, justice system reform and maybe even a UBI.
For the best example, look no further than the St. Scholastica Day Riots, which started with a drunk angry scholar and escalated into a mob riot with nearly 100 casualties. [0] When not rioting against the villagers, Oxford scholars in the 13th and 14th century were prone to riot amongst themselves.
Similar disagreements in the past culminated in lynchings and led to the founding of the University of Cambridge (to avoid more bloodshed from angry villagers, but also in part to avoid accountability for other kerfuffles). So yeah, wealthy teenager daycare with education on the side is nothing new.
Edit: fixed a few historical inaccuracies, I mixed a few events in my head.
>The seed of the riot was an altercation in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford [ when two students became angry at being served poor quality drink ]
I wonder if this is the etymological origin of the word 'swindle?'
The online etymological dictionary indicates that the term was of German origin, brought to England by German Jews, meaning a giddy or untrustworthy person, based on an older word meaning to languish or decline but that seems incognate with its current meaning.
Except when the police is involved which should be any time the law is broken. You make it seem like colleges are their own oasis of law and order.
This is an issue in the US, but it is worth noting this particular administrative maneuver is at University of Leicester which is in the UK. [0]
It's already happening. I went to a Canadian university. The marketing material says the school wanted to give the students a "great student experience". What's great student experience? The glossy pamphlets shows varsity sports facilities, bright lecture halls and students hanging out in residences.
Namespace collision detected:
1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior"
Definition #1 isn't an edge case-- most universities are chock full of such events and seminars. Shit like this: a linguist who was tasked with helping a Northern California tribe fill in the blanks in the documentation of their dead language so they could revive it. If your curiosity isn't peaked by that concept and it's associated practical challenges and sets of choices, I'm not sure what you're doing on HN.
Definition #2 is like HN's version of cheating celebrity stories in the Enquirer. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life enumerating each case, you certainly wouldn't run out of bona fide material. But if all you talk about 99% of the time is that-- to the extent that you forget definition #1 even exists-- you have to admit at least part of your outrage is due not to your own free will but due to people clicking upvote buttons as if nudging trays of junk food close to where you're sitting.
Edit: typo
What draws the largest general audience at colleges are sports.
It would be reasonable if many HN posters wanted to critique college sports fans for diverting funds and energy from more important scholarly pursuits. It would be reasonable, if a bit odd, for them to do this by sarcastically nicknaming college sports fans, "Einsteins."
It would be understandable if HN posters extended the sarcastic nickname "Einstein" to other domains to target people who ruin that domain by spamming it with superficial, loud-mouthed, low-effort pursuits.
It would not be reasonable, understandable nor healthy if a critical mass of HN posters did this without knowing a) who Einstein is, b) the obvious fact that the nickname is being used sarcastically, and c) an entire department in every major college is concerned with an intellectual pursuit of extending the work that Einstein started. After all, hackers are supposed to understand the systems they hack!
Anyway, if this were the case then anyone with even a passing interest in impugning the reputation of Einstein himself could then leverage that ignorance to do so.
It's my rank speculation that "social justice" to a critical mass of HN'ers has become something of a backformation from "social justice warrior." E.g., an ignorant lurker reads a snippet about some historical figure from a social justice movement (or just a topic tangentially related to a social justice movement from the past), feels outrage over the superficiality and arrogance of SJW's, and unconsciously applies those same feels to whatever the conversation happens to be about.
This happens all the time with memes-- e.g., Tim and Eric make a convincing "Free Real Estate" infomercial parody, parody becomes a meme, Tim shows up in a film, and Redditors mock him: "Hey, it's that Free Real Estate huckster guy!"
Non-selective schools (like Leicester, which admits 80%!of applicants, of which only 20% choose to attend) won’t be able to pull this off. The signaling value is too weak. They can’t get you an interview at a top company. If they can’t prepare you for it, how many parents will pay for a 4 year vacation?
But with the loans, colleges and universities are flush with cash, so they build extravagant dorms, hire way too many administrators, VP's, etc.
My idea to fix this is to make the universities provide the loans. Then they have an incentive to make sure students graduate and have a career path that makes sense (and money!)
We have allowed and encouraged an entire generation to screw themselves with these outrageous loans.
That paper was written in 1982
Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector.
It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics.
This is a scandal.
--
Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]:
The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...]
In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May.
However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic.
--
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...
The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.
Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.
Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.
Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.
When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...
However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?
Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
DeepMind?
They certainly didn't pick it for the food ;)
I think if you look at where the researchers are, Europe does really well. As per usual though, this is poorly commercialised.
This would seem to militate against a notion that Europe doesn't do AI.
Now, Europe definitely doesn't commercialise AI well, but that's a different point.
As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.
So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.
Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".
I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).
Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.
I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
(Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure.
The flip side is you get paid a third of industry.
That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job.
As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs.
With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard:
1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love
2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life.
It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs.
Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.
And now the German version of this tale:
You finish high school with 18/19 get your master's degree with 23/24. Then you get a PhD position but because it's tied to a three-year project with third-party funding, you're also expected to do project work that does not contribute to your thesis at all. You're only starting out in the business, though, so you're happy to help!
Then, three years later, the project is finished but your thesis is nowhere near that. Now, choose your own adventure:
1) Luckily, your supervisor can hire you using his own budget. That's nice, almost no strings attached. Now you can really focus on finishing up your thesis.
2) Luckily, there's another project that has just started and that you can work on now. You're a bit unsure, though: when the first project was up, no-one thanked you for your work, your supervisor was just surprised about the state of your thesis. Should you do that again? What's more, the new project has nothing to do with the old project, let alone with the topic of your thesis. Because you really have no other option, you agree to do it - still better than nothing.
Which brings us to the next option:
3) Your supervisor unfortunately has no funds to extend your contract. But since you've already invested so much work and you like the idea of a PhD, you apply for unemployment support through the government and hope that you can finish everything within a year. Later, you're gonna call this period an "independently funded research scholarship" on you CV.
But all good things come to an end: finally, after much hardship, you graduate! Wow!
And you even find a post-doc position in some other town! Great. You don't mind a change of scenery! Now you're rolling!
And you're good at your job. You feel good. Get lots of papers accepted.
But your contract ends after two years. Luckily, there is another post-doc position in some other town! Great! You're not so keen on moving again but hey, your new partner doesn't mind a change of scenery.
And you're still pretty good at your job. You kind of start feeling a bit disillusioned with your field though: it seems like all the research published these days is just application-driven -- not what once pulled you to the field. Oh, well, at least your job pays the rent.
But your contract ends after two years. You consider applying for professor positions because in Germany, there is no middle ground really. But you have your doubts: are you really good enough? Besides, both you and your partner hate the idea of moving yet again: you just made new friends. But what can you do?
None of your applications for a professor position go anywhere. So you go for a third post-doc. The move was really not that bad, as you were able to sell most of the old furniture. The new supervisor is great and you feel energized with a rediscovered love for the field.
You don't get as many papers out as before even though you try. But somehow, you don't have as much time for actual research anymore, as you find yourself more and more tied up in administratrivia. You work long hours but only half of it is actually dedicated to research, and it shows in your output. Nevertheless, you like the working environment.
But then your contract ends after two years. Your supervisor would love to keep you, he even has enough money in his budget for at least five years. But oh! Damn. There is a law in Germany that six years after your PhD, you cannot be hired on university budget anymore, unless it's a permanent position. And, well, sorry, the bad news is: universities don't hire on permanent contracts. Faculty, that is, they don't hire faculty - except professors. Administration, sure, they're permanent. Facility management, sure, they're permanent. Just the people doing the core task of a university (teaching and researching), sorry, no.
You give a professor position one last try because there just happens to be an opening that sounds like it was just made for you. You fit it perfectly. And so do 9 others. But there's only one position. You're all pretty much equally qualified, so who's going to get it? Will it be you?
It doesn't matter because it's clear that nine folks will not get it.
Nine people who's dream it has always been to be in research, who have invested a lot in making this dream a reality, who are completely qualified and very experienced will now have to go and do something else... while a new generation of young, blue-eyed, PhD students are ready for the same journey.
Removing this requirement would allow competition (even from independent researchers in coffee shops).
Good luck trying to change this!
An endowment you can rustle up with sufficiently well connected people, especially if you aren't looking for that much money.
Grants I agree are a problem. Darpa as I recall doesn't necessarily require university connections, but I'm not sure if Europe has anything easy like that. Maybe you attach a startup incubator?
1)https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-for-s... 2) https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-relig...
EDIT: In terms of financing, how much money do you really need? If you are self sufficient in terms of owning the property, endowment income and growing vegetables and selling beer/yoghurt etc., is that not enough? Would the modern academic type be interested at all in essentially living in a commune/monastery where some amount of time is dedicated to cleaning/maintenance/carpentry/agriculture?
Universities are hard due to accreditation, but starting a not-for-profit is quick and easy.
In the USA the NIH is 3-4x the budget of the NSF
Because there is very little mobility into academia, MANY people land on the wrong side of the pond. You can't try industry and go back. One more difference is that colleges once wanted people with decades industry experience, and many older people saw going back to teach young'uns as a way of giving back.
It's not just older people. If you're in industry, and want to pursue a good idea for 5 years where you don't have elbowroom, or in academia and want to try to commercialize something, you break your academic track. It's possible with tenure, but I find many tenured academics distinctly underimpressive by the point they've gone through decades of abuse to get there....
- "I never wrote a patent and I turned out great. Why should we bother giving an innovation course to our PhD students?" - "This person had a 10-year break in their academic career. I can't evaluate them."
So it's not only that there is a lack of mobility between industry and academia, rather this gap is actively fueled.
I know a handful of faculty at top universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc). At least one did a year at a FAANG company prior to starting so it isn't like they don't know better. They are paid well enough and don't need 400k salaries. They love their research topic and love the freedom to work on the topics they care most about. They love mentoring students specifically. They don't care about software engineering as a discipline and would rather spend time learning other things. They (most of them) like teaching. They like being part of a research community.
And most -- not all but most -- new faculty hires cheat in some way to get there, at the elites (at the very least, overselling results, but often intentionally p-hunting, stealing credit, and similar).
This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.
By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.
Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.
Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.
The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.
Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see.
Long story short, most researcher and professors are evaluated on the basis of the output of their research (number of publications, journals, h-index and that kind of stuff).
Teaching is really an overhead, and a lot of researchers/professors game the system by making things as standard as possible in their own interest (and whatever about the students).
I had seen this myself during a surprisingly short exam (circuit theory): taken in the morning, the professor had corrected ALL of the exams before 3:30 pm. The trick was in using simple numbers (the computations were not the hard part of the exam), skimming briefly the piece of paper and then checking if the numbers in the solution matched his own numbers in his already-solved exam. Duh. I had to go there, ask to have the exam evaluated in front of me, and for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.
You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper. (I had learned from the book instead of his lessons because I had a full-time job -- and thus he hadn't recognized the procedure)
Anyway, I had to keep my temper and explain. He agreed and assigned me the points.
To come back to the original point: somebody might think he's just an asshole (and btw they wouldn't be wrong) but if you know about the back-office dynamics you'd understand that he was/is just minimizing the overhead. In a wrong way, but still, that's what he was/is doing.
> You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper.
I can't speak to this specific case. And awarding no points at all does sound quite unusual. But, speaking as a professor, it's disturbing to see how often and how badly students overestimate the intelligibility of their work.
Important qualification: I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions. The situation may be very different in circuit theory and other areas in which answers to exam questions often aren't in prose.
Dude/Dudette, circuit theory can't be further than it already is from prose essays and and open-answer questions.
As I mentioned, part of the strategy was to use simple numbers (think of stuff like 1, 2,-1, pi, stuff like that) because the hard part of the exam was not in numbers and/or raw computation.
So basically if you can read numbers, you can see what's been done there.
And I expect an engineering professor to be able to read numbers.
This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.
Yes, Terence Tao is doing pretty well.
The top 3 (and #5) are all "HEAD COACH".
* this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra.
* Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0].
* The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so.
* There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go.
* They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...
Total BS imho, but don't get me started...
The US are even more innovative in ripping off students.
I went to Exeter. I picked the cheapest accommodation. I was more than happy with the on site sports centre. I wouldn't want to pay double for gold taps and an arena.
I think it would be interesting to see how places fared if tuition was linked to rankings. Top 10 can charge full wack, Next 10 80%, etc. But that would force people to make hard decisions...
It would have been better if they'd just actually made "tuition fees" an actual proper graduation tax, rather than a tax for the poor and a loan for the rich.
The English evidently agree this is a problem and have been doing their part to make UK universities less “inherently” attractive.
This issue is, btw, basically identical to the one for council funding. It is a very tricky area with no easy answers but, funnily enough, always ends up with the same solution (council funding in the UK is basically regressive, like university funding because there is literally no way to pressure these institutions to be responsible without user paying).
Also, I'm not sure it's true to say UK degrees don't care about the beauty of number's. Again, the statistics show that the number of mathematics students have been according to the overall trend [2]. And anecdotally, comparing with friends from other countries the UK actually seems to have a university system unusually geared to purely academic degrees.
It's my personal belief that while of course university is about getting a job, it's also about learning about adulthood for many people. People use it to delay the start of their working life and enjoy a few years of adult freedom, as well as to get a degree. Anecdotally, I know a lot of my friends went to uni almost entirely for this reason and had no idea in their head about what they'd do after yet. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact with increasing lifetimes I think it only makes sense we continue to delay the age at which we enter the workforce.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...
[2] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio...
The amount of money the uni gets is the same. Overseas pay the full price, domestic students are subsidised and only pay £9k, but the uni gets it in full anyway. And, no, they still take overseas students (with remote studies it's not more difficult, than domestic ones). Imperial's Chem department even filled more places for 1st year than usual.
About 10% of teaching income is from the government, but that's to cover courses that cost more to teach (medicine, physical sciences, engineering etc). There is no per-student subsidy as far as I am aware? Unis get the 9k a year, either cash or from the slc.
Also, international fees are unregulated. They're totally down to the uni and the student. Central government doesn't touch them. This is why there has been a big push to take on foreign students in most universities over the last 20 years.
Source:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I'm glad to hear Imperial Chem is doing well. Exeter Chem was closed when I was there back in 2004.
Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each.
I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.
Their alumni should complain that the administration is harming the value of their credentials.
Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science".
If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
I’m still gonna check though :)
But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past.
If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well.
Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
The UK university model doesn’t follow the liberal arts model. That’s not what we’re aiming to do over here. Especially at a very low-tier university like Leicester. Our degrees are more highly specialised than yours.
Don’t judge our universities by your model.
Don't blame us when you misuse the damn word.
I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.
Wikipedia explains
> Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
Almost zero people in Europe will have done a liberal arts education. As a mainstream thing it's really a uniquely American idea.
And again, where is this idea of the UK doing liberal arts 30 years ago from? That's a bizarre claim not grounded in any kind of reality.
> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts.
This is utterly impossible to understand as anything other than a reference the specific medieval seven liberal arts which do historically and practically underpin the definition of the unversity as distinct from other forms of tertiary education, not the "modern" concept of a liberal arts education.
Go grind your political axe elsewhere.
It'd be illegal to call it 'Hamburger University' in the UK for comparison, as 'university' is a protected designation here and it wouldn't meet the standards for a university, while it does in the US.
(McDonald's does have the same training facility in the UK, but it doesn't claim to be a 'university' here or award 'degrees' like it does in the US.)
Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P)
Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees. I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio...
Currently, there are two problems in UK universities:
Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!).
Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades.
This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs.
FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in!
For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price
PS: appologies for spelling, insomnia...
Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.
The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about.
(Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
Consider if Marks & Spencer announced it would no longer sell clothes, to focus instead on food, for example.
Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.
(That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public.
The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers.
Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small.
But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
It is a flaw in The Firm.