Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place.

His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a department is going through a lot of money, then it must be prestigious, important, and doing good work.

I heard a joke once that mathematicians are the second-cheapest academics to hire because all we require is a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. But, in fact, we require online access to all these journals, for which we have to spend a ton of money. Spending all this money makes us look good to our deans, and lends prestige and the look of importance to our department, and allows us to compete with other departments for resources.

I think it's a bunch of BS, frankly, but it's the one time I heard the existing system defended, so perhaps it's worth bringing up.

Sorry, so the argument is: other research costs are expensive in some fields, thereby high spending is prestigious, thereby access to publications ought to be expensive so that fields that lack more direct expenses can seem comparable ? This doesn't seem to make sense, because fields where direct research expenses are high also require access to publications. Maybe I'm missing your point? If so, please clarify.

You're right, it doesn't make sense, but I find it entirely plausible. Welcome to academia; nobody said it was supposed to make sense (especially when it comes to the financial aspects of the gig). Ask me sometime about how my university calculates overhead costs & indirect percentages, let alone how it allocates and charges for floor space- the words "byzantine" and "Machiavellian" come to mind.

Any scientist will tell you that the most important person in their department- by far- is their finance person. They're the ones that know your university's financial system inside and out, and so will be able to help you keep your money from going straight up the university's nose (as it were). A good finance person will also know how, on a per-agency-basis, to structure a grant's budget so that you get to keep as much money as possible as freely-usable as possible (E.g., there are things that the NSF will let you do with certain kinds of grant money that the NIH won't, and vice versa, and a good finance person knows what they are).

So who are the cheapest?

Philosophy - they don't need the wastebasket [JOKE]

I had to restrain myself from saying that about economists.

The economists have an incinerator where everything left-wing goes.

I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

The Halo Effect is a well-known bias. Important things cost a lot of money, therefore if what you're doing doesn't cost a lot of money, it's not important. This happens in large institutions in the private sector as well, sections of companies building their own fiefdoms.

Unfortunately it doesn't. If you hear the words 'efficiency' or 'value for money' being used at a UK university, it usually means they're about to announce a round of redundancies.

Remember that higher education is a bureaucracy, and since the types of conflict that spring up are really minor, they are particularly petty, nasty and status-centered.

In that sort of environment, your actual contribution to some objective goal has nothing at all to do with your position in the bureaucratic pecking order. That's why the basketball coach makes $2M/year, while the galley slaves teaching the classes make $20k, plus shitty health insurance.

Using less money, less staff, less equipment does not make you an alpha academic. In the 90's, that meant that an assistant professor in math or science had to have Sun workstation with a 21" monitor (~$12-15k). A full professor got a fancy SGI Octane that cost even more. At my college, the full math professors were mostly in their sixties -- my calculus professor used his SGI as a terminal emulator to futz around on the VAX. The screen savers were cool though.

Sayre's Law

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law

This is not how universities work. Remember, they're not for profit, so reducing costs means nothing unless your budget is slashed.

Universities make money on grants, what is called the "overhead" -- it ranges from 40% to even more of all grant money received. In such an environment, it makes sense to charge as much as possible for the research. That's is exactly what most class A universities do.

And that is why the true stars of any university are the departments that charge more for their research. E.g., if you have professors that can justify building a hugely expensive particle physics' lab, that is a big point for you.

It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your grant is millions of dollars over a few years, you end up having a lot of very nice dinners paid for with money that was meant to be used for research and education.

If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant.

That's exactly, word-for-word, what professors have told me here. Sad indeed.

Incidentally, that's how the federal government operates. At the end of every fiscal year, if there was money left, it _had_ to be spent.

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