Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

The mid-west has amazing public STEM schools in UMich, Wisc, UIUC, Purdue....and yet their economic centers are in free fall. On the other hand, none of Texas's top cities had a top public school (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and they got by just fine. Austin's rise fairly recent. If anything, the sad state of local economies near massive flagship universities like UMass, Penn State, UFl, TA&MU shows that top-graduates clearly do not care about "sticking around" near their university, and instead just work at whatever the actual economic center is.

Waterloo is one of the top tech schools of the world thanks to a well run co-op program, and their professors have little to do with it. Top universities are amazing thanks to getting the best students and amazing undergrad teachers, who often tend to be PhD students or lecturers. Neither have tenure, so I'm not too worried about their ability to keep the momentum going.

Hell, I'm not even sure that the research output itself will drop. It's not like the total funding for universities went down. We might even see $$ go towards more competitive areas, and a further increase in productive output.

The best researchers do not always make the best educators. The best educators do not always make the best researchers.

Being good at research is a nice to have, but a facility like UT Austin should be hyper focused on attracting the country's best educators to help Texas' best students get (or create) the country's best jobs in Texas.

That said, the best educators are likely also attracted by Tenure.

Whether someone would be/is a good graduate student mentor is a total side dish when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions too. Grants, publications, professional connections, research topic/vision, are all more frequently discussed.

I'm blown away by this statement. Maybe math is an amazing haven of curiosity, and if so that is good to know. But academic credit is half the damn currency of science, and it is 100% the main reason that many profs are willing to take a pay cut. This is something openly joked about by people at all levels in my department (biology), and of what I know from some physicists I am close to it is not great there either. Though this could also have some subfield dependence.

In biology tenure is hardly a direct benefit anyway because there's nothing much you can do without grants, and no one wants to stop being thought of as productive/smart. People chill a little after getting tenure, but only because 50% of them are basically fired at that decision point. Tenured faculty absolutely still play the grantsmanship game hard in biosciences.

I suppose in mathematics there is not as much impact that university status can have, because way less upfront money is needed.

Well, some universities are quite rich. The professors salaries aren't always constrained by the university budget.

They appear to gain billions upon billions of guaranteed cashflow from the government from all of state, local, and federal in many forms every year. Further, the vast majority of US universities/companies raked in huge amounts of cash over the last few decades, exceeding quite a bit of other industries. I'm sure that's as magical as it gets.

> > Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way.

> Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't.

Sucks for them, pay up, they've been able to afford it for decades.

> Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists.

Yes, its to entice their pool of 11,000 [1] and 16,000 [2] graduate students to fight over ~1500 [3] faculty positions across the US. And, the half that do go through to the PhD track will never finish, at best coming out with a MA/MS/MSE or whatever bullshit version of what is colloquially known as a "masters degree" they have invented at their company.

> > After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities.

> Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded.

What do you mean? If by number of topics an single institution can have, then sure, that's a given (lets see the psychology department reproduce their results though). If by the individual topic, then I would beg to differ quite heavily. Lets talk about all the national labs, and while given that some national labs are also owned by universities, these labs are still private, LANL as an example for A&M since we're on that topic. Their scope far exceeds any department A&M has, depth as well, much, much more.

> > And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers.

> ...most of which are given by tenure.

I don't think graduate students are quite that dumb, I'm sure plenty of them can figure out that tenure is not very likely, even if they first author 30 papers all of which get accepted into all of the top journals in their field. Unless they plan on getting rid of the competition somehow,

AKA the existing faculty as well as other students and post-docs. I'd love to see that brawl. I'd pay a few thousand for a Ann Arbor grad to fight an OSU grad to the death. Maybe Berkeley, AA, and Harvard could start giving a few classes on how the Unabomber did what he did.

[1] https://www.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-figures

[2] https://www.tamu.edu/about/at-a-glance.html

[3] https://jobs.chronicle.com/jobs/faculty-positions/tenured-te...

1. Technical TRAINING to do job X (rote-style)

2. Conceptual LEARNING to think creatively about solving problems and asking and answering novel questions—big or small.

Many of us on Hacker News understands the huge difference between this teo modes that has been so elegantly captured in Richard W Hammings “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn”.

If you want to be TRAINED then sure, go to an institution that does no research.

If you want to LEARN then go to an institution that does some research, better yet, a great deal of research.

I was an undegrad at UCSC in the 1970s—-no grades and great faculty who loved both teaching and research. I learned to learn and I still live to learn.

Now I am expected to TRAIN first year med students human genetics that will allow them to pass their boards. The boards demand insufferably ancient genetics—a cut-off date of 2001 would be fine-wonderful. But there has been a bit of progress in genetics in the last two decades. I tried to teach them a hybrid of the “classics” but with 50% of time devoted to cutting-edge modern genetics. I hate TRAINING to the test.

You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?

I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20% (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense) across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year)

From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers are doing so because (they believe that) participating in that program gives them advantage in the employment market, some years later... but not exactly to learn anything, which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of those attending.

I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but it seems like the main actual thing the whole system is doing now, whatever anyone's intentions were or are. Only semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career" for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much about whether applicants have a degree.

In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor is too weak, which has led to some really weird outcomes as far as how higher ed is treated.

[EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds with itself than the above contention that increased university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down, while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might be a way to reduce university attendance—so many people are going to college, because companies aren't desperate enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads real money—they can afford to hold out for college grads, even if they don't really need them.

In Australia for example college debt is managed through the taxation system allowing people to invest in the careers in the early days and then pay off their debt when their taxable income reaches a high enough threshold.

> Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying to pay off college debt

> As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous results.

If you have a degree, and are working retail, and are near-poverty, then you screwed up somewhere. Your degree is objectively useless if this is the only prospects available after graduation - so why did you get that degree? Why didn't you continue into postgrad or change degree paths?

Perhaps we should stop offering student loans for useless degrees. Still offer them, but no loans allowed. That would go a long ways towards solving the diagnosed problem.

We've spent decades telling everyone they must get a degree to live a successful life - then we puppy-mill them into garbage/completely-useless degree programs, and are surprised when they go back to the same job they held in highschool. Now, we're going to forgive all those poor choices, because we think we did everyone wrong, but we're going to change not one thing to prevent it from happening again. Brilliant.

Because learning more about our history and the world we live in furthers humanity in immeasurable ways often only appreciated years and decades in the future.

Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

For example, the fields you mention (sciences/engineering, medicine) pull in vastly more money that humanities. Because they have more money, they hire more faculty, and they also train and graduate more PhD students.

I knew a few humanities PhD students while I was in grad school, and none of them were funded by research grants. If they were lucky, they got fellowships. That's a stark contrast to engineering where both grant and fellowship funding was relatively plentiful (though I've got a few horror stories there too).

On top of it, humanities jobs are really hard to find (even more difficult than fields like physics that are already known for multiple postdocs, etc.), making it a bad deal all around for PhD students in those fields.

Overall, I think things are already allocated more or less the way you expect, and I don't think we need to piss on humanities for this. They already have it hard enough.

Tenure is the key incentive in the academic tournament model. Other fields that do “out or up” (consulting, Big Law) offer major $$$ to the winners.

>The problem is that you lose the people who are the most competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable skills, etc.

So, you can have your cake and eat it too... provided that the cake is half-off because it's not competitive.

Which is what Scott Aaronson said.

Also, a portion of adjunct and contract-based positions are filled by those seeking a tenure track position. Removing tenure will affect this side as well.

There's some ambiguity there.

In my experience, it's not necessarily hard to find someone whose credentials match job requirements wrt. teaching. Finding a good teacher for an academic position can be quite hard though.

If you can negotiate a low teaching load, it might be OK in some cases.

Nonetheless, I agree with what you say. I'd add there is a ton of nasty politics, bullying, etc. which might be hard to avoid while you are on tenure track chasing tenure.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-creator-of-C++-Bjarne-Stro...

Of course he's not a nobody, but if Texas universities pay that kind of money to superstar professors, for small stints, this could attract people from industry that in the end are much more up to date on the industry's state of the art (vs the research state of the art).

The top 5 other professors (but probably many tenured) were making in the ~$200k range at that time too. In that part of the country, it's huge.

Ultimately tenure has a price. if there's no tenure, higher salaries would be offered.

Now the impact on student's tuition could be interesting, but if most of it goes to administrative staff anyways, who knows?

The way I see things, freedom is a consequence of tenure. Or at least it was intended to be like that. If you want to pursue ground-breaking ideas, you might not publish for a while. If you are tenured this doesn't matter much. If you aren't, it's like playing Russian roulette with your career.

> Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now

In some systems, you are tenured right from the beginning. For example, in British Academia, most assistant professor positions are permanent and it's not impossible to get one straight after your PhD. However, pay and funding is much lower.

* Academics say publish or perish is terrible and produces warped incentives.

* Academics say they need tenure to protect senior researchers from the publish or perish system.

* But academics seem to be the ones building grant and advancement systems that enforce “publish or perish”.

I don’t get it - it certainly sounds like tenure mostly protects senior academics from systems they built themselves. If publish or perish is so bad why don’t senior members of departments build advancement opportunities that don’t rely on impact factor? Cynically, it almost feels like tenure is enforcing publish or perish, because those with tenure set the rules and the current system protects those who are tenured.

Furthermore, I don’t see why the sort of “deep study” research that the idealized tenured researcher does would need special protection. If the researcher has a track record of success surely the department would tolerate a brief lull in publications while they work on their Magnum Opus? Private industry frequently does multi-year deep research projects without the need for tenure systems.

Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that already happens for admissions.

Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals?

Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do.

In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who run the town and implement the services, it becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and associated services? The sports complex and associated services? The transportation system?

And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a university, because a university is just a school, and it shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One, you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get rid of these services, often times the local town cannot replace them. So how are they to manage?

So if you're having trouble understanding why a university can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it could be because you don't have a clear understanding of their role and why they are crucial. Universities require bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size of the student population.

First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously define and measure those qualities.

This would be great, but I will present without comment the fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far the best way that we know how to do ability-based admissions.

You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission.

Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the expansion of the administration and increasing education costs.

A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be fired for low performance, or for economical reasons. You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.

* if they don't control the administration of the schools, this only serves to make it harder to hire anybody and easier to fire those who the administration doesn't agree with. Presumably conservatives. That's a net loss.

* if they do control the administration (or have a path to getting that control) then why not just hire people who think like they do and then enjoy the results of having those folks have tenure?

Even one who took a month of unannounced vacation out of the country then retroactively declared it as work from home when it turned out they had not even accrued the time they took. They were also only approved for one day a week work from home.

My point being at least where I work it is next to impossible to fire a full time staffer who is not attached to soft money. An adjunct though is essentially disposable once a year. Part time professors, at the end of any semester.

In my personal experience I've seen or heard of more professors espousing their personal views as fact than most online and academic discourse would have otherwise led me to believe possible.

I think removing tenure is a net loss for research because professors now have to worry about politically motivated reprisal for their research, whereas I believe it to be a net gain for student education since professors can then be held accountable for failing their basic responsibility of teaching factual information to the best of their knowledge based on the available research in their field of study.

2. Liberal states seem to be going extreme in other directions. Some examples are how “equity” policies (in general, not a bad idea) are implemented. Gifted programs, ap programs, accelerated programs and the like are being cut because the participants don’t have the proper racial ratios (Asians and Whites tend to be statistically over-represented). Equity is not an unreasonable policy to pursue, but doing it by holding back others is regressive, imho. Holding back high achievers also addresses the problem at the wrong level — that is, the origins of academic inequality typically happen at a much earlier age.

Interestingly, in most states (blue, red, or purple), teachers are almost forced to teach to the bottom 25-30% of each class, since schools are evaluated by how many people meet the minimum standards rather than by overall or high level achievement.

The law is pretty broad and moreover the legal costs default to the defendant. Even if my wife didn't do something that was officially illegal, we'd be stuck counter-suing to reclaim legal costs.

[1] https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-ap...

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-ap...

It’s poorly worded, likely to be abused, and also not just K-3 anymore like people keep incorrectly asserting. Even if I did think that there was some grooming conspiracy, I wouldn’t want to teach in Florida because I don’t want to be sued by some parent who has a relatively risk-free way to get free money by claiming I mentioned some LGBT agenda.

Also, you understand that “move to a blue city” only gets you so far right? This will (and to some extent already has) lead to a shortage of decent teachers in Florida, because a lot of teachers who can move to a more hospitable state have (or will).

A friend remarked one benefit of moving to industry (aside higher pay and more job security(1)) was the reduced hours - no longer always continuing to work after leaving the office.

(1) job security after tenure isn't magical compared to industry around here; before tenure, job security is more or less a guaranteed "haha nope."

So on average, industry has far better job security.

There's truth in that, for better or worse.