Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjt | Hacker News Reader

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat race."

The people who want to win that rat race will go somewhere else. UT will be greatly impacted but I don't think the overall scientific output of the USA will.

View on HN

I struggle to see how this benefits Texas, though. Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants, but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs along with them.

It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it extremely friendly to Bitcoin mining, which happens to be the most competitive, low-margin, environmentally damaging part of the crypto ecosystem. Meanwhile most of the high-margin profit centers (exchanges, DeFi protocols, new blockchain technologies) remained in the Bay Area. It's like Texas is awfully fond of setting up selection filters and then selects for the mediocre.

It's almost as though the state leadership is utterly incompetent :)

It's intentional. One of the biggest threats to authoritarians is an educated electorate.

All of this is part of a larger war on public education in Texas:

Book bans, accusing librarians of stocking pornographic material, pushing radical conservatives into school boards, accusing public grades schools of teaching CRT, passing blatantly unconstitutional bills to force religion into public schools (like the one forcing the ten commandants to be displayed today), and trying to defund public schools by pushing the voucher program for unregulated privatized schooling.

How does Texas's research output affect its ability to pull in top professionals from elsewhere ?

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.

Austin is Texas's fastest growing city (and in the USA), and the metro is known as one of its richest. UTA has some role in fostering a tech scene that isn't as nice in Dallas or Houston (and doesn't really exist yet in San Antonio).

Seattle definitely benefits a lot from UW and its computer science department, but there is some cycle going on (Intel and Microsoft were heavy backers of UW CSE in the earlier years, and also took many of its graduates).

People do care about sticking around if they can. If the school is somewhere nice; e.g. in the Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin.

There's a flywheel effect to academic research where good professors -> interesting discoveries -> grad students spin out and start companies -> economic growth -> good jobs -> halo effect for university -> more students, more budget -> better professors. That's how Stanford, MIT, and Harvard got to be so dominant. They spawned a whole ecosystem of startups and tech companies around them.

"Good professors" is a necessary but not sufficient condition to getting this flywheel going. You also need public/private partnerships to commercialize discoveries; a reasonably attractive urban area that'll keep students there; availability of venture capital; and a fair bit of luck with the initial batch of startups. But if you don't have decent teaching & research programs you're taking yourself out of the running entirely.

> Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors

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.

Does tenure really make the best professors? In my experience it only creates an incentive up to the point of getting tenure, then most of them hibernate until retirement and take up space without producing much because they have no need to. IMO a good professor is great even without tenure. If they are just trying to fake it til tenure pushing cheap research to then have them take up a slot and resources to sit around, I rather ban tenure.

I think you could have more non-tenure track faculty, but eliminating it entirely is a bad ideas unless you are willing to compete on price for top researchers, which colleges are largely opposed to doing.

The up-shot is faculty are going to look elsewhere for jobs.

Once you get tenure you still need to make full professor. The bar there is that you have to have made a name for yourself, and that doesn’t happen if you hibernate.

Here in Europe the term tenure is also used, but apparently vastly differently.

Here, "tenure" means you have a permanent position at a university. You can still be fired, but it's quite a hassle involving a lengthy process. Basically, you're guaranteed to stay employed given adequate performance, but your task allotment can still vary a lot. Eg. less publications can lead to less research time and thus more teaching duties. (Such a thing can lead to a spiral of ever-reduced research time, yes).

If performance keeps being under par after task allotment shifts, you may end up in a new role - eg. as manager instead of researcher. Etc. etc. Basically, things have to get quite bad before you're out of a job, but you cannot sit back and hibernate, or you lose your role as a prof.

Anyway, it seems that in the US, this is rather different. Or, at least, the perception of tenure amongst commenters is.

It's pretty much the same. Tenured faculty have a set of prescribed duties, particularly teaching loads. If they have a lot of grants or other duties that they perform, the teaching burden can be lightened, but they can't just decide to not do anything.

When I was in grad school there were professors who were much less active after getting tenure and a full professorship, but this was a fairly competitive school and they worked themselves to the bone to get tenure at a good school. They were obviously burnt out, most left. A few stick around and mostly just perform their teaching duties and some administrative/service work.

The top researchers were often not the best teachers, some of the better teachers had let their foot off the gas on the research side (the university wants them to do research because of how the grant structure works).

As a practical matter I doubt UT and A&M will be affected at all. They're two of the richest universities in the United States thanks in large part to the Permanent University Fund (i.e., oil money). They'll 1) raise pay substantially and 2) tap their big-money donors to create professorial sinecures that amount to unofficial tenure.

If you get fired because of the legislature's antics, but still get your salary and have access to quasi-university resources (grad assistants and labs), were you really fired?

The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point.

The point is to hire faculty doing cutting edge work is that they train students. They teach others in a field. Then you get to grow the local knowledge base about a particular method or field. Hopefully, you're training citizens of the state, who then will stay locally instead of going to a different state (avoiding a brain drain). Or just as likely, you're trying to draw in students from out of state or internationally. And then (hopefully) those people will want to stay within the state, either for more research, or to start/join local companies.

It's not the primary effect of the faculty that you want... that's nice, but it's the second order network effects that a state really wants to encourage.

you hire faculty to 1) train students 2) to do cutting edge work 3) on fundamental/basic research and unprofitable but important topics. academia's not just an internship.

The smartest people in a field are not necessarily the best at training, especially if they care more about their own research end goals than trainee outcomes and/or have never gotten proper guidance on how to effectively mentor.

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.

Some are though. Sean Carroll immediately comes to mind.

https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...

I don't have an opinion about the bill, but thought this anecdote was relevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com