'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.

In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.

They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.

It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.

cue the audience laughter

They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant.

However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).

(It was a day of celebration when the 8K of RAM was upgraded to 16K.)

That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.

Typically they will only take 1 credit after entering candidacy though, down from 9, so overall tuition drops significantly.

> It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess

Sounds like you should have asked for a more appropriate amount of money in the grant.

> If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

Grants can often be extended and funding can be supplemented.

> Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay

Sure, but we are compensated by other academics reviewing our papers for no financial compensation.

> Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

They take copyright over the submitted manuscript. I maintain copyright over preprints. Anyway, the point of writing the research is to distribute it, not to own copyright over it, so I don't see the problem. You can choose the venue, and not all venues take copyright over the submitted manuscript. If copyright is important, then choose one of those venues.

"- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment."

There are a number of ways to cover students - TAships, university level scholarships, and grant funding. For grant funding, the cost of the credits is something we can budget for, is in my university markedly lower than an undergraduates, and is budgeted for. This is portraying "We had to budget for someone working" in a weirdly salacious light.

"- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding."

It's not better to buy shitty lab equipment - while grants don't like funding large capital purchases that will cross projects (except for the grants for this), the equipment doesn't vaporize. The cluster nodes and servers I bought for my first project are still running, and indeed go in applications for new grants as equipments I have, in a section often titled "Facilities and Equipment".

As for not spending it out in time, there's what's called a "No Cost Extension", which is "Hey, we didn't spend the money in time, can we have a bit more time?". The NSF grants the first one of these automatically, and one grant I'm on is on it's third (a program office has been very understanding about the difficulties of conducting research in hospitals during a pandemic).

I've never had pushback from a program for getting an NCE unless it was genuinely something where we messed up spending somehow.

"- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student."

Nope, they're 100% students. This is both good and bad for them, but it's true. They're just expected to spend half - or less - of their time in classes, and the rest on research.

"- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)"

Every university I have been at has had a mechanism for a massive cut in tuition once a graduate student has passed their preliminary exams and become a candidate. It's a big enough one that literally my first instruction to my students is "File your ADB waiver please."

"- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)"

When my students are "on approach" they see me and their committee more and more. They're just expected to drive those meetings more as well.

"- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award)."

Again, this is simply incorrect.

"- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues"

Perhaps in the most abstract sense, in that scholarship is a metric by which I was judged for tenure and promotion, and without that, I don't have a job and thus am not paid. But there has never been a "paper bounty" or something like that for any position I've been in.

Venues do matter, and some places are cutthroat about it, but other places aren't. In my department for example, publications that are in respectable journals appropriate for your discipline will carry you all the way to full professor.

"- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)"

I consider this part of my service obligation, and indeed when filling out annual reports and the like, list reviewerships and editorial positions.

The rest of your stuff on publication is actually refreshingly correct.

"- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work."

I sit on my college's tenure and promotion committee. This just actively isn't true. We look at the difference between solo and co-authored papers, where a particular individual is on a paper and the balance between first, last and middle authorships (I'm in a field that doesn't alphabetize). We also consider whether someone is expected to be there, or is anticipated to contribute a lot to work that others will end up being the lead for (as a modeler, this is occasionally the position I'm in).

Then there's positions that give considerably more weight to teaching or service.

> prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Over the four years she has been there, faculty have received 3 3-5% annual raises. Staff have received ... 1 1% raise.

Faculty and staff were allowed to start working remotely where appropriate during COVID, or "expand the use of a home office".

Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.

Faculty also lobbied for "increasing flexibility for students" by "offering all classes all terms", regardless of enrollment. In practice, this has lead to numerous professors and adjuncts getting paid for teaching a class that often has 2 or even 1 student enrolled.

> As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

In fact, the university recently found themselves in a near 8 digit budget deficit, with every department overrunning. And then faculty tried to throw Finance under the bus - "How could this happen?"

Finance's answer - "Because your departments generally refuse to do purchase orders and an approval process. The first time we hear of most of your expenses is when you hand us an invoice and say 'we bought something, please pay for it'". It also ignores the reality that for the most part, Finance is a facilitator, not an arbitrator. Faculty are adults - if they're given a budget (which they largely come up with themselves), then stick to it.

Things easily go both ways.

They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).

Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.

Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.

For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...

The university I worked with had a 40+% overhead rate auto-included. This could not be negotiated. If you want to work with us, we add this amount to our Govt. request.

The university added a lot of extra work because of this. I basically brought them a proposal, I literally walked over to their partnership office and said "I've written a proposal I'd like to work with you on." It was mostly written, and said I think "some number" would be reasonable. They said, we don't apply without 40+% overhead, rewrite the whole grant so it works with our overhead and faculty tie-in requirements. I said that seems very large, and then none of the other numbers work. They said, write with 40+%.

The eventual result was that the university wanted me to work as a sub-contractor being paid less than a different contractor they were going to hire as a specialist, so I could have the pleasure of partnering with them.

Also, it needs to be completed a month before the deadline, because then all our internals need to churn over the money numbers (and predictably came back a check mark). I was glad it lost.

The cost of tuition for undergrads at schools is certainly ridiculous and a way to siphon money from the government though. That said, I take umbrage with the people that complain about liberal arts degrees. The education is as valuable as any other kind of education in that it hones critical thinking skills in a specific discipline. Those skills are applicable to many, many jobs. The engineers I knew and liberal arts students I knew that struggled to get jobs after college struggled because they had nothing else on their resume when they graduated because they put zero thought into getting a job until school was over.

When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.

Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]

My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.

[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)

[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.

You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.

That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.

1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money.

2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits.

3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects.

You just have to state it in advance.

4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough.

One of the founding tenets of U of Austin is noted as being declared that they would not factor race, gender, or class into admissions because they "stand(s) firmly against that sort of discrimination". I’m amused, but not surprised, that in the minds of some that’s a conservative idea.

I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them.

Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.

The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them.

You mentioned startups. Basically that means create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.

Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries.

That should create an arbitrage opportunity.

Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.

Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.

Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.

What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.

Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.

Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".

This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.

Highly insightful.

That means the support the institution will put behind a shoot-for-the-stars research centre grant is way different than what a theorist looking to pay for 5 grad students will get, but the institution is happy to proportionately support that as well. Especially R1's that are trying to play the prestige game aggressively, they'll push for a "world class" faculty page pretty much across the board. But they don't all get the same offices.

Institutions' reliance on overhead to fund operations varies wildly as well, which makes the calculus different.

I think pitting theory against experiments does not address the issues. The big problem IMO is that the funding systems are so competitive and at the same time (initially) have a large luck component, that it incentives short term, low risk research.

Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewed in the context of being expensive.

Let me try a sports analogy. In American football, each team takes turns (rounds) to draft new players. There are college players who are already famous, had fantastic careers at the college level, and all the scouting agencies said they are can't miss. Then there are college players who played for unknown schools and the scouts don't even have a grade for them. As a result, teams dedicate the first three rounds drafting the players everyone says are can't miss (the good fundraiser in the Academic world). However, the great teams are the ones who can find the hidden gems and draft unknowns in later rounds because they can see the talent (the hypothetical talent scout who spotted the potential of messenger RNA research 20 years ago).

Thanks for the info.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/at-harvard-there-are-2600-more...

But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year.

This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet.

But for most, eventually they have to give up on their dream and do something else - except post-docs are underpaid, so they start off in a worse financial position than they otherwise would.

This has a domino effect, because those post-docs compete for jobs with fresh PhDs who never wanted to stay in academia anyway.

The effect is compounded by universities increasingly relying on adjuncts as a way to cut costs (adjunct professors are heavily exploited, and they take the abuse because they feel like they need to boost their resume to get a tenured position). So, there are even fewer tenure track positions to go around

The only way to fix it is to either reduce the number of PhDs awarded every year (not going to happen) or incentive an increase in the number of professorships at universities.

There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.

Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options.

One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded).

What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.

This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.