Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas? – Mind Matters
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Universities always have been a system for selecting people who can keep it running in the future. So the first day as a freshman kicks off a test of serveral years if you're a fit. That's why we have different levels of degrees. People can drop out without much sunk costs. Otherwise only very few would try this journey and then the base for selecting good people would be low.
What I mean with good people who keep it running has changed a lot. Historically, universities didn't have to justify themselves much. For governments, it was obvious because they provided knowledge gain, and, primarily, they provided well-educated people to work for the government. So universities selected the best people because they would become the next generation of teachers or drop out as educated governmental workers.
Nowadays, the government and the public want to see research results (for funding) because this is supposed to be the purpose of universities. I think this is a misunderstanding and universities took part in creating it. So the people universities select for now are still good students but also ones that play by the new rules and crank out as many papers as possible.
My main obstacle during the PhD was to adapt to a research style of looking up fashionable topics in the research community, writing an incremental paper und publishing it. My advisor even objected against some ideas because they're too risky.
Modern univ is run by sociopath MBAs that financialized institutions.
They only care about getting in money. Prestige / paper numbers is secondary.
If you haven't been living under a rock, you know that the cost of upper education has exploded over the last 3-4 decades. Tuition has increased far above inflation, while endowments have exploded.
And yet, these are nonprofit organizations. There are no shareholders, no private ownership. Salaries are being heavily depressed in professors as financialization of departments results in humanities studies being axed. Teaching is either TAs or the rise of the minimum wage professor: the adjunct.
There has been an arms race in facilities, but that does not explain all the increase. So:
WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?
Every college professor will tell you that administration has exploded in size. Wait, these colleges basically functioned perfectly well without huge administration orgs. WHy are they there?
Because they, who spoke MBA to the rich benefactors (aka former captains of induasty) inserted themselves. And of course any MBA of any place anywhere, be it nonprofit charity, corporation, or administrator of a college, in the last 30-40 years has seen their pay dramatically rise.
A "CEO" of a charity used to be ... a charity. They'd get paid peanuts. Now it's pretty routine for a substantial charity director to get paid millions. Because of course they are so valuable and amazing that they need high compensation to "retain" them lest they take their amazing talents to corporate world.
College administrators get to point to the fundraising and tuition increases and the overall revenue increase to show their amazing abilities and how they need to be retained with high six figure or seven figure salaries, otherwise clearly the university would fall apart.
What a weird conclusion. You are more likely to get a high paying job as a professional athlete if you have won a lot of tournaments, and you are more likely to win a lot of tournaments if you’re a highly paid professional athlete. So they conclude “Oh, so skill in the sport doesn’t matter?”
Of cause it does!
There's also research showing pretty clear seniority effects on grant receipt.
You're raising a good point but my sense is it doesn't fit the data well.
There's also a really basic question of whether grants per se should matter at all in things like tenure decisions. You could make an argument that they're a means to an end, and using them for hiring decisions is sort of a tail wagging the dog phenomenon.
We would perhaps not care so much about the "vicious cycle" if the incentives were aligned with "good" research. If cancer gets cured, at the end of the day I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over how. But the concern is the incentives are misaligned in favour of exploiting the metrics instead of "good" research.
The way to think about it is to imagine a non tenured person writing two identical grants. They take one grant and change their position to full professsor while other stays at non tenured.
They are saying that the one that says full professor will get a higher score on average than the non tenured application.
Of course the more you get in grants, the more overhead you can offset and typically the more you can publish thus the more likely you are to get tenure (assuming your institution even offers it any more).
Granting organizations want there resources to go to proven successes in general and the more you publish and speak at conferences the more recognition you get for the funder.
This is not to say that some funders won't risk a grant to a junior faculty member but senior facuty are likely to be safer bets. They PI the grant projects and junior faculty are participants, co-pi, and co-authors.
Put in layman's terms, I am not likely to contract a guy with an interesting non conventional idea on how to build my house but you might and that is great for the new idea guy if you are willing to accept the risk. In the house building world, the senior is a general contractor or master builder. The juniors are apprentices with energy and ideas. Again though, I'm not got to contract with an apprentice to build my house or lead a multi million dollar research project.
Building a house is an engineering and construction problem, more akin to a medical procedure, where you might want a tried and true method by an experienced practitioner.
Research is similar in that you want someone with skill and knowledge doing the work. But there's a tension because in the extreme case, you could just find someone doing the same study they've done forever well and reliabily getting the same result, but that wouldn't be accomplishing the goal of research.
What we have now is in between but probably closer to the latter approach, where funding agencies fund because it's likely to work in the sense of producing small p values, rather than because it generates new information.
The story of Karikó is sad to me in part because it is so common, but most don't have the privilege of a historical event to underscore the problems and turn it into a fairy tale ending.
Until they fix that, the rest of us will always have better options than that.
Honestly, this is a sick system. Hire a faculty member and then expect them to hire someone to perform one of their fundamental duties: teaching.
It seems to me that the basic model needs to change. Hire faculty for what you want them to do. Want an instructor? Hire an instructor. Want a researcher, hire a researcher. Provide both with what they need, whether that is RAs, TAs, funding, lab space, or whatever.
If a research active faculty member wants to teach even less, then they use grant money to buy themselves releases.
Typically even research faculty are expected to teach at least one course as are leadership faculty like deans. Though obviously the provost and president are unlikely to teach but rather raise a shit ton of philanthropy.
For context, I have work and consulted for more than a decade at R1 universities that you have heard of.