An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia
crypto.junod.info
crypto.junod.info
I think there's a certain type of person that is particularly attracted to advanced work in science and technology -- the systems purist, who believes strongly that the world "should" work in mostly objective ways. This is a strength in that the world doesn't change very much without these idealists pushing for their vision, but it's also a horrible weakness because these sorts of people don't tend to internalize that any project among groups of humans is going to be messy and inefficient and frustratingly subjective. The successful people adapt, and learn to bend the messy ecosystem to their will. The others...don't (they do things like writing dramatic, self-important missives about how the system is failing them, and cc it to the entire department. ahem.)
If you make it all the way to the end of a PhD program and you haven't realized that it's mostly about how to make steady, measurable progress in a messy, complicated, political world, you haven't yet reached the end of the process.
Time either beats it out of you, or you become this very pathetic, unfortunate sort of character as you get older. There are few things sadder than adults who blame the world for being insufficient for their needs.
This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns.
EDIT: typos
This problem is even worse when you take taxpayer funds, because transparency and accountability are fundamental attributes of good governance, and the claim that 'it will be useful someday' potentially pushes the accountability aspect out to t=infinity.
what's the difference? would you want to fund a Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies?
I think it is important to distinguish between individual vs collective accountability, as well as accountability within a field and the accountability of the field to larger society. My argument for supporting basic research in a field assumes that there is internal accountability within that field and that the research makes sense to those within it even if there is no direct application. In this view accountability of the individual to society is mediated by the accountability of the field at large to society. This is what allows for various sorts of bet hedging (if we think of a field as a firm) to improve the chances of hitting the rare event where a basic result has a big impact. If there is a deterioration of transparency accountability within a field, perhaps due to the mechanisms the OP describes in points (1-7) then (8) does become a problem. So I have perhaps a different understanding of (8) then the OP. I do not argue that some particular flavor of esoteric mathematics be supported because 'it will be useful someday'. Rather I argue that, so long as there is intellectual integrity within mathematics (or whatever other field) that one should expect some small fraction of the esoteric theoretical research will yield big returns, and that these returns will subsidize the failed efforts. This kind of mechanism allows for the possibility to support t=infinity timescale research with accountability checks of the collective at finite timescales.
Now, if we start to deviate from my assumption of integrity within a field and my scenario of field as idealized firms, there are all sort of interesting game theoretical questions that pop up. For example, what sort of internal rewards and punishments within a field are needed to keep things honest? I don't know, but I think it is interesting to think about.
Yeah, that is a huge, and completely wrong assumption about the sciences.
I could rattle off a list of names just in my field (you should google them to find out exactly what they did): Dalibor Sames/Bengu Sezen. Leo Paquette. Homme Hellinga. Peter Schultz/Jonathan Zhang. Geoffrey Chang. Armando Cordova. To varying degrees of fraud, or negligence (e.g. Chang wasn't fraudulent, just almost criminally[0] negligent) And those are the people who got caught, and the ones I know about. Guess how many of them still have faculty positions?
[0]I feel safe saying this (with the "almost" qualification) because misappropriation of federal funds is a crime.
Irrespective of your assumption, you still need some sort of justfication for giving taxpayer money to science. Presumably, because it's good for society. Well fine. If it's so good for society, why can't you find people to give money to science as a free-will donation?
This is already more accountability than in some government departments or parts of large corporations!
Since nobody can predict everything ahead of time, we have to take risks and explore possible dead ends. Moreover, we really want to avoid getting everyone stuck in the same mindset, so we need people to challenge the status quo occasionally. Think of research as a large search problem--you sometimes have to take seemingly bad moves in order to avoid local maxima. Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted.
Do you not see how this could be bad? You're implicitly subsidizing a select few - then who gets to be the gatekeeper that decides what is or isn't bad? Surely not, people who are selected because of their high training, where "high training" winds up also being indirectly judged as "people who were trained by the closed society of individuals who just happen to be the selectees"?
I mean, really, that's what we're doing. As the system becomes more closed and self-interested, and dependent on extracting funds from the government, the more the danger of becoming detached from reasonableness - and then you DO have to worry about people tickling their intellectual jollies.
Now, if we had the very same system, except it were funded as, say a private non-profit entity, it will for sure have the same problems. But - it's less morally suspect, because, at least the people donating their money into it should have known that risk beforehand - and can choose to directly defund their part in the rotten enterprise when they figure out what's going on.
> Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted.
You're absolutely right. But that choice is not one that government should be making, because of its conflict of interest (accountability). Incidentally, there are problems with transparency in government funding reviews (NSF and NIH panels are conducted in secret with 'anonymous reviewers'), too, but those are implementation details, not fundamental problems.
I'm not suggesting that the risk-taking involved in judging basic science should not be done. I am suggesting that it should not be done by government.
The term "basic research" refers to the study of fundamental principles. It is undertaken precisely to "tickle intellectual jollies". This is not a bad thing. Basic research is important because it is critical for the advancement of Science to understand why something works the way it does. This approach is distinct from applied research, which is very often concerned with making a buck from the derivation of Scientific results.
Spoken like a true engineer
If it's so obviously good, then why aren't people paying out of their own pockets to help out?
I'm going to anticipate your answer: because they're too selfish. But is there any reason to believe that our elected officials are any less selfish? Look at the narcissistic idiots we elect - and ask, are these the people whom you really want holding the purse strings? I often see complaints, "petition congress not to defund science". Well you know what, scientists shouldn't be so darned entitled, it wasn't their money to begin with. Putting their faith in the continued patronage of a capricious bunch of authoritarians beholden to questionable special interests may not have been the smartest way to secure a sustainable (or a moral) stream of funds.
In the end, taxes are backed by "if you don't pay them, you're gonna be taken away by agents who will throw you in jail". That's blood money you're taking. Deficit spending, which is governments do these days, is even worse - at least with taxes there is the pretense of the voter having a say; when you borrow money on the credit of the nation - you are mortgaging the assets of future generations, who cannot go back in time and cast a vote against spending their money on a stupid idea.
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others.[1] Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defense, flood control systems and street lighting. Public goods that are available everywhere are sometimes referred to as global public goods.
Let's put it in really stark terms. I want to build a lighthouse. Because it's a public good; it will keep ships in the ocean safe. Is it morally justified for me to hold a gun to your head and threaten to blow it off if you don't give ten dollars for the construction of the lighthouse? What about one dollar? Ten cents? Half a cent? Let's ratchet back a little bit. Maybe I don't threaten to blow your head off. I'll just build a cell and throw you in there. For ten years. Is it any better if it's six months? Six weeks? Does that make it any better? Does it make it any morally better if instead of taking the personal responsibility for detaining you, I delegate that responsibility to agents of a byzantine bureaucracy?
May I remind you:
>I'm going to anticipate your answer: because they're too selfish. But is there any reason to believe that our elected officials are any less selfish? Look at the narcissistic idiots we elect - and ask, are these the people whom you really want holding the purse strings?
>The degree of benefit for the future is sometimes not measurable, however if the past is any indication than it has definitely provided major contributions to innovation.
It's not like privately funded applied and basic science is chopped liver here. Applied: Salk and Sabin developed the polio vaccines without a public dime (pun intended) and didn't patent it either. Basic: Peter Mitchell proposed and validated the chemiosmotic effect (1970s) and even won a nobel prize on the discovery, without public help. Obviously, if you go far back enough to where the state was essentially uninvolved in science, most of the discoveries were made with private funding. Yes, of course, publically funded science has made discoveries, but what you are arguing is the broken window fallacy.
The purpose of government is to marshal these selfish urges such that we benefit as a whole.
Whether or not that happens is a political problem. That the political system can be captured by politically expedient interests is a political problem.
Of course gradstudent should throw a hissyfit, if it is in their interest - would you expect anything less?
I think a lot of people think that's what government should do, but you should really think hard about why that's a bad idea. Who is "we"? Who gets to really decide what is "benefit"? Who gets to decide what is "selfish"? And how can I be that person so that I can screw over gradstudent, and bring about benefits, which, oh by the way, also REALLY benefit my friends and family? Some animals are just.... More equal than others.
society
> Who gets to really decide what is "benefit"?
society
> Who gets to decide what is "selfish"?
individuals
> And how can I be that person ?
society is not one person.
> Some animals are just.... More equal than others.
Which is why the pigs need constant replacement, power must be diffusely held and the executive must be separate from the judiciary.
Please don't anticipate my answers :) at present people are paying out of their own pockets for 3rd and 4th level education. So this is happening.
Taxes are not yours. They belong to the state. There is a fallacy that exists that you own your taxes and "pay them" to the state. This is not the reality. The reality is that the state has always owned the taxes and by virtue of the system they have created (which the taxes are used to fund) enable you to earn a living. You owe taxes because you have used the resources of the state. Be it the land, the security forces or the markets or transport networks.
There are lots of good things that aren't worth what they cost.
Otherwise, studies on ancient history, dead languages, etc. should be completely eliminated.
Yes, academia in that sense is a set of elitists, but then again, only the elite can properly evaluate one another's jobs.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that much of how Academia works today is inevitable. How many people are truly excellent in any job? Always only a small percentage. Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%. What are the other 80% supposed to do? They have to represent something that they are not, because people outside of Academia must believe that 100% of Academia are excellent (otherwise they would revolt where all their tax money goes). Everything bad in Academia follows from this.
Collaborate with the excellent 20%? What is wrong with encouraging more collaboration between researchers? Why should the mediocre 80% be pressured into publishing low-quality, CV-padding papers when they could be working effectively with geniuses?
Some journals, Nature being the most notable, chase impact factor above all else. The only thing they truly care about is that the papers they publish get cited. This means highly original work, which frequently doesn't get cited much for a long time, is less desirable than a turn-the-crank paper from a respected name.
Researchers have been taught to prize Nature publications (thanks to the same flawed metric of merit) and spend a disproportionate amount of time submitting papers to Nature. When you write a paper you choose your target journal, and writing for Nature means you need to avoid rocking the boat too much, because they receive so many submissions that one minor criticism from a referee will torpedo your paper, even if that criticism is demonstrably wrong. Sometimes invalid criticisms are made by referees who are jealous, threatened, or merely lazy, but the editor has so many other submissions to deal with that he/she won't take the time to evaluate and understand the referee recommendations. Real science invites debate, but Nature's editors run screaming from it.
Why do researchers care so much about playing this game if it compromises their writing and even their research? Even a tenured prof needs to hustle for funding if he wants to do more than teach and sit in his office. PI's are salesmen even more than they're managers! The very language itself is twisted at the core when applying for grants. The average researcher or project must be superlative in every way on paper or no money is going to come. You can't say you're doing something out of pure curiosity and the chances of it spawning another silicon valley are remote. It has to be imminently commercializable with potential for massive, revolutionary impact! Honesty will destroy you. If every research proposal delivered what it promised the World would be one giant Palo Alto. We would all be better off if some better way to allocate resources were found, but that's no easy task!
As for the PhD student... There is more than meets the eye here. You don't walk away from 4 years of work in the last month without reason. Perhaps his thesis is a hopeless mess. Perhaps his relationship with his supervisor is hostile. Perhaps he's mentally ill. The last few months are ridiculously stressful after all! It's also very possible he or she is a lot more than one month from finishing. Hopefully there are people who care about this person and will help him/her get back on track and finish. The game is flawed, but the best way to ensure nobody wins is to refuse to play it.
If you're on the caliber of, says Srinivasa Ramanujan or Galois, then I'm fairly sure you don't have to give a shit to PhD or any educational systems. Most of us aren't that type of geniuses though, and we do need help and coaching from advisors, grad schools or otherwise.
In theory, the PhD is this fantastic credential that opens all kinds of doors. In practice it might make a small difference in your starting salary in industry. The only place where having a PhD is truly important is in a research position, which basically means academia. Even then it is not the last word -- tenure track positions might be out, but there are a number of schools who are willing to hire a good researcher whose highest degree is an MS.
Even with a PhD your prospects may not be all that much better than they are with an MS. I have seen people get a PhD with only one or two published papers, in a field where you need at least ten to even have a serious shot at a tenure track position. If you are the kind of person whose attitude is, "Screw it, I am in school to learn as much as I can and not just to publish a bunch of incremental improvements," you might not even get a shot at an academic job. Sure, someone can pad their CV as a postdoc -- but that is not all that much better than being a grad student, just moderately better pay.
Says who? Maybe this student has no interest in going into academia and does not see the point of completing a PhD program.
The student has a reason, we just don't know what it is.
There are other points that are addressed in the opposite direction. Anyway it's good to have a wide variety of opinions floating around, makes it easier for us outsiders to get closer to 42...
I hate the way we have to 'sell' research to compete for funding and prestigious publications. But my impression is that most researchers regard this as a necessary evil, not as their primary purpose. Maybe I've been lucky in my academic experiences (two UK universities, biology), but I met a lot of people who are still genuinely interested in the science. They play the salesman game, of course, because they have to, but they help their PhD students and postdocs, try to judge research from other groups objectively, and care about intellectual honesty. Some of the best are the emeritus professors, the ones who simply carried on researching instead of retiring.
In many cases, the paper is not the best method of conveying information, but it works well enough for most cases that no one has managed to usurp it. Editor reviewed journals might have some flaws in their process, but it is effective enough at picking out useful papers that scientists clearly chose to purchase them and use them as a source. So I wouldn't hate the publishing cycle per say, just the fact that in those cases where it is not exactly optimal, the tyranny of the majority is ruining the day of a small set of research types.
I'm also in a field that has low financial barriers to doing research. The lab model that is predominant in the natural sciences is very very different.
Here's the secret: it is quite possible to get a permanent position with a reasonable teaching load at a reasonable university without lots of funding and without having to produce large numbers of publications in high-profile conferences/journals. Indeed the majority of the world's scientists do just this -- almost by definition, for otherwise selective journals/conferences/funding systems could not be selective: to be selective means to deny entry to the masses. The trick is to think long-term and build develop one's niche of science, until so much material of interest has been accumulated that something novel and substantial has become of it. In my experience, that takes a decade or two of an individual's labour. It's psychologically difficult to toil solitary for that long without positive community feedback (which in science really comes in form of grants and high-profile publications). But it is certainly possible. By the time you have created that niche, you can also create your own conferences/journals/prizes etc, and all of a sudden you are the eminent scientist in your field. That in turn makes it easy to get PhD students, grants etc.
Caveat: the above programme may not work so easily for pre-tenure academics at the top-prestige universities, or in fields that have very high start-up costs in terms of material and/or labour (e.g. high-energy physics). Fortunately, most of computer science is comparatively cheap though (needs only a laptop and an internet connection).
Given that this is a possible career path, and clearly many scientists who got famous only late in life, or posthumously, have had long periods of frustrating 'drought', one wonders if negative rants like that in the linked article, may not in part be a reflection of the authors lack of belief in his/her abilities.
We've all been there. I think you have to either be purposely oblivious or one of the extremely lucky ones blessed with a true research environment, but it is impossible for the new generation of scientists to not see the writing on the wall. Every single student is suffering from the symptoms, yet very few are doing things to change it.
One note, echoing the original author - for myself personally, the letters 'PhD' no longer carry the same meaning anymore. If anything, it's become an additional signal that you once bought into a system that is selling you short. I still respect those who have PhD's, but only for what it once meant, not for what it means now.
In other words, if we weren't doing this, we would all be in grad school/academia getting PhD's and doing research anyways. This is more a reflection that we're giving up that opportunity in an effort to pay it forward. I would rather 'PhD' to mean something again than to have something that is meaningless.
Universities as we dream them, like Humboldt did, are alas a relic of the 19th century. They’re a lost romantic desire, like the inspiring anecdote (regardless of its historical truth) of a student Niels Bohr and a professor Ernest Rutherford debating over truth as equals.
Universities as we know them since the 1960s evolved into cash-burning bureaucracies. Soon, academia may evolve again — open sourced learning, who knows?
Until the age of enlightenment the bigger part of scientific endeavors was done by dilettanti, unpaid, un-institutionalized “hobbyists” and other philosophes. We will return to those days — perhaps, and need be, at the expense of “democratic access” to learning.
But the ideal of a community of intellectuals devoted to truth and science will live on in the honest hearts of young scientists (and self-employed hackers). Kudos to the courageous heart of that young PhD-student for reminding the academic managerial caste of our ideal!
The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it.
It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamentally corrupting. I think that only applies to mismanaged money; it can also be seen as fundamentally enabling.
This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.
A third (rather modern) requirement might be to ignore what most people consider good practices and simply try to get as many things done as you can. The actual process of building things is mostly what increases your skill, not solely your study of how to build things.
The forth requirement for a computer science career is for someone to give you your initial break (hire you at a job). The only thing necessary for this is to find (a) an open-minded employer who cares mostly about whether you can build things rather than about what credentials you have, and (b) you can show a portfolio demonstrating that you can build things. Build a portfolio of personal projects -- the more visual, the better. Mine was to show demos of 3D game engines I made. They were simplistic, but they were pretty, and it got my foot in the door. If I wanted to become a webdev, I would put together a portfolio of websites I made. Note that you can make whatever you feel like making -- it doesn't need to have a purpose, just something like "here's my example checkout process I made for my example merchant website." Stuff like that.
There's always hope as long as you believe in yourself.
As we cram more and more people into the same cities, the same companies, the same institutions of learning, they're going to experience some failures to scale. This is one of those failures. Academia becomes hyper-competitive. There aren't enough jobs. School becomes too expensive. Home prices outpace inflation and wage increases by a factor of three or more. The world is just much more competitive today, and it will continue to become even more competitive.
I sometimes think about my grandfather, now dead, who was a sales executive for a major clothing company in the 60s and 70s. He was making $50k in 1960. According to an inflation calculator, that would be nearly $400k today in base salary. It astounds me to reflect on this and the fact that he didn't even have a college degree. A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar. There were many others like him; you didn't have to be a business whiz extraordinaire to land such a job fifty years ago. You just had to be dedicated, hard-working, personable, and passionate, and everything else would follow. But the world was just not nearly as competitive back then.
Can we explain why we seem to see an increasingly competitive society despite there being more actual stuff to go around?
I don't think this is a complete explanation, though, and your point is a good one.
I also believe that the transition from one-income to dual-income households has had a pretty deleterious effect on the buying power of the average household. Rather than providing financial security, the second income led to a bidding war on homes, cars, and schools. It's a shocking fact that today's dual-income family has less disposable income after necessary bills than yesterday's single-income family.
Actually that's not true at all. High-performing salespeople in tech (and other industries) are extremely well-paid, and tend not to have fancy degrees.
Sales is still a career in which hustle and results are valued over book smarts, and there is no branch of a company that is "closer to revenue" than sales.
Finally, the upper ranks of many Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are filled to the brim with graduates of HBS and similar. There are lots of ex-McKinsey consultants in VP positions in the industry.
Whether or not the upper ranks of Facebook used to work for Rajat Gupta is hardly relevant to the question of how much salespeople make!
Much of what is bemoaned here is simply a consequence of the fact that science is done by humans and generally costs money, so there is a necessary component of business-type activities (networking, fundraising, marketing, management). Scientists also have human qualities such as egos, desire for money, power, respect and the rest. Why should we be different, or held to a higher standard?
Additionally, it's really hard to do original research. First off, really original good ideas are hard to come by; this problem is also not restricted to science or scientists. Then when new ideas come, they are often difficult or impossible to translate into scientific output, because of other constraints, such as lacking good enough data to test hypotheses. And then they typically fail, despite being great ideas. Really good, original, CORRECT ideas are far more rare.
Furthermore, science would be much worse off if researchers worked like the author would prefer. If everyone spent 10 years without publishing, working on a completely original problem, there is zero replication. Additionally, if the experiment or approach fails, as they usually do, little is left. So do you publish negative results, and then move on to the next decade's problem?
Instead, it's better that the system works the way it does. People do 'bandwagon research', which really is replication. They take the same idea, and apply somewhat different methods, or different datasets, or whatever. And they publish this as often as they can get away with.
Then, one can look at the aggregate body of work and evaluate the ideas and methods better. There is more redundancy in the system, and because the papers are smaller, the setbacks are much smaller in the case of failure, and there is a paper trail (so to speak) marking progress along the way. These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers, who may only be interested in a small part of the work--the methods, or some of the data, or whatever. It would slow everyone down if the only publications were these giant monographs that came out once or twice a decade.
It may feel like people are only working on small, unoriginal ideas because many papers look like this, but it's really important to zoom out and see how things fit together. Science is basically a Monte Carlo simulation, and having lots and lots of small and fast iterations covers the space much more efficiently.
Survey papers are useful to other researchers. Minimum publishable units are a waste of research time, and the pressure to pad one's CV and get "results" (which actually means more papers) worsens the situation. It is even worse when a grad student is told that they were "scooped" because their half-finished MPU was published by someone else.
They draw radical conclusions from their research which cause alarm/concern/interest to those who have no idea about the body of research but grant funding in order to get more funding?
Want to slightly disagree with this though: "Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little, while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and begins to play on the other side of the table."
The same thing happens in industry, except that you're paid more, and your work is directly relevant to the world you see (and not just a journal/conference where it is never read again.)
I would say that the quoted statement is not an entirely fair characterization of managers (PIs) in academia though. It's always easy to discount the contribution of others and to believe you did all of the work, and believe me, you do a lot of it - but it's not a trivial matter that these "managers" already thought up and won money for the general research direction, and ultimately accept responsibility for the success of your projects; not to mention having to worry about funding you for the duration of your PhD. And do recall that they do had to be extremely patient with you while you were still learning the ropes - so you can't extrapolate your productivity in your last year back to the first year when assessing your cumulative value. ("you" used here in the generic sense)
I won't deny that many managers are asshats as bosses, but their job is not so simple.
contrast with the article and discussion at:
When you read a "scientific" paper, you read it expecting it to be a sweetened account of the reality. The test have obviously been performed using only few samples; out of the the ten described features of a system, only the two described in depth are currently implemented; the source is not available because it does not work on the famous really hard cases of the class of problems it should solve.
The system is so polluted that if you start being as honest as you should be, the reviewers will think that you have done even less.
The problem is that you have to pay a bunch of parasites to support the few who are actually advancing the human race.
Subsidized infrastructure does not practically promote risky endeavors. It's created the side effects mentioned in the original article.
It is useless to complain about problems without giving a solution. Maybe, as you imply, the current situation is the least bad possible. I think that there is at least room for improvement when it comes to sharing of data and reproducibility, and I plan to work on reducing the technical barriers to both of these things. However, I don't have a solution to the social problem of how to rank academics and how to prevent academics from colluding in order to artificially raise their ranking.
Academia has become a business, in which the priorities for research institutions are grants first, publications second and teaching a distant third. But this development does not imply that the way the university conducts business is optimal or desirable. (One sees this smug attitude in the comments in the form, "academia is a business, get over it.")
Graduate students, postdocs and research staff are exploited. One can legitimately ask whether the institutionalized scientific method must necessarily exploit graduate students, postdocs and research staff to maintain standards of scientific rigor. Cannot the the university act as a gatekeeper without requiring inexpensive contingent laborers to subsidize faculty and administrator salaries? Why must limiting access to networks of scholars and scholarship involve such oppressive opportunity costs?
[1] http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep...
The noble idea of a res publica litterarum, or a universitas scientiarum — it’s lost since the post-war baby boom.
Metrics, metrics, metrics... even if your metrics mean nothing at all, they're still very convincing!
"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications [...]" (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars)
Doesn't answer your question, because it's about deeper institutional forces than the mere existence of business schools. But I found it an interesting read.
javascript:{v=document.createElement('style');v.innerHTML='blockquote{font-size:14px;width:500px}blockquote div{padding-bottom:8px}';document.body.appendChild(v)};void(0);I probably couldn't tell you much about the article now, but I felt I got it at the time.
@587,287 words and 400wpm, War and Peace would take just over 24 hours to read.
The purpose of a PhD is to provide training in how to do research; most PhD students do not change the world or even make a large contribution to a research area - that's not the point. There are standard texts about PhDs that explain this, and most supervisors recommend students read a few of those books at the beginning of their PhD.
As someone who has worked in both academic and industry, I can assure you that academia has not literally become a business, that academics still have great freedom, and that almost every academic I have ever met works hard and is motivated primarily by the goal of doing great work.
Contrary to the article, most significant research is not done by PhD students - hardly surprising - it is done by Research Associates and Research Fellows, under the supervision of professors and lecturers. That's in the UK at least, and job titles vary in other countries.
I find the anti-academia slant in tech circles to be quite strange. Many people think academia is "out of touch", but there is a lot of collaborative work between academia and industry, involving nearly all the large tech companies. I've never heard academics in Computer Science expressing any animosity towards those working in industry. It's strange, because academia has historically been and continues to be incredibly important in the tech industry; I'd like to see more collaboration and less of a schism.
https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Arti...
armies of graduate students and postdocs to do the nuts and bolts work, Asaadi says. That's fine, he says, so long as everybody understands the situation from the beginning. "When you're starting graduate school, is your advisor telling you, 'Look, you get this great skill set that will be transferable to other things outside of academic physics'?" Asaadi says. "Or are you being told, 'Just work hard and there will be something or other [in physics] in the end'? It seems like it's more of the latter." He adds, "This is where we got some pushback from advisors—it was seen as whining."
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend [their prime, most productive first] 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
The OP talks about a bunch of problems in academia, may of which stem from an attempt to run universities like corporations. In his article, Edsger Dijkstra explains why that's not a good idea.
PS: If you'd like to discuss this, I just submitted this article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358342
Not to mention sites like stack-overflow where the entire community helps each other with tons of problems no matter how trivial or how complicated.
The whole world really could learn alot from us
Is it relevant? Not sure any more given the loss of jobs to Asia and when the worker crosses 40. But it's been this way for as long as I've been aware.
Most of academia simply sets fire to money. The more given to one bureaucracy, the bigger the flame. Fusion research (DOE). Or in this case, not. It would be rather nice to see Skunk Works and or Polywell reach Q > 1, it would be one of the greatest engineering feats ever.
Also there needs to be some support for communities of art and philosophy, where those may get by better.
Finally, all profit or all conjecture makes Jane a dull girl. (Jack was out sick today.)
Beat research universities at their own game, and perhaps they'll go back to being true universities.
But i do like the idea of telling these senior supervisors to f-off and taking away the talent to do some real work for which they get credit
Thought experiment. 1K have talent, another 1K are promising, and another 1K are basically non-productive.
If you have a 3K student body and chop away 1K, you'd like to think that that 1K leaving are those with the least talent, so they'll never be able to compete with the superior upper 2/3.
Also if you assume a constant income of R+D money, all separation really means is spending a larger fraction of that limited money on fixed costs (great, now we need two $10M/yr CEOs and two $5M/yr CFOs and two labs and two HR depts and two... etc etc) Much like a divorce usually doesn't in total result in an aggregate higher standard of living once the same total income now has to support two households instead of one.
CTRL+F for "computer science" and start reading from there. Till then it's filler.
--Gary Indiana
You're almost done.
Almost there...