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The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.

by brador 10y ago

GuiA 10y ago
The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.
- brador 10y ago
  And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.
  - deong 10y ago
    That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.
- codexon 10y ago
  I find that the people that are best at research (and thus most likely to get tenure) are usually very poor teachers. Usually they are so good at their subject that they tend to skip steps in their explanations and forget how difficult a certain concept is and expect everyone to breeze through it. Unfortunately, universities optimize for research rather than teaching.
mattkrause 10y ago
I strongly doubt that is true, actually. I'm a few years out from my PhD. The classmates who stayed in academia are neither much smarter nor harder working than those who have left. It does select for certain personality traits, like risk tolerance and willingness to self-promote, but I'm not sure that's really what we want.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) When you optimize for, say, the number of publications, you encourage aspiring professors to vomit out more minimal publishable units and self-promote more loudly rather than thinking interesting thoughts and writing them down after some rumination. The property you actually care about, the interestingness and quality of the research, is a latent property. You cannot optimize for it by optimizing any of its indicators; they are only noisily related, and intervening on the indicators will only break the connection between the indicator and the latent interestingness.
scottlocklin 10y ago
In the ideal world of the massless pulley and frictionless plane, that's what would happen. The reality is, the professoriate we have now is better at playing the game. Smartest people I know are in industry. While tenure was supposed to encourage risk taking, the way it's given out these days it seems to have the opposite effect.

The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.

by brador 10y ago

The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.

GuiA 10y ago

The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.

brador 10y ago
And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.
- deong 10y ago
  That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs. long-term rewards.
codexon 10y ago
I find that the people that are best at research (and thus most likely to get tenure) are usually very poor teachers. Usually they are so good at their subject that they tend to skip steps in their explanations and forget how difficult a certain concept is and expect everyone to breeze through it. Unfortunately, universities optimize for research rather than teaching.

mattkrause 10y ago

I strongly doubt that is true, actually. I'm a few years out from my PhD. The classmates who stayed in academia are neither much smarter nor harder working than those who have left. It does select for certain personality traits, like risk tolerance and willingness to self-promote, but I'm not sure that's really what we want.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) When you optimize for, say, the number of publications, you encourage aspiring professors to vomit out more minimal publishable units and self-promote more loudly rather than thinking interesting thoughts and writing them down after some rumination. The property you actually care about, the interestingness and quality of the research, is a latent property. You cannot optimize for it by optimizing any of its indicators; they are only noisily related, and intervening on the indicators will only break the connection between the indicator and the latent interestingness.

scottlocklin 10y ago

In the ideal world of the massless pulley and frictionless plane, that's what would happen. The reality is, the professoriate we have now is better at playing the game. Smartest people I know are in industry. While tenure was supposed to encourage risk taking, the way it's given out these days it seems to have the opposite effect.