3 ms·
On the other hand, you get a lot of people doing crazy amounts of work for little pay in order to get tenure. If you abolished the tenure system, there is no ch
by nagrom 16y ago
On the other hand, you get a lot of people doing crazy amounts of work for little pay in order to get tenure. If you abolished the tenure system, there is no chance at all that the majority of current scientists would stay in the field - the freedom that comes with tenure to pursue whatever interests you is the only reason to stay and work the ridiculous hours required of post doc researchers.
It's a beautiful idea that people would work for 1/3 the market rate because the work is so interesting, but it doesn't hold water. If you work as a researcher at Google, Microsoft or IBM, do you get paid 1/3 of a senior developer position? Abolishing the tenure system would see even more of the current brain drain from academia to industry.
Changing the tenure system is feasible. What really needs to be done is to split professorship into three paths: project management and administration, technical work and teaching. A professor should pick one main area, and one minor area and stick with them. It won't happen because all the prestige is in technical work and all the power is in administration. There would be few professors choosing to teach, and few professors willing to admit that they don't do any technical work. Everyone would claim to do technical work but actually politic and scheme, and to change things you would need the enthusiastic consent of exactly the guys that play the system the best.
By the way, in the point alluded to in the article that universities pay a lot of money to professors: professorial salaries have not inflated all that much in the past 30 years. Vice principals' salaries have, consultancy services have and centralised administration has. To the best of my knowledge, the inflated money has gone to purchase huge IT systems and employ a lot more student support services and student monitoring, at least in my experience. To point a finger at professorial salaries is misleading at best.
- jdhopeunique 16y agoI don't think IT systems make up much of a university's budget. A quick google search turned up the following: http://naturalscience.msu.edu/administration/budget.html http://naturalscience.msu.edu/administration/budget.html http://www.bgtplan.lsu.edu/TREND/finances/actual/genexpend.pdf http://www.bgtplan.lsu.edu/TREND/finances/actual/genexpend.p... http://budget.psu.edu/openbudget/AllFundView2001.asp?type=A&FY=20082009&fundtype=99&admin=%27TUN%27&sortcode=A http://budget.psu.edu/openbudget/AllFundView2001.asp?type=A&...
- nagrom 16y agoThe inflation in spending is what I was addressing. That second link shows that professorial salaries are one of the slower-increasing expenditures in a university's budget very nicely :-)
- jdhopeunique 16y agoInflation in spending is very misleading. I'm reminded of certain statistics that begin with "<x> minority is the fastest growing <demographic, religion, political affiliation, etc> in the country" ...well of course. When you're the minority, it's easy to be the fastest growing. I relooked at that second link and the total instruction and research budget are only growing slightly slower than the total budget over the entire time period ie. a multiple of 2.17 vs 2.3
- Tamerlin 16y ago" the freedom that comes with tenure to pursue whatever interests you is the only reason to stay and work the ridiculous hours required of post doc researchers." In other words, in return for being an indentured servant for a number years, you get to pay it forward by being a lazy ass taking credit for YOUR servants' excessive hours? The entire system is hosed. Education suffers, research suffers, and apparently the whole point of it is to serve as a multi-year hazing process in order to get tenure so that you can coast for the rest of your career? I'm glad I didn't pursue tenure... I thought IT was a waste of life, but tenure track is even worse. (Actually, I knew that before I left academia, I just didn't know how much of a waste of talent the IT industry would turn out to be.)