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Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd. Normally, it means having a j
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd.
Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common practice, and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there's not one true home), it's not a 'harmful' thing.
As the author explains in the article per se, he's talking about an industry/academic split. This is much harder, for the reasons he's outlined, and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation, and it'd be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry, particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market.
But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that it's cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire career professors and educators. And as any adjunct-heavy institution will tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life. Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody's life isn't enough to support all but the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this will just further damage the instructional core of universities.
So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don't think it's a great model for the future.
- grawprog 8y agoFor the last year of my degree our teachers were mostly contract teachers taken from industry. The courses they taught suffered fairly heavily for it. Their contracts covered only the time spent at school so marking, coming up with assignments and lectures were all done on the teacher's own time. This led to some pretty half asset efforts by the teachers, arguably not entirely their fault, and one case of a teacher making trouble for students working on a project outside of school and the same teacher using his position to acquire grant money for work he didn't do.
- mi_lk 8y agoDual affiliation meaning industry/academic split is unambiguous here since that's the word Facebook AI Research choose to use [1][2] and the authors are explicitly responding to Facebook's model. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-affiliation-model-ai-experts-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-aff... [2]: https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443 https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI think particularly in the case of FAIR, this is a response to Facebook being outspoken about "dual affiliation" with their AI researchers, so it's a response really to Facebook specifically. https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143