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> academia is a lousy place to do novel research This observation seems a bit at odds with the abundance of core technologies that originated in academia. The

• randomsearch 6y ago
  > academia may have worsened in the meantime This is, I believe, correct, and the problem. > But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects Both I and others moved to academia for this reason. However, it is incorrect. Perhaps "market" is not the right word, but the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding, and mostly focused on "salesmanship" -- more focused on selling than an entrepreneur, in fact.
  • wraptile 6y ago
    >> academia may have worsened in the meantime > This is, I believe, correct, and the problem. I think it's a bit of the opposite: academia didn't get _that_ worse but entrepreneurship has gotten much much better. In reality it's probably a mix of both.
  • theaeolist 6y ago
    Academia is a market. Your customers are reviewers and your income is citations. You have to pander to this market with everything that you got.
    • sideshowb 6y ago
      I agree with this sentiment* So really the choice comes down to the problem you want to solve: if it's easier to sell to reviewers do it in academia, if it's easier to sell to customers do it in industry. (* if not the detail - non academic impact is worth quite a lot in uk academia nowadays, and you may at times measure that through e.g. sales figures, but these in turn must ultimately be sold to reviewers)
    • teorema 6y ago
      Speaking as a former tenured professor, I can say this is no longer very accurate. What would be more accurate is that your customers are grant review panels, and your income is indirect funds on grants (at least in the US, and increasingly elsewhere).
  • mjn 6y ago
    > the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too). At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach. At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.
  • ookdatnog 6y ago
    I think this depends very much on what field you're in, who your supervisor is, etc. I'm a PhD student and I haven't written a single grant application in two years so far. Also, imo writing papers feels more like "persuasion" than "salesmanship". For one, in-depth discussion of the shortcomings or drawbacks of your approach tends to be appreciated in academia.
    • scott_s 6y ago
      I think that when others are talking about the experience of being an academic, they mean that of a professor, not student. While some students do help their advisors write grants, I don't think it's the norm - I never did. But grant-writing is a major concern for professors at top-tier research universities.
• scandox 6y ago
  How much of the Internet was academic? Reading Where the Wizards Stay Up Late one would have a strong feeling that the impetus for it's development was mostly between Arpa/DoD, Rand Corporation (well Paul Barron) and Bolt Beranek & Newman. The installations were made at Academic Institutions and staff there certainly got very involved in it's development...but that account certainly doesn't make it feel like it was an academic exercise.
• srtjstjsj 6y ago
  The things you describe or old mostly-military-funded development projects, not the publish or perish modern academia.
• cperciva 6y ago
  I wasn't merely generalizing from my own experience; that was something multiple tenured professors had explicitly told me. (I think their hope was that I would be less novel rather than leaving academia, mind you.) I absolutely concur that academia has worsened. There used to be enough money sloshing around that you could get plenty without needing to be particularly good at selling yourself to grant committees.
  • snowwrestler 6y ago
    I've heard the money is harder to get but I haven't heard why. Tuition has gone up much faster than inflation; I know that rarely funds research directly, but it should at least prevent an operational drain on endowments. Speaking of endowments, investments in general have done quite well over the past 30 years, even taking into account major impacts like the dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008 meltdown, pandemic, etc. Endowments should be doing well. Has private giving declined? Is the government spending less on research? To be clear: I'm just curious.
    • nickcotter 6y ago
      It’s a good question. I don’t have any numbers, but I visited my old (early 90s) campus, Exeter (UK) recently. The Chemistry and Music departments had closed down and some kind of shiny Financial Engineering building had appeared. A lot of new purpose-built student accommodation had been built on campus and off. Is it the case that students are viewed more as customers looking for a return on investment and the money is dedicated to that end?
    • teorema 6y ago
      This is late, but I think this whole thread is interesting and no one has really answered your question. I'm a former tenured professor at a major research university who left my position, in part because I came to hate my department (there was an exodus of faculty and it and the university changed substantially), developed a sense that academics is in crisis, and because of family issues (good issues, of the compelling kind). The salience of grants has increased for a variety of reasons. The first, and in my mind, most important reason is because of indirect funds on grants, which universities have come to recognize as a revenue stream. It's not just that grants are harder to get, it's that university administration is focused more on profit as a major administrative goal. A former NIH head lamented this once in an article by pointing out that indirect funds (vague, nonitemized pay demanded for things like heat, police pay, etc.) scale linearly with direct funds (the actual cost of the research), even as the actual indirect costs are bounded sublinearly. This is because most universities just negotiate a percentage of the direct funded grant award be indirect funds, but those indirect costs don't continue to increase--e.g., the cost for a heated office and phone line are the same whether you have 100k in direct funds or 1m in direct funds, but the government pays a lot more in the latter case (in which case taxpayer money isn't really paying for the heated office and phone line). You might recognize this, as do many HN readers, but it's difficult to convey how pernicious an effect it has had. In my time in the department, I saw the attitude change from "people should seek funding to cover their research" to money, and indirect funds in particular, being the primary goal above all else. In preparing grants, by the time I left, grand administrators would strongly encourage you to apply for grants that were maybe 2-4x what were needed for the actual research, just to increase indirect funds that would be paid off the grant. Note that this leads to a spiral, in that inflated asks that are met by the government lead to less money for others. I do think there's been a shift in administrative goals for whatever reason, maybe due to career administration types increasing, admin coming from outside the university rather than inside, etc. etc. Some of it has to do with changes in how administration is trained for administrative roles per se. Some of it is changes in demands by legislatures, who want to see universities independently turn profits and serve corporate interests more, indirectly or directly. I don't know what it is. But the goals have shifted, and it's enabled by indirect funds from the federal government. The number one thing someone could do to change the grant culture in the US is to eliminate indirect funds, or at least to raise requirements so that they are no longer a source of profit for universities. Another question is why grant monies are scarcer though. One answer is the pyramid scheme of university research at the moment, which has changed over time. There's a great paper about this by some former federal agency heads (I think in PNAS?) with revealing analyses and figures showing that the indirect fund seeking really picked up steam in the late 90s to around 2000, when per researcher funding was at a peak. Around that time is when universities and researchers started this indirect fund seeking -- admin and researchers realized there was enough to go around, and they could bring in grad students and postdocs ala pyramid scheme to support the indirect funds and it all worked. After that, with increasing newcomers, funding per researcher started to decline, but the incentives for indirect fund seeking remained. So basically in 1999-2000 the current system was established whereby universities get profits from indirect funds from federal agencies, burning through newcomers (grad students and postdocs) to make it work. Although it's not explicitly stated, trainees are essentially seen as disposable labor, justified under some Darwinian idea that the best will rise to the top and the rest will just leave the field. The core issue, whether or not indirect funds are really justified, or whether or not grant money is an appropriate metric of research value, or whether those leaving the field truly have no value in the sense that they should be funded, is left unaddressed. Another, subtler issue is that many in administration who are former researchers came of age during the pre-2000 era, and so are just used to the system, and don't really see the problems. They were funded early on, and get grant extensions or career funding, and are not faced with the issue of whether or not they would have survived in the current system, so they don't demand any changes (there's a lot of research showing that the average age of first R01 has increased over time, and that older researchers are much more likely to get extensions to large grants than newcomers are to get new research funded). This is exacerbated by the fact that those who did come of age later are used to the current system also, and sort of see it as "well this is what I had to deal with, so you should have to deal with it too." Another issue that doesn't get as much attention is the decline of tenure. Tenure is a favorite thing to criticize in many circles, but what many don't realize is that it has been severely declining. In many fields or areas of academics, most faculty are untenured, and in other areas tenured faculty have been replaced by adjunct faculty and so forth. The problem with this is that it means that increasingly the faculty that do exist are dependent on grants for survival, which increases the pressure to obtain grants, and more grants. Even if you're tenured, admin sort of sees the untenured grant-contingent faculty and uses them as a comparison (rather than asking how can their time be balanced between teaching and research, or is their research value really best indexed by grant dollars). There's also a general issue of the black box of increasing university costs, which no one seems to have a good answer to, and is probably due to a combination of things. Increasingly top-heavy admin, "glamor project" funding, increasingly extreme retention salary offers are some of it. Some of it at public institutions is declining state funding, although that doesn't account for private universities. As the pandemic has highlighted, endowments are often fixed in the sense that they're dedicated to specific things, like the library, or whatever. So: Increasing university costs no one can really fully explain (or wants to explain). Decreased state funding. Decreased federal grant money availability, worsened by inflated grant proposals. Increased number of researchers due to pyramid scheme incentives. Increased pressure from admin to seek indirect funds, due to increased profit motive and other factors. Decreased protections from tenure and other similar things. Really you could write an entire large book about these issues, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.