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University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

244 points by rfurmani 6y ago

ALittleLight 6y ago
The tweets say that pure math is an important part of the ecosystem of scholarship at a university (slight paraphrase) and I agree with that. I don't really have any concern about axing medieval literature though.
- sn41 6y ago
  I am a pure math guy who absolutely loves the Canterbury Tales. The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about. (Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
  - rambojazz 6y ago
    Sorry I don't know this Uni in particular, and I agree with your comment. But why is this such a big issue? I mean, a lot of universities do not have a pure-math faculty because they are dedicated to other faculties. I guess it depends on what the Uni wants to be. My Uni didn't have a physics department, or a medical one, or arts, or music... All of these faculties were however available in other Unis.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Getting rid of something you already have is more newsworthy than never having it, which is mundane as you say. Consider if Marks & Spencer announced it would no longer sell clothes, to focus instead on food, for example.
    - username90 6y ago
      They want to sack the math department to create a machine learning department. But they still need people to teach the math classes for machine learning etc, and without the math professors they'd need machine learning professors or so who aren't as good at maths.
      - orange_tee 6y ago
        ML uses almost entirely applied math and stochastics: optimization, numerics and statistics. Besides that, just because they won't have faculty researching pure math, doesn't mean they cannot have applied math guys teaching pure math classes. Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
        sn41 6y ago
        > I assume the pure math department is not doing much. Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I also love the Canterbury Tales and still have the intro memorized thanks to a professor I had in college. That said, if students aren't taking the classes I can't see how the school is going to be hurt by losing the faculty. All kinds of things tie into math, not so much into medieval literature. (That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Easier not to bite that bullet, I think! Though I found https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case... persuasive.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  thats the spirit, "my thing is important, yours is just rubbish and should be done away with"
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
The Administrators make their power play: declaring faculty redundant. They no longer want pesky faculty thinking about things that don't earn money, so the math faculty has to go. The end goal is clear: a University is a business, being sold to students and Alumni, for the purpose of profit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Reality is truly a comedy. One day teachers will be a thing of the past in universities.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    One day? Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.
    - netizen-9748 6y ago
      Plenty of them don't do research anymore either, depending on the school
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      In the UK all professors are permanent positions.
  - madpata 6y ago
    I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).
    - njanirudh 6y ago
rambojazz 6y ago
A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. It can be good or bad, it depends on the goals of the university and which faculties it wants to specialize on.
- morelisp 6y ago
  > A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well. Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    I don't know of a single US research university that doesn't have a math department.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Pure math departments are important for identifying the outlier students who are capable of contributing to the field. An entire department might only find one star per year (or decade), but that could advance a topic 100 years overall. Occasionally a self-taught prodigy like Ramanajuan emerges, but society needs many more.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      The article is about pure math, which is the foundation of mathematics using sets, topology, etc. It has separate classes, textbooks and professors from applied mathematics, and often a very low courseload because of the difficulty (like 24 hours per week.) From a simplistic standpoint, pure math is not focused on equations or numeric solutions, unlike applied mathematics. (You don't need a calculator for most pure math classes.)
lordnacho 6y ago
What would make this more clear cut is a summary of what situation the university finds itself in. What's happened with the finances, why these departments, which admin staff are going?
inglor_cz 6y ago
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-outnumbered-schools-administrators-suppor/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-ou...
- foldr 6y ago
  > regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    No, but this is the kind of stuff that can keep students busy and not asking whether they get their money's worth. A very efficient distraction.
    - foldr 6y ago
      Students wanting to get their money’s worth is exactly the root cause of this. Trust me, British Universities are bending over backwards to give students what they want. If you’ve been anywhere near a British University you’d know how ridiculous it is to suggest that the staff are somehow secretly organizing BLM protests (??) as part of a plan to stop students noticing how much money they’re spending (??)
      - throwaways885 6y ago
        The universities should cut their losses then, and tell students to go somewhere else. Part of the issue is placating every whim of students, focusing on the fluff and not on the teaching.
hntrader 6y ago
The part about synergy between faculties is accurate. Having strong pure math academics helps out the various applied math departments in indirect ways that I've seen. This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.
- soVeryTired 6y ago
  He won the breakthrough prize, so he literally has been paid millions.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    I meant annual comp, but yes that's a good step
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Tao is arguably one of the most famous mathematicians on earth, I'm pretty sure he's on a decent salary.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    He's on about 500k/year. It's not enough. That's a not uncommon total package for a reasonably experienced SV engineer, it's not fitting for one of the foremost pure mathematicians of our generation. It's because most of his output is positive externality, his employer capturing little of his value creation except for the prestige & teaching output, which must be less than 10% of his current value proposition to society.
- canjobear 6y ago
  You can look up the salary of any UC employee here. https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ Yes, Terence Tao is doing pretty well.
ptero 6y ago
I do not know the details of this case, but universities are opening new departments, centers and programs all the time. There needs to be some mechanism for reallocation rather than just growth. Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each. I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.
kleiba 6y ago
I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this approach over what he claims to be the European way: long-term thinking and research done for research's sake. That paper was written in 1982 Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector. It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics. This is a scandal. -- Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]: The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...] In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May. However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic. -- [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-will-further-weaken-basic-research-funding https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...
- dandanua 6y ago
  It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity. The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
LatteLazy 6y ago
People should note that: * this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra. * Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0]. * The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so. * There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go. * They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/sep/05/the-best-uk-universities-2021-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/se...
- throwaways885 6y ago
  "Limited"? UK tuition used to be much, much cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Yeah, it used to be that the government paid that and students went for free or got a grant. Starting back in 2002 they cut the amount the government paid and increased what students paid. So the unis didn't get any more money, the government just saved cash. Total BS imho, but don't get me started...
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      It would be less of an issue if there was an actual free market, instead all unis just max out the student loan and still complain there's not enough money. I'd happily go to a shack if there's good teaching. The US are even more innovative in ripping off students.
Steko 6y ago
No doubt these administrators put very low value on pure math but they also know the uproar might/will reduce some of the budget cuts they're dealing with.
glapworth 6y ago
I used to work as an Lecturer in the other University in Leicester and I have lots of friends and colleagues working in various departments at Leicester University. It looks like the financial situation at the University is quite bad, and this isn’t the first time the executive has threatened to close this department. I feel for the people working there at the moment. Sad times.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  But why is the situation bad? has student population dropped off?
- deathlight 6y ago
  Aren't math departments like the cheapest ones though? I feel like they would be near last in line for being cut.
trinovantes 6y ago
I think it's important to fund research for the sake of research because it's the only way to explore the unknown unknowns of the universe. At the extreme end, it's a bit dystopian to consider the future of academia being limited to only topics that can deliver immediate economic value. But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past. [1] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
lr1970 6y ago
Nothing wrong with reshaping their focus if they also rename themselves into the Leicester Vocational School. They should be stripped of the title University that they are not worthy of any longer.
motohagiography 6y ago
A thought experiment that has a surprising amount of predictive power is to view the universities as a system of single-party rule on the scale of the CCP, where they vie for power internally among themselves, and use the real economy to fund their effective system of sinecures. Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.
- tgb 6y ago
  You're suggesting that the math department is out of line with the universities propaganda? Are you aware that they're also axing humanities departments? They're not axing applied science departments. Your "experiment" doesn't really match reality.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    Are the universities a de-facto one party system? No. Does their aggregate behaviour resemble one? More often than you'd expect. The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
    - tgb 6y ago
      Your theory is, at best, completely orthogonal to event in the tweet. Dropping the medieval literature department is secretly a plot to produce activists who seize the means of production by purging quantitatively minded people? I would seriously reconsider the underpinning of my world view if it led me to such a conclusion.
hot_fuzzybear 6y ago
As a fellow Czech, who studies in one of top 20 UK universities, let me add my two cents. As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees. I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio... Currently, there are two problems in UK universities: Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!). Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades. This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs. FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in! For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price PS: appologies for spelling, insomnia...
godelzilla 6y ago
Pure math is an inconvenient subject for schools based on reproducing the status quo.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
poxwole 6y ago
Running Universities like a business. A scam and a travesty
mettamage 6y ago
Amazing marketing fodder for any startup that wants to create a better educational system. Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P) Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
renewiltord 6y ago
This is good. Too long have universities maintained the illusion that all subjects are worth studying. They are not. And we have a valuation mechanism - pay. The truth is that some subjects need far fewer participants than others. You don’t need the marginal new mathematician or historian or geographer. We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public. The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers. Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small. But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
- rscho 6y ago
  That has to be the most capitalistic opinion I've read in a long time. This is in essence: "let's just limit access to studies yielding no current or short-term anticipated industrial benefit to rich people". This is what monetary valuation means. What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
- ssivark 6y ago
  Where would you rank the marginal university administrator?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Probably not very useful. The problem we have is that support staff units are in control of staff expansion. They then create more support staff out of some institutional reproductive urge. It is a flaw in The Firm.
- daniel-thompson 6y ago
  This is classic short-term MBA thinking. It completely misses that theoretical researchers are an integral part of a diverse research ecosystem, that researcher diversity is more than the sum of its parts (or in MBA-speak, is synergistic), that some theoretical work eventually does become economically valuable as it filters into applied sciences, and that this might take longer than one or two quarters after publication.
grumple 6y ago
If their math faculty is of similar quality to (or worse than) what we had at my top 25 university, they aren't going to lose much of value. I was a math major. Our math department was so bad - because the faculty was truly, magnificently inept at teaching - that our engineering school created their own versions of every required math class so the engineers could actually learn the required math.
alfl 6y ago
So if I’m a hiring manager looking at someone with a recent degree from University of Leicester I have to discount their math abilities. Their alumni should complain that the administration is harming the value of their credentials.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  > I have to discount their math abilities. Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science". If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
  - alfl 6y ago
    Totally fair. Depends on the problem space you’re hiring for. I’m still gonna check though :)
techbio 6y ago
Why not dirty up the math with some real world applications and you might have a provably winning system.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Seems like a good reason that their accreditation board should let them now that this would result in them losing accreditation for all STEM degrees.

244 points by rfurmani 6y ago

The tweets say that pure math is an important part of the ecosystem of scholarship at a university (slight paraphrase) and I agree with that. I don't really have any concern about axing medieval literature though.

sn41 6y ago
I am a pure math guy who absolutely loves the Canterbury Tales. The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about. (Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
- rambojazz 6y ago
  Sorry I don't know this Uni in particular, and I agree with your comment. But why is this such a big issue? I mean, a lot of universities do not have a pure-math faculty because they are dedicated to other faculties. I guess it depends on what the Uni wants to be. My Uni didn't have a physics department, or a medical one, or arts, or music... All of these faculties were however available in other Unis.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Getting rid of something you already have is more newsworthy than never having it, which is mundane as you say. Consider if Marks & Spencer announced it would no longer sell clothes, to focus instead on food, for example.
  - username90 6y ago
    They want to sack the math department to create a machine learning department. But they still need people to teach the math classes for machine learning etc, and without the math professors they'd need machine learning professors or so who aren't as good at maths.
    - orange_tee 6y ago
      ML uses almost entirely applied math and stochastics: optimization, numerics and statistics. Besides that, just because they won't have faculty researching pure math, doesn't mean they cannot have applied math guys teaching pure math classes. Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
      - sn41 6y ago
        > I assume the pure math department is not doing much. Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I also love the Canterbury Tales and still have the intro memorized thanks to a professor I had in college. That said, if students aren't taking the classes I can't see how the school is going to be hurt by losing the faculty. All kinds of things tie into math, not so much into medieval literature. (That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
Smaug123 6y ago
Easier not to bite that bullet, I think! Though I found https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case... persuasive.
KaiserPro 6y ago
thats the spirit, "my thing is important, yours is just rubbish and should be done away with"

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

The Administrators make their power play: declaring faculty redundant. They no longer want pesky faculty thinking about things that don't earn money, so the math faculty has to go. The end goal is clear: a University is a business, being sold to students and Alumni, for the purpose of profit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaways885 6y ago
Reality is truly a comedy. One day teachers will be a thing of the past in universities.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  One day? Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.
  - netizen-9748 6y ago
    Plenty of them don't do research anymore either, depending on the school
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    In the UK all professors are permanent positions.
- madpata 6y ago
  I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).
  - njanirudh 6y ago

rambojazz 6y ago

A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. It can be good or bad, it depends on the goals of the university and which faculties it wants to specialize on.

morelisp 6y ago
> A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well. Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
- pmiller2 6y ago
  I don't know of a single US research university that doesn't have a math department.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Pure math departments are important for identifying the outlier students who are capable of contributing to the field. An entire department might only find one star per year (or decade), but that could advance a topic 100 years overall. Occasionally a self-taught prodigy like Ramanajuan emerges, but society needs many more.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    The article is about pure math, which is the foundation of mathematics using sets, topology, etc. It has separate classes, textbooks and professors from applied mathematics, and often a very low courseload because of the difficulty (like 24 hours per week.) From a simplistic standpoint, pure math is not focused on equations or numeric solutions, unlike applied mathematics. (You don't need a calculator for most pure math classes.)

lordnacho 6y ago

What would make this more clear cut is a summary of what situation the university finds itself in. What's happened with the finances, why these departments, which admin staff are going?

inglor_cz 6y ago

I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-outnumbered-schools-administrators-suppor/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-ou...

foldr 6y ago
> regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  No, but this is the kind of stuff that can keep students busy and not asking whether they get their money's worth. A very efficient distraction.
  - foldr 6y ago
    Students wanting to get their money’s worth is exactly the root cause of this. Trust me, British Universities are bending over backwards to give students what they want. If you’ve been anywhere near a British University you’d know how ridiculous it is to suggest that the staff are somehow secretly organizing BLM protests (??) as part of a plan to stop students noticing how much money they’re spending (??)
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      The universities should cut their losses then, and tell students to go somewhere else. Part of the issue is placating every whim of students, focusing on the fluff and not on the teaching.

hntrader 6y ago

The part about synergy between faculties is accurate. Having strong pure math academics helps out the various applied math departments in indirect ways that I've seen. This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.

soVeryTired 6y ago
He won the breakthrough prize, so he literally has been paid millions.
- hntrader 6y ago
  I meant annual comp, but yes that's a good step
mhh__ 6y ago
Tao is arguably one of the most famous mathematicians on earth, I'm pretty sure he's on a decent salary.
- hntrader 6y ago
  He's on about 500k/year. It's not enough. That's a not uncommon total package for a reasonably experienced SV engineer, it's not fitting for one of the foremost pure mathematicians of our generation. It's because most of his output is positive externality, his employer capturing little of his value creation except for the prestige & teaching output, which must be less than 10% of his current value proposition to society.
canjobear 6y ago
You can look up the salary of any UC employee here. https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ Yes, Terence Tao is doing pretty well.

ptero 6y ago

I do not know the details of this case, but universities are opening new departments, centers and programs all the time. There needs to be some mechanism for reallocation rather than just growth. Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each. I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.

kleiba 6y ago

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this approach over what he claims to be the European way: long-term thinking and research done for research's sake. That paper was written in 1982 Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector. It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics. This is a scandal. -- Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]: The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...] In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May. However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic. -- [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-will-further-weaken-basic-research-funding https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...

dandanua 6y ago
It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity. The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.

LatteLazy 6y ago

People should note that: * this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra. * Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0]. * The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so. * There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go. * They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/sep/05/the-best-uk-universities-2021-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/se...

throwaways885 6y ago
"Limited"? UK tuition used to be much, much cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Yeah, it used to be that the government paid that and students went for free or got a grant. Starting back in 2002 they cut the amount the government paid and increased what students paid. So the unis didn't get any more money, the government just saved cash. Total BS imho, but don't get me started...
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    It would be less of an issue if there was an actual free market, instead all unis just max out the student loan and still complain there's not enough money. I'd happily go to a shack if there's good teaching. The US are even more innovative in ripping off students.

Steko 6y ago

No doubt these administrators put very low value on pure math but they also know the uproar might/will reduce some of the budget cuts they're dealing with.

glapworth 6y ago

I used to work as an Lecturer in the other University in Leicester and I have lots of friends and colleagues working in various departments at Leicester University. It looks like the financial situation at the University is quite bad, and this isn’t the first time the executive has threatened to close this department. I feel for the people working there at the moment. Sad times.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
But why is the situation bad? has student population dropped off?
deathlight 6y ago
Aren't math departments like the cheapest ones though? I feel like they would be near last in line for being cut.

trinovantes 6y ago

I think it's important to fund research for the sake of research because it's the only way to explore the unknown unknowns of the universe. At the extreme end, it's a bit dystopian to consider the future of academia being limited to only topics that can deliver immediate economic value. But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past. [1] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/

lr1970 6y ago

Nothing wrong with reshaping their focus if they also rename themselves into the Leicester Vocational School. They should be stripped of the title University that they are not worthy of any longer.

motohagiography 6y ago

A thought experiment that has a surprising amount of predictive power is to view the universities as a system of single-party rule on the scale of the CCP, where they vie for power internally among themselves, and use the real economy to fund their effective system of sinecures. Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.

tgb 6y ago
You're suggesting that the math department is out of line with the universities propaganda? Are you aware that they're also axing humanities departments? They're not axing applied science departments. Your "experiment" doesn't really match reality.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Are the universities a de-facto one party system? No. Does their aggregate behaviour resemble one? More often than you'd expect. The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
  - tgb 6y ago
    Your theory is, at best, completely orthogonal to event in the tweet. Dropping the medieval literature department is secretly a plot to produce activists who seize the means of production by purging quantitatively minded people? I would seriously reconsider the underpinning of my world view if it led me to such a conclusion.

hot_fuzzybear 6y ago

As a fellow Czech, who studies in one of top 20 UK universities, let me add my two cents. As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees. I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio... Currently, there are two problems in UK universities: Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!). Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades. This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs. FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in! For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price PS: appologies for spelling, insomnia...

godelzilla 6y ago

Pure math is an inconvenient subject for schools based on reproducing the status quo.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

poxwole 6y ago

Running Universities like a business. A scam and a travesty

mettamage 6y ago

Amazing marketing fodder for any startup that wants to create a better educational system. Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P) Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.

renewiltord 6y ago

This is good. Too long have universities maintained the illusion that all subjects are worth studying. They are not. And we have a valuation mechanism - pay. The truth is that some subjects need far fewer participants than others. You don’t need the marginal new mathematician or historian or geographer. We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public. The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers. Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small. But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.

rscho 6y ago
That has to be the most capitalistic opinion I've read in a long time. This is in essence: "let's just limit access to studies yielding no current or short-term anticipated industrial benefit to rich people". This is what monetary valuation means. What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
ssivark 6y ago
Where would you rank the marginal university administrator?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Probably not very useful. The problem we have is that support staff units are in control of staff expansion. They then create more support staff out of some institutional reproductive urge. It is a flaw in The Firm.
daniel-thompson 6y ago
This is classic short-term MBA thinking. It completely misses that theoretical researchers are an integral part of a diverse research ecosystem, that researcher diversity is more than the sum of its parts (or in MBA-speak, is synergistic), that some theoretical work eventually does become economically valuable as it filters into applied sciences, and that this might take longer than one or two quarters after publication.

grumple 6y ago

If their math faculty is of similar quality to (or worse than) what we had at my top 25 university, they aren't going to lose much of value. I was a math major. Our math department was so bad - because the faculty was truly, magnificently inept at teaching - that our engineering school created their own versions of every required math class so the engineers could actually learn the required math.

alfl 6y ago

So if I’m a hiring manager looking at someone with a recent degree from University of Leicester I have to discount their math abilities. Their alumni should complain that the administration is harming the value of their credentials.

bzbarsky 6y ago
> I have to discount their math abilities. Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science". If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
- alfl 6y ago
  Totally fair. Depends on the problem space you’re hiring for. I’m still gonna check though :)

techbio 6y ago

Why not dirty up the math with some real world applications and you might have a provably winning system.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Seems like a good reason that their accreditation board should let them now that this would result in them losing accreditation for all STEM degrees.