5 ms·

I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)? As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ifi

I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)? As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life. So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return. Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X". I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).

woofie11 6y ago
Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood. Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too. I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
  What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother? (Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
  - woofie11 6y ago
    Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure. You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure. The flip side is you get paid a third of industry. That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job. As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs. With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard: 1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love 2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life. It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs. Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      tl;dr: financial stability suffices to ensure academic freedom; rich financial rewards are not necessary.
- anticristi 6y ago
  Nicely put. Some professors want monastery-level accountability with industry-level salary. Have the cake and eat it.
  - kleiba 6y ago
    I'd say those are the minority - for most academics, doing the research is the most important thing, and salary second, or else, the CS departments of this world would be empty.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.
  - kleiba 6y ago
    I think you can safely say that for all of Europe.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    To be fair to the UK/EU you’d need to compare total compensation and factor in the social net in Europe.
    - holbrad 6y ago
      Even once you factor all of the that in, you receive far less money.
- mplanchard 6y ago
  Not sure where you went to school, but this definitely isn’t the case everywhere. I went to a state school, and freshly minted faculty were making 60-80k, while folks with tenure were in the 100-125K range. The only people making salaries like you describe were higher level administrators and of course the football coach.

woofie11 6y ago

Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood. Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too. I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.

SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother? (Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
- woofie11 6y ago
  Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure. You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure. The flip side is you get paid a third of industry. That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job. As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs. With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard: 1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love 2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life. It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs. Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    tl;dr: financial stability suffices to ensure academic freedom; rich financial rewards are not necessary.
anticristi 6y ago
Nicely put. Some professors want monastery-level accountability with industry-level salary. Have the cake and eat it.
- kleiba 6y ago
  I'd say those are the minority - for most academics, doing the research is the most important thing, and salary second, or else, the CS departments of this world would be empty.
barry-cotter 6y ago
> Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.
- kleiba 6y ago
  I think you can safely say that for all of Europe.
- bombcar 6y ago
  To be fair to the UK/EU you’d need to compare total compensation and factor in the social net in Europe.
  - holbrad 6y ago
    Even once you factor all of the that in, you receive far less money.
mplanchard 6y ago
Not sure where you went to school, but this definitely isn’t the case everywhere. I went to a state school, and freshly minted faculty were making 60-80k, while folks with tenure were in the 100-125K range. The only people making salaries like you describe were higher level administrators and of course the football coach.