5 ms·
Not my turf but I'll chime in. In the past people who did science could do so with less personally on the line. In the early days you had men of letters like C
by lordnacho 5y ago
Not my turf but I'll chime in.
In the past people who did science could do so with less personally on the line. In the early days you had men of letters like Cavendish who didn't really need to care if you liked what he wrote, he'd be fine without any grants. That obviously doesn't work for everyone, but then the tenure system developed for a similar reason: you have to be able to follow an unproductive path sometimes without starving. And that can mean unproductive in that you don't find anything or in that your peers don't rate your work. There'd be a gap between being a young researcher and tenured, sure.
Nowadays there's an army of precariously employed phds and postdocs. Publish or perish is a trope. People get really quite old while still being juniors in some sense, and during that time everyone is thinking "I have to not jeopardise my career".
When you have a system where all the agents are under huge pressure, they adapt in certain ways: take safer bets, write more papers from each experiment, cooperate with others for mutual gain, congregate around previous winners, generally more risk reducing behaviour.
Perhaps the thing to do is make a hard barrier: everyone who wants to be a researcher needs to get tenure after undergrad, or not at all. (Or after masters or whatever, I wouldn't know.) Those people then get a grant for life. It will be hard to get one of these, but it will be clear if you have to give up. Lab assistants and other untenured staff know what they are negotiating for. Tenured young people can start a family and not have the rug pulled out when they write something interesting.
- uberswe 5y agoThis is one of the many reasons I like Universal Basic Income. Having UBI would let researchers take risks and have something to fall back on if needed and could reduce some of the pressure
- TimPC 5y agoI don't think UBI works well here because in most fields the level of success that the precarious group experiences in industry is substantially higher than a guaranteed minimum. A lot of people have identity aspects tied to their university affiliation and don't want to stop working with the university in part for that reason.
- dagw 5y agoNo matter what level we put UBI at, it will almost certainly be less than a third of what a researcher salary would be. Also it's not just about the money. Losing your job means losing access to a lab, access to data, access to grant money and basically everything you need to actually do research.
- msg3 5y agoI agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but don't think your solution is a good way forward - immediately after undergrad is way too early to be evaluating research potential and would just shift the hyper competitiveness earlier. A better solution would be to stop overproducing PhDs. We could reduce funding for PhD students and re-direct that towards more postdoctoral positions - perhaps even make research scientist a viable career choice?
- ivan_gammel 5y agoThe system that produces PhDs isn’t that bad. It is a good way to create research portfolio useful for employment in private sector. We need to pay less attention to the title though - this is not a distinguishing achievement for life.
- RhysU 5y agoCorrect, it's not a laurel to rest on. The act of producing a doctoral dissertation usually leaves something of a mark on one's outlook, skills, etc. I claim it is a _distinguishable_ achievement for life.
- achillesheels 5y agoYet the principle of pursuing knowledge is not for pecuniary interests. So your judgment demonstrates the temporal shift of the Western University towards rubber stamping people’s vocational aptitude. This leads to corruption, of course.
- TimPC 5y agoOverproducing PhDs seems to be a necessary aspect of how research is conducted in the current university. Most serious lines of work are pursued by a PhD student or Postdoc and advised by a Professor. They need a critical mass of PhD students which is definitely a much larger number than 1 per professorship. This is especially true in fields where industry jobs aren't readily available.
- oldnews193 5y ago