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I can't speak for the math department, but I've noticed that there are general contentions between Columbia's faculty and administration that seem somewhat uniq

I can't speak for the math department, but I've noticed that there are general contentions between Columbia's faculty and administration that seem somewhat unique to the school. Professor Martin Chalfie has noted how cramped and run-down his lab is in an interview, which seems like soft-spoken criticism at the way Columbia has failed to use its enormous endowment towards acquiring more research and teaching spaces. Perhaps someone at Harvard or MIT can chime in with whether such contentions exist outside of Columbia, but I'm not too surprised to see a professor criticize the school for somewhat blatant wrongdoing.

ericd 5y ago
I can tell you that the student body at MIT generally had a pretty dim view of the admins when I was there, always trying to kill the things that make MIT an amazing place, while building stupidly overpriced vanity buildings. Not to mention the incredibly shameful way they handled the Aaron Swartz case.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I think there were a mix of cases when I was there, with admins sometimes supporting the wonderful weird and other times not. Often when they did, it was because the weird was only a background level of annoying/risky and when they didn’t, it was often that the level of cacophony had exceeded that admin’s tolerance for it.
  - Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
    It got worse: while the admissions office and museum were using MIT hacking culture to attract applicants and advance its brand, the school changed both the type of officers hired for the campus police which is necessary due to its inner city location and started arresting students for attempting to pull off harmless hacks. I also heard some reports they got generally more aggressive towards the student population. When I was there they hired older, very experienced police officers who were looking for a good, not normally intense final job for their career. So they were generally understanding and fit into the culture. Aaron Swartz was an entirely different thing. Instead of hammering JSTOR from his own institution of Harvard to the point it blocked the whole campus, he disguised himself demonstrating mens rea, a guilty mind, let himself into a machine room and left behind the laptop to do his act of civil disobedience or whatever. And then proved chronically depressed people have no business committing such crimes. From beginning to end he demonstrated ill intent towards MIT.
blagie 5y ago
In 2022, MIT is a cesspool of fraud and corruption. This wasn't the case a quarter-century ago. The extreme competition seems to be overtaking all of the elites. MIT is the #1 university brand in the world, but it spent most of its integrity and soul to get there. There's a fine line you need to walk to become a faculty member at elite schools. You need to lie a little on grant applications to align when you want to do to what will be funded. You need to lie a little bit in publications so they have impact. You need to fight for credit, sometimes on work you didn't do. As these become normalized, winners do these more and more; otherwise, you won't get that faculty job. The culture slowly trickles down. I think most grad students at MIT are still honest, but not the most successful ones (most of the ones who find faculty jobs are at least a little bit crooked). Second-tier school faculty slots are filled with graduates of first-tier schools. MIT has a traditional hacking culture which emphasizes breaking rules. This worked well when this involved climbing on rooftops, but it works less well when the endowment is O($100M) per faculty member, and there's money to embezzle through complex corporate schemes and financial games. Contentions don't exist too much between faculty and admin right now, but they definitely do between students and Institute. MIT grad students are working to unionize, and the Institute, to union-bust.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Not to diminish what you wrote, but almost every single bit of it could be said of almost every research-heavy university in the US today. It's academics in general today, not just MIT.
- 11101010001100 5y ago
  > I think most grad students at MIT are still honest, but not the most successful ones (most of the ones who find faculty jobs are at least a little bit crooked). While this might be true, I suspect the statistics are not that different from the general population.
  - blagie 5y ago
    I don't think so. In my experience, most people are pretty decent and honest. There's something which extreme competition does which breaks that, both by whom it selects, and by how it changes culture. MIT a quarter-century ago was much more honest than MIT today. Peer institutions -- one stop down -- are also still much more honest, although I suspect that will change in a decade or two. The same change happened in several of MIT's peer schools.
lazerpants 5y ago
The Chemistry Department specifically has horrible infrastructure and a huge part of the problem is that construction is very difficult. NYC isn't a college town like Cambridge or New Haven and Columbia has to pay more to get stuff built and on top of that it's a long process involving multiple constituencies. Just look at how long it took for Columbia's Manhattanville campus to come together. There are plans in the works to fix these infrastructure issues but the timeline is frustratingly long.
- lofatdairy 5y ago
  Yeah, on one hand I don't think admin are to blame for the delays in acquiring space and development. They have to compete against the enormous cost, enormous time delays, and even their student body who despise gentrification. That said, these delays have definitely contributed to the tensions, as we can see in the difference in relationships with admin held by BME, neuro, and CBS, who were granted space in Manhattanville, vs everyone else. I don't know too much about NYC development, but Manhattanville seems somewhat unambitious in height, I don't know if that was the limit to Columbia's air rights or what, but it seems like a waste of limited footprint.
setgree 5y ago
I was formerly a PhD student at Columbia in the social sciences. The faculty I interacted with didn't seem to care a whit one way or the other about the school at large, they were just really invested in the department's competitiveness in attracting faculty, grad students, etc. I can't speak to any run-down labs, but regarding cramped working conditions -- space is just always going to be at a premium in Manhattan. Arguably Columbia is going above and beyond to acquire more space by opening up the Manhattanville campus [0,1,2]. In general, when academics complain about things, I take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, I don't doubt for a minute that the administration juked the stats to get a better USN&W ranking. [0] (https://neighbors.columbia.edu/news/robert-fullilove-appointed-co-director-manhattanville-wellness-center-joining-olajide-williams https://neighbors.columbia.edu/news/robert-fullilove-appoint... [1] https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-twin-buildings-with-shuffling-facades-define-ds-r-s-new-columbia-business-school https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-twin-buildings-with-s... [2] https://ny.eater.com/2022/2/22/22939502/columbia-jerome-greene-science-center-manhattanville-market-food-hall-nyc-review https://ny.eater.com/2022/2/22/22939502/columbia-jerome-gree...

ericd 5y ago

I can tell you that the student body at MIT generally had a pretty dim view of the admins when I was there, always trying to kill the things that make MIT an amazing place, while building stupidly overpriced vanity buildings. Not to mention the incredibly shameful way they handled the Aaron Swartz case.

sokoloff 5y ago
I think there were a mix of cases when I was there, with admins sometimes supporting the wonderful weird and other times not. Often when they did, it was because the weird was only a background level of annoying/risky and when they didn’t, it was often that the level of cacophony had exceeded that admin’s tolerance for it.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  It got worse: while the admissions office and museum were using MIT hacking culture to attract applicants and advance its brand, the school changed both the type of officers hired for the campus police which is necessary due to its inner city location and started arresting students for attempting to pull off harmless hacks. I also heard some reports they got generally more aggressive towards the student population. When I was there they hired older, very experienced police officers who were looking for a good, not normally intense final job for their career. So they were generally understanding and fit into the culture. Aaron Swartz was an entirely different thing. Instead of hammering JSTOR from his own institution of Harvard to the point it blocked the whole campus, he disguised himself demonstrating mens rea, a guilty mind, let himself into a machine room and left behind the laptop to do his act of civil disobedience or whatever. And then proved chronically depressed people have no business committing such crimes. From beginning to end he demonstrated ill intent towards MIT.

blagie 5y ago

In 2022, MIT is a cesspool of fraud and corruption. This wasn't the case a quarter-century ago. The extreme competition seems to be overtaking all of the elites. MIT is the #1 university brand in the world, but it spent most of its integrity and soul to get there. There's a fine line you need to walk to become a faculty member at elite schools. You need to lie a little on grant applications to align when you want to do to what will be funded. You need to lie a little bit in publications so they have impact. You need to fight for credit, sometimes on work you didn't do. As these become normalized, winners do these more and more; otherwise, you won't get that faculty job. The culture slowly trickles down. I think most grad students at MIT are still honest, but not the most successful ones (most of the ones who find faculty jobs are at least a little bit crooked). Second-tier school faculty slots are filled with graduates of first-tier schools. MIT has a traditional hacking culture which emphasizes breaking rules. This worked well when this involved climbing on rooftops, but it works less well when the endowment is O($100M) per faculty member, and there's money to embezzle through complex corporate schemes and financial games. Contentions don't exist too much between faculty and admin right now, but they definitely do between students and Institute. MIT grad students are working to unionize, and the Institute, to union-bust.

derbOac 5y ago
Not to diminish what you wrote, but almost every single bit of it could be said of almost every research-heavy university in the US today. It's academics in general today, not just MIT.
11101010001100 5y ago
> I think most grad students at MIT are still honest, but not the most successful ones (most of the ones who find faculty jobs are at least a little bit crooked). While this might be true, I suspect the statistics are not that different from the general population.
- blagie 5y ago
  I don't think so. In my experience, most people are pretty decent and honest. There's something which extreme competition does which breaks that, both by whom it selects, and by how it changes culture. MIT a quarter-century ago was much more honest than MIT today. Peer institutions -- one stop down -- are also still much more honest, although I suspect that will change in a decade or two. The same change happened in several of MIT's peer schools.

lazerpants 5y ago

The Chemistry Department specifically has horrible infrastructure and a huge part of the problem is that construction is very difficult. NYC isn't a college town like Cambridge or New Haven and Columbia has to pay more to get stuff built and on top of that it's a long process involving multiple constituencies. Just look at how long it took for Columbia's Manhattanville campus to come together. There are plans in the works to fix these infrastructure issues but the timeline is frustratingly long.

lofatdairy 5y ago
Yeah, on one hand I don't think admin are to blame for the delays in acquiring space and development. They have to compete against the enormous cost, enormous time delays, and even their student body who despise gentrification. That said, these delays have definitely contributed to the tensions, as we can see in the difference in relationships with admin held by BME, neuro, and CBS, who were granted space in Manhattanville, vs everyone else. I don't know too much about NYC development, but Manhattanville seems somewhat unambitious in height, I don't know if that was the limit to Columbia's air rights or what, but it seems like a waste of limited footprint.

setgree 5y ago

I was formerly a PhD student at Columbia in the social sciences. The faculty I interacted with didn't seem to care a whit one way or the other about the school at large, they were just really invested in the department's competitiveness in attracting faculty, grad students, etc. I can't speak to any run-down labs, but regarding cramped working conditions -- space is just always going to be at a premium in Manhattan. Arguably Columbia is going above and beyond to acquire more space by opening up the Manhattanville campus [0,1,2]. In general, when academics complain about things, I take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, I don't doubt for a minute that the administration juked the stats to get a better USN&W ranking. [0] (https://neighbors.columbia.edu/news/robert-fullilove-appointed-co-director-manhattanville-wellness-center-joining-olajide-williams https://neighbors.columbia.edu/news/robert-fullilove-appoint... [1] https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-twin-buildings-with-shuffling-facades-define-ds-r-s-new-columbia-business-school https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-twin-buildings-with-s... [2] https://ny.eater.com/2022/2/22/22939502/columbia-jerome-greene-science-center-manhattanville-market-food-hall-nyc-review https://ny.eater.com/2022/2/22/22939502/columbia-jerome-gree...