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Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this: > […] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. Mor

Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this: > […] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM fields like computer science, those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry, not to mention equity in startup companies and so on. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243

bjt 4y ago
While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat race." The people who want to win that rat race will go somewhere else. UT will be greatly impacted but I don't think the overall scientific output of the USA will.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  I struggle to see how this benefits Texas, though. Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants, but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs along with them. It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it extremely friendly to Bitcoin mining, which happens to be the most competitive, low-margin, environmentally damaging part of the crypto ecosystem. Meanwhile most of the high-margin profit centers (exchanges, DeFi protocols, new blockchain technologies) remained in the Bay Area. It's like Texas is awfully fond of setting up selection filters and then selects for the mediocre.
  - trilbyglens 4y ago
    It's almost as though the state leadership is utterly incompetent :)
    - HybridCurve 4y ago
      It's intentional. One of the biggest threats to authoritarians is an educated electorate. All of this is part of a larger war on public education in Texas: Book bans, accusing librarians of stocking pornographic material, pushing radical conservatives into school boards, accusing public grades schools of teaching CRT, passing blatantly unconstitutional bills to force religion into public schools (like the one forcing the ten commandants to be displayed today), and trying to defund public schools by pushing the voucher program for unregulated privatized schooling.
  - screye 4y ago
    How does Texas's research output affect its ability to pull in top professionals from elsewhere ? The mid-west has amazing public STEM schools in UMich, Wisc, UIUC, Purdue....and yet their economic centers are in free fall. On the other hand, none of Texas's top cities had a top public school (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and they got by just fine. Austin's rise fairly recent. If anything, the sad state of local economies near massive flagship universities like UMass, Penn State, UFl, TA&MU shows that top-graduates clearly do not care about "sticking around" near their university, and instead just work at whatever the actual economic center is. Waterloo is one of the top tech schools of the world thanks to a well run co-op program, and their professors have little to do with it. Top universities are amazing thanks to getting the best students and amazing undergrad teachers, who often tend to be PhD students or lecturers. Neither have tenure, so I'm not too worried about their ability to keep the momentum going. Hell, I'm not even sure that the research output itself will drop. It's not like the total funding for universities went down. We might even see $$ go towards more competitive areas, and a further increase in productive output.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Austin is Texas's fastest growing city (and in the USA), and the metro is known as one of its richest. UTA has some role in fostering a tech scene that isn't as nice in Dallas or Houston (and doesn't really exist yet in San Antonio). Seattle definitely benefits a lot from UW and its computer science department, but there is some cycle going on (Intel and Microsoft were heavy backers of UW CSE in the earlier years, and also took many of its graduates). People do care about sticking around if they can. If the school is somewhere nice; e.g. in the Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin.
- mbreese 4y ago
  The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point. The point is to hire faculty doing cutting edge work is that they train students. They teach others in a field. Then you get to grow the local knowledge base about a particular method or field. Hopefully, you're training citizens of the state, who then will stay locally instead of going to a different state (avoiding a brain drain). Or just as likely, you're trying to draw in students from out of state or internationally. And then (hopefully) those people will want to stay within the state, either for more research, or to start/join local companies. It's not the primary effect of the faculty that you want... that's nice, but it's the second order network effects that a state really wants to encourage.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    you hire faculty to 1) train students 2) to do cutting edge work 3) on fundamental/basic research and unprofitable but important topics. academia's not just an internship.
  - caddemon 4y ago
    The smartest people in a field are not necessarily the best at training, especially if they care more about their own research end goals than trainee outcomes and/or have never gotten proper guidance on how to effectively mentor. Whether someone would be/is a good graduate student mentor is a total side dish when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions too. Grants, publications, professional connections, research topic/vision, are all more frequently discussed.
    - redavni 4y ago
      Some are though. Sean Carroll immediately comes to mind. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/45034#:~:text=Carroll%20provides%20his%20perspective%20on,a%20public%20intellectual%20involved%20in https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral... I don't have an opinion about the bill, but thought this anecdote was relevant.
- 0xBDB 4y ago
  As a practical matter I doubt UT and A&M will be affected at all. They're two of the richest universities in the United States thanks in large part to the Permanent University Fund (i.e., oil money). They'll 1) raise pay substantially and 2) tap their big-money donors to create professorial sinecures that amount to unofficial tenure. If you get fired because of the legislature's antics, but still get your salary and have access to quasi-university resources (grad assistants and labs), were you really fired?
linuxftw 4y ago
This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not. The only reason people are foregoing higher salaries to work at universities is because universities have pushed private research almost completely off the map. And even if public research is necessary, it doesn't need to be part of the university system. Ever heard of the NSA? They do research, yet somehow they're able to exist without being a university. (Not saying OP is disagreeing or agreeing with the statement from the article).
- techsupporter 4y ago
  > This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not. Why aren't they? It reads to me like you are making the same presumption, just in the other direction, without the support you see as lacking in the original quote. Please forgive me if I've missed something vital.
- larkost 4y ago
  How do you suppose that universities have pushed industry out of research? The reality is that industry has bay-and-large decided it only wants to do the development part of R&D, and leave the research to someone else. Universities have stepped in to fill that gap. Of course this is messy, for example industry is very involved in the research in AI, but in places like medical technologies near 100% of the early development of everything from drugs to most devices is done out of Universities, and there is nothing stopping industry from trying to step in there.
nappy-doo 4y ago
[flagged]
- drewcoo 4y ago
  "City upon a hill" [1] is a Christian sentiment. Given TX also wants to post "the ten commandments" (no note of which ten) [2], given the rather impressive dominionist [3] domination of the US courts at various levels [4], I don't see anything contrary to the "city upon a hill" at all. Unless we want to ague over sectarian differences, that is. The people in power today tend not to be Puritans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill [2] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3963001-texas-state-senate-approves-bill-to-post-ten-commandments-in-public-schools/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3963001-texas-state... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abortion-christian-right-america https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abo...
- marcusverus 4y ago
  > There are those that want to regress society and cause harm just to cause harm… Nope. It’s true that the US has split into two camps with competing worldviews, but the belief that your worldview is the one, true worldview, and the other worldview not only wrong but malicious is just dogmatic nonsense. Out of an abundance of caution, I would advise against drinking the refreshments at your cult meetings.
yodsanklai 4y ago
> More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, I wonder. For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities. And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers. Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.
- romwell 4y ago
  > For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Do you imply the universities will magically get more money somehow? >Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't. Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists. >After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities. Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded. >And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers. ...most of which are given by tenure. >Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent. As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not. All that aside, great research takes time and persistence, and culture, and environment, and working groups. All that disappears once your core is transient.
  - caddemon 4y ago
    > As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not. I'm blown away by this statement. Maybe math is an amazing haven of curiosity, and if so that is good to know. But academic credit is half the damn currency of science, and it is 100% the main reason that many profs are willing to take a pay cut. This is something openly joked about by people at all levels in my department (biology), and of what I know from some physicists I am close to it is not great there either. Though this could also have some subfield dependence. In biology tenure is hardly a direct benefit anyway because there's nothing much you can do without grants, and no one wants to stop being thought of as productive/smart. People chill a little after getting tenure, but only because 50% of them are basically fired at that decision point. Tenured faculty absolutely still play the grantsmanship game hard in biosciences. I suppose in mathematics there is not as much impact that university status can have, because way less upfront money is needed.
caddemon 4y ago
I don't agree with this as a state policy, but I don't know if it is as disastrous for UT as Aaronson makes it out to be. The academic job market is an absolute fucking bloodbath. Plenty of very qualified up and coming researchers struggle to get TT positions at major research universities. If they stay in academia, many postdoc for an absurdly long time or settle for career stagnating instructor positions (even though their focus had been research), or maybe just become a researcher within someone else's lab. An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think. I guess it comes down to how badly you think the current system is performing at selection. But the competitiveness is absolutely insane, that part is objective.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  > An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think. And also it includes a gamble that texas will reinstate tenure.
- arghnoname 4y ago
  I got a PhD in computer science and considered going into academia, though I ultimately decided against it because there is only so much scratching and clawing that I am willing to do. I was a decent researcher and to be honest, not having tenure at an good institution at all (as opposed to two tier TT and non-TT jobs) would have been kind of a plus. I probably would have gotten tenure, but I got so damned sick of chasing yet another brass ring. I don't have tenure at my current industry job (it does pay better, granted) and I don't worry about this at all. I do my job well enough that I don't really worry about getting fired. What I cared about: quality of the institution (conferences, publications, collaborators, students, facilities), location, department, subarea expertise, service burden, reciprocal respect, salary that buys you a decent life, and ample opportunity to be successful. Tenure? That's nice, but the main advantage cited for it (ability to say controversial things) is long gone anyway. Profs gotta behave themselves regardless.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Agreed, I explicitly decided on a non-TT role because the tenure carrot isn’t juicy enough anymore. The non-TT role where you get a salary good enough for 12 months but you only have to work 9 just can’t be beat.
scarface74 4y ago
Is that a bad thing? I think part of the problem with modern college education is the lack of industry experience and the another part of the problem is that professors are more interested in research than teaching
onetimeusename 4y ago
those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry I don't think this is generally true. I can think of a few cases of tenured faculty who could earn 10x their salary in private consulting but in my opinion it's generally not true. I think a good comparison would be to look at the average salary of something like Microsoft Research employees who are PhDs versus the average salary of tenured faculty of Computer Sciences at a highly ranked school like UT Austin. I suspect it won't be substantially different (based on job offers I have seen). Although I don't know what a vastly higher salary means here, I suspect that the largest entrants in private industry for quantum computing would not pay vastly higher salaries than Scott Aaronson's ~$270K for work in that field.
- arghnoname 4y ago
  MSR can pay well, but top flight universities (in CS at least) do actually pay pretty well. But MSR is in some ways almost a university in and of itself. It has extremely good talent and is as competitive as many faculty departments. The appeal of MSR (to me) is from the research opportunities afforded to them. The product of MSR researchers is still mostly papers. In other words, they are still researchers and research (papers) is what they want to produce. They serve on conference committees, the works. It's easy to go from MSR to academia and back again. The professors who give up a big salary are those who could take the skills they developed and apply it in a more industrial capacity, where their innovations are not public or published. This is worth a lot more to a company. Taking highly motivated and intelligent people and having them solve the hardest problems at the biggest companies in such a way (i.e., secretly) that gives the company a competitive advantage is going to pay quite well.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just increase your salaries to compensate for the lack of a permanent employment guarantee. Tenure is worth quite a bit, but as the market for non-tenured research positions show it's not worth Microsoft Research salaries much, and very much within the budget of big universities since they now have the flexibility to fire people and don't have to think of each case of tenure granted as permanent cash flow going out. The thing about academic hiring and academia in general that's interesting is that prestige is highly integrated into every aspect of the industry. It's also highly reliant on foreign labour, as they get an exemption from visa caps that both gives them the ability to hire from a vastly greater labour pool and also makes them attractive as places to work for smart foreigners. A professor position at a prestigious university is still worth a lot just for the prestige alone, tenure or not, as you get access to other prestigious colleagues, a higher quality pool of PhD students, and a sense remaining in the general academic community as a whole (although I guess we'll see if this remains true). I'm not entirely convinced that tenure is a driving factor for faculty hires. It's true that traditionally, tenure-track positions are the "real" research jobs, and non-tenure track positions are where they hire the grunts to do some teaching at really terrible rates, but the reason that they can get away with doing that is because there are vastly more PhDs than there are positions for them, even in competitive STEM fields. This is why tenured positions have been mostly disappearing over the past decade. There's no reason this system has to remain, the tenure-track can just become the full-professor track, and nothing much has to change. In my opinion, this will not have too much of an effect on the academic job market in Texas. The people that cared enough about politics to swear off all jobs in Texas were never really an option (oh no the gender studies department will be empty, what will the Texas politicians think about this tragic development), and the rest are still in the competitive market of academic hires. I think, independent of this whole Texas saga, that the whole notion of academic tenure needed a rework anyways, as it never really made sense to me why specifically research positions have a permanent offer of employment. The whole notion of academic freedom is mostly a load of bullshit, if you don't write the correct things you don't get grants, and if you don't get grants you're effectively fired at big research universities anyways, tenure or not. What's left is a guarantee of employment that causes a great deal of inflexibility in the job market and on the institutions, and causes a great deal of risk aversion. The rework didn't need to come like this, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

bjt 4y ago

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat race." The people who want to win that rat race will go somewhere else. UT will be greatly impacted but I don't think the overall scientific output of the USA will.

nostrademons 4y ago
I struggle to see how this benefits Texas, though. Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants, but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs along with them. It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it extremely friendly to Bitcoin mining, which happens to be the most competitive, low-margin, environmentally damaging part of the crypto ecosystem. Meanwhile most of the high-margin profit centers (exchanges, DeFi protocols, new blockchain technologies) remained in the Bay Area. It's like Texas is awfully fond of setting up selection filters and then selects for the mediocre.
- trilbyglens 4y ago
  It's almost as though the state leadership is utterly incompetent :)
  - HybridCurve 4y ago
    It's intentional. One of the biggest threats to authoritarians is an educated electorate. All of this is part of a larger war on public education in Texas: Book bans, accusing librarians of stocking pornographic material, pushing radical conservatives into school boards, accusing public grades schools of teaching CRT, passing blatantly unconstitutional bills to force religion into public schools (like the one forcing the ten commandants to be displayed today), and trying to defund public schools by pushing the voucher program for unregulated privatized schooling.
- screye 4y ago
  How does Texas's research output affect its ability to pull in top professionals from elsewhere ? The mid-west has amazing public STEM schools in UMich, Wisc, UIUC, Purdue....and yet their economic centers are in free fall. On the other hand, none of Texas's top cities had a top public school (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and they got by just fine. Austin's rise fairly recent. If anything, the sad state of local economies near massive flagship universities like UMass, Penn State, UFl, TA&MU shows that top-graduates clearly do not care about "sticking around" near their university, and instead just work at whatever the actual economic center is. Waterloo is one of the top tech schools of the world thanks to a well run co-op program, and their professors have little to do with it. Top universities are amazing thanks to getting the best students and amazing undergrad teachers, who often tend to be PhD students or lecturers. Neither have tenure, so I'm not too worried about their ability to keep the momentum going. Hell, I'm not even sure that the research output itself will drop. It's not like the total funding for universities went down. We might even see $$ go towards more competitive areas, and a further increase in productive output.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Austin is Texas's fastest growing city (and in the USA), and the metro is known as one of its richest. UTA has some role in fostering a tech scene that isn't as nice in Dallas or Houston (and doesn't really exist yet in San Antonio). Seattle definitely benefits a lot from UW and its computer science department, but there is some cycle going on (Intel and Microsoft were heavy backers of UW CSE in the earlier years, and also took many of its graduates). People do care about sticking around if they can. If the school is somewhere nice; e.g. in the Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin.
mbreese 4y ago
The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point. The point is to hire faculty doing cutting edge work is that they train students. They teach others in a field. Then you get to grow the local knowledge base about a particular method or field. Hopefully, you're training citizens of the state, who then will stay locally instead of going to a different state (avoiding a brain drain). Or just as likely, you're trying to draw in students from out of state or internationally. And then (hopefully) those people will want to stay within the state, either for more research, or to start/join local companies. It's not the primary effect of the faculty that you want... that's nice, but it's the second order network effects that a state really wants to encourage.
- sterlind 4y ago
  you hire faculty to 1) train students 2) to do cutting edge work 3) on fundamental/basic research and unprofitable but important topics. academia's not just an internship.
- caddemon 4y ago
  The smartest people in a field are not necessarily the best at training, especially if they care more about their own research end goals than trainee outcomes and/or have never gotten proper guidance on how to effectively mentor. Whether someone would be/is a good graduate student mentor is a total side dish when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions too. Grants, publications, professional connections, research topic/vision, are all more frequently discussed.
  - redavni 4y ago
    Some are though. Sean Carroll immediately comes to mind. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/45034#:~:text=Carroll%20provides%20his%20perspective%20on,a%20public%20intellectual%20involved%20in https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral... I don't have an opinion about the bill, but thought this anecdote was relevant.
0xBDB 4y ago
As a practical matter I doubt UT and A&M will be affected at all. They're two of the richest universities in the United States thanks in large part to the Permanent University Fund (i.e., oil money). They'll 1) raise pay substantially and 2) tap their big-money donors to create professorial sinecures that amount to unofficial tenure. If you get fired because of the legislature's antics, but still get your salary and have access to quasi-university resources (grad assistants and labs), were you really fired?

linuxftw 4y ago

This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not. The only reason people are foregoing higher salaries to work at universities is because universities have pushed private research almost completely off the map. And even if public research is necessary, it doesn't need to be part of the university system. Ever heard of the NSA? They do research, yet somehow they're able to exist without being a university. (Not saying OP is disagreeing or agreeing with the statement from the article).

techsupporter 4y ago
> This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not. Why aren't they? It reads to me like you are making the same presumption, just in the other direction, without the support you see as lacking in the original quote. Please forgive me if I've missed something vital.
larkost 4y ago
How do you suppose that universities have pushed industry out of research? The reality is that industry has bay-and-large decided it only wants to do the development part of R&D, and leave the research to someone else. Universities have stepped in to fill that gap. Of course this is messy, for example industry is very involved in the research in AI, but in places like medical technologies near 100% of the early development of everything from drugs to most devices is done out of Universities, and there is nothing stopping industry from trying to step in there.

nappy-doo 4y ago

[flagged]

drewcoo 4y ago
"City upon a hill" [1] is a Christian sentiment. Given TX also wants to post "the ten commandments" (no note of which ten) [2], given the rather impressive dominionist [3] domination of the US courts at various levels [4], I don't see anything contrary to the "city upon a hill" at all. Unless we want to ague over sectarian differences, that is. The people in power today tend not to be Puritans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill [2] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3963001-texas-state-senate-approves-bill-to-post-ten-commandments-in-public-schools/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3963001-texas-state... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abortion-christian-right-america https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abo...
marcusverus 4y ago
> There are those that want to regress society and cause harm just to cause harm… Nope. It’s true that the US has split into two camps with competing worldviews, but the belief that your worldview is the one, true worldview, and the other worldview not only wrong but malicious is just dogmatic nonsense. Out of an abundance of caution, I would advise against drinking the refreshments at your cult meetings.

yodsanklai 4y ago

> More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, I wonder. For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities. And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers. Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.

romwell 4y ago
> For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Do you imply the universities will magically get more money somehow? >Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't. Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists. >After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities. Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded. >And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers. ...most of which are given by tenure. >Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent. As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not. All that aside, great research takes time and persistence, and culture, and environment, and working groups. All that disappears once your core is transient.
- caddemon 4y ago
  > As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not. I'm blown away by this statement. Maybe math is an amazing haven of curiosity, and if so that is good to know. But academic credit is half the damn currency of science, and it is 100% the main reason that many profs are willing to take a pay cut. This is something openly joked about by people at all levels in my department (biology), and of what I know from some physicists I am close to it is not great there either. Though this could also have some subfield dependence. In biology tenure is hardly a direct benefit anyway because there's nothing much you can do without grants, and no one wants to stop being thought of as productive/smart. People chill a little after getting tenure, but only because 50% of them are basically fired at that decision point. Tenured faculty absolutely still play the grantsmanship game hard in biosciences. I suppose in mathematics there is not as much impact that university status can have, because way less upfront money is needed.

caddemon 4y ago

I don't agree with this as a state policy, but I don't know if it is as disastrous for UT as Aaronson makes it out to be. The academic job market is an absolute fucking bloodbath. Plenty of very qualified up and coming researchers struggle to get TT positions at major research universities. If they stay in academia, many postdoc for an absurdly long time or settle for career stagnating instructor positions (even though their focus had been research), or maybe just become a researcher within someone else's lab. An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think. I guess it comes down to how badly you think the current system is performing at selection. But the competitiveness is absolutely insane, that part is objective.

jacobr1 4y ago
> An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think. And also it includes a gamble that texas will reinstate tenure.
arghnoname 4y ago
I got a PhD in computer science and considered going into academia, though I ultimately decided against it because there is only so much scratching and clawing that I am willing to do. I was a decent researcher and to be honest, not having tenure at an good institution at all (as opposed to two tier TT and non-TT jobs) would have been kind of a plus. I probably would have gotten tenure, but I got so damned sick of chasing yet another brass ring. I don't have tenure at my current industry job (it does pay better, granted) and I don't worry about this at all. I do my job well enough that I don't really worry about getting fired. What I cared about: quality of the institution (conferences, publications, collaborators, students, facilities), location, department, subarea expertise, service burden, reciprocal respect, salary that buys you a decent life, and ample opportunity to be successful. Tenure? That's nice, but the main advantage cited for it (ability to say controversial things) is long gone anyway. Profs gotta behave themselves regardless.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Agreed, I explicitly decided on a non-TT role because the tenure carrot isn’t juicy enough anymore. The non-TT role where you get a salary good enough for 12 months but you only have to work 9 just can’t be beat.

scarface74 4y ago

Is that a bad thing? I think part of the problem with modern college education is the lack of industry experience and the another part of the problem is that professors are more interested in research than teaching

onetimeusename 4y ago

those who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in industry I don't think this is generally true. I can think of a few cases of tenured faculty who could earn 10x their salary in private consulting but in my opinion it's generally not true. I think a good comparison would be to look at the average salary of something like Microsoft Research employees who are PhDs versus the average salary of tenured faculty of Computer Sciences at a highly ranked school like UT Austin. I suspect it won't be substantially different (based on job offers I have seen). Although I don't know what a vastly higher salary means here, I suspect that the largest entrants in private industry for quantum computing would not pay vastly higher salaries than Scott Aaronson's ~$270K for work in that field.

arghnoname 4y ago
MSR can pay well, but top flight universities (in CS at least) do actually pay pretty well. But MSR is in some ways almost a university in and of itself. It has extremely good talent and is as competitive as many faculty departments. The appeal of MSR (to me) is from the research opportunities afforded to them. The product of MSR researchers is still mostly papers. In other words, they are still researchers and research (papers) is what they want to produce. They serve on conference committees, the works. It's easy to go from MSR to academia and back again. The professors who give up a big salary are those who could take the skills they developed and apply it in a more industrial capacity, where their innovations are not public or published. This is worth a lot more to a company. Taking highly motivated and intelligent people and having them solve the hardest problems at the biggest companies in such a way (i.e., secretly) that gives the company a competitive advantage is going to pay quite well.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

I don't think he is correct. As with many other things, tenure is a benefit that has a cost: if you want to attract people without offering tenure, you just increase your salaries to compensate for the lack of a permanent employment guarantee. Tenure is worth quite a bit, but as the market for non-tenured research positions show it's not worth Microsoft Research salaries much, and very much within the budget of big universities since they now have the flexibility to fire people and don't have to think of each case of tenure granted as permanent cash flow going out. The thing about academic hiring and academia in general that's interesting is that prestige is highly integrated into every aspect of the industry. It's also highly reliant on foreign labour, as they get an exemption from visa caps that both gives them the ability to hire from a vastly greater labour pool and also makes them attractive as places to work for smart foreigners. A professor position at a prestigious university is still worth a lot just for the prestige alone, tenure or not, as you get access to other prestigious colleagues, a higher quality pool of PhD students, and a sense remaining in the general academic community as a whole (although I guess we'll see if this remains true). I'm not entirely convinced that tenure is a driving factor for faculty hires. It's true that traditionally, tenure-track positions are the "real" research jobs, and non-tenure track positions are where they hire the grunts to do some teaching at really terrible rates, but the reason that they can get away with doing that is because there are vastly more PhDs than there are positions for them, even in competitive STEM fields. This is why tenured positions have been mostly disappearing over the past decade. There's no reason this system has to remain, the tenure-track can just become the full-professor track, and nothing much has to change. In my opinion, this will not have too much of an effect on the academic job market in Texas. The people that cared enough about politics to swear off all jobs in Texas were never really an option (oh no the gender studies department will be empty, what will the Texas politicians think about this tragic development), and the rest are still in the competitive market of academic hires. I think, independent of this whole Texas saga, that the whole notion of academic tenure needed a rework anyways, as it never really made sense to me why specifically research positions have a permanent offer of employment. The whole notion of academic freedom is mostly a load of bullshit, if you don't write the correct things you don't get grants, and if you don't get grants you're effectively fired at big research universities anyways, tenure or not. What's left is a guarantee of employment that causes a great deal of inflexibility in the job market and on the institutions, and causes a great deal of risk aversion. The rework didn't need to come like this, but it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.