3 ms·

Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas? – Mind Matters

31 points by Anon84 3y ago

bradley13 3y ago
> "it is usually encombant on the researcher to buy thier RAs, course releases, summer salary" Honestly, this is a sick system. Hire a faculty member and then expect them to hire someone to perform one of their fundamental duties: teaching. It seems to me that the basic model needs to change. Hire faculty for what you want them to do. Want an instructor? Hire an instructor. Want a researcher, hire a researcher. Provide both with what they need, whether that is RAs, TAs, funding, lab space, or whatever.
- mynameisnoone 3y ago
  Yes. It's like don't expect an engineering manager to code and manage. Have a department with world-class lecturers and researchers, and let it be okay that they are often different people. For example, take the UC Davis computer science department: they had Sean Davis, a paragon of CS lecturers. Also Prof. Farrens with his infamous Monty Python-laden finals. On the research side, they also had bridge champion "Chip" Martel, Norman Matloff (h of 22), and Matt Bishop. Dan Gusfield was a rarity: both a good lecturer and a good researcher. Division of labor, and specialization of trade is a "good" value that shouldn't be ignored.
- derbOac 3y ago
  I always think it's like hiring a plumber to make money for you rather than actually replace your leaky pipe. At some point if everyone does that homeowners are making a lot of money but everyone has corroding plumbing.
- uberman 3y ago
  They do this already. Adjuncts are teaching faculty. Tenure usually comes with a research expectation and faculty in the tenure system typically have a reduced course load. If a research active faculty member wants to teach even less, then they use grant money to buy themselves releases. Typically even research faculty are expected to teach at least one course as are leadership faculty like deans. Though obviously the provost and president are unlikely to teach but rather raise a shit ton of philanthropy. For context, I have work and consulted for more than a decade at R1 universities that you have heard of.
mo_42 3y ago
I've been part of universities for 9 years from undergrad to PhD. I was only able to reflect on this system after I left. Universities always have been a system for selecting people who can keep it running in the future. So the first day as a freshman kicks off a test of serveral years if you're a fit. That's why we have different levels of degrees. People can drop out without much sunk costs. Otherwise only very few would try this journey and then the base for selecting good people would be low. What I mean with good people who keep it running has changed a lot. Historically, universities didn't have to justify themselves much. For governments, it was obvious because they provided knowledge gain, and, primarily, they provided well-educated people to work for the government. So universities selected the best people because they would become the next generation of teachers or drop out as educated governmental workers. Nowadays, the government and the public want to see research results (for funding) because this is supposed to be the purpose of universities. I think this is a misunderstanding and universities took part in creating it. So the people universities select for now are still good students but also ones that play by the new rules and crank out as many papers as possible. My main obstacle during the PhD was to adapt to a research style of looking up fashionable topics in the research community, writing an incremental paper und publishing it. My advisor even objected against some ideas because they're too risky.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  You're complicating things. Modern univ is run by sociopath MBAs that financialized institutions. They only care about getting in money. Prestige / paper numbers is secondary.
  - leansensei 3y ago
    With this bogeyman MBA figure you are postulating, you are oversimplifying.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      Ok I'll expand. If you haven't been living under a rock, you know that the cost of upper education has exploded over the last 3-4 decades. Tuition has increased far above inflation, while endowments have exploded. And yet, these are nonprofit organizations. There are no shareholders, no private ownership. Salaries are being heavily depressed in professors as financialization of departments results in humanities studies being axed. Teaching is either TAs or the rise of the minimum wage professor: the adjunct. There has been an arms race in facilities, but that does not explain all the increase. So: WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? Every college professor will tell you that administration has exploded in size. Wait, these colleges basically functioned perfectly well without huge administration orgs. WHy are they there? Because they, who spoke MBA to the rich benefactors (aka former captains of induasty) inserted themselves. And of course any MBA of any place anywhere, be it nonprofit charity, corporation, or administrator of a college, in the last 30-40 years has seen their pay dramatically rise. A "CEO" of a charity used to be ... a charity. They'd get paid peanuts. Now it's pretty routine for a substantial charity director to get paid millions. Because of course they are so valuable and amazing that they need high compensation to "retain" them lest they take their amazing talents to corporate world. College administrators get to point to the fundraising and tuition increases and the overall revenue increase to show their amazing abilities and how they need to be retained with high six figure or seven figure salaries, otherwise clearly the university would fall apart.
gklitz 3y ago
> Why couldn’t she get financial support? “You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a former faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There is a vicious cycle,” he says. Interesting. So, the idea doesn’t matter. What a weird conclusion. You are more likely to get a high paying job as a professional athlete if you have won a lot of tournaments, and you are more likely to win a lot of tournaments if you’re a highly paid professional athlete. So they conclude “Oh, so skill in the sport doesn’t matter?” Of cause it does!
- scrubs 3y ago
  Athletics have refs and a score and rules all simple enough to sort winners from losers. Papers don't. The analogy is flawed.
- derbOac 3y ago
  Except there's studies showing increasing turnover in academics and exiting being unrelated to research quality metrics. There's also research showing pretty clear seniority effects on grant receipt. You're raising a good point but my sense is it doesn't fit the data well. There's also a really basic question of whether grants per se should matter at all in things like tenure decisions. You could make an argument that they're a means to an end, and using them for hiring decisions is sort of a tail wagging the dog phenomenon.
- j7ake 3y ago
  This is incorrect way to think about it. Because optics matter more than whatever skill may be involved. The way to think about it is to imagine a non tenured person writing two identical grants. They take one grant and change their position to full professsor while other stays at non tenured. They are saying that the one that says full professor will get a higher score on average than the non tenured application.
- hazbot 3y ago
  But sport is by definition set up so what is measured is the result we care about. We would perhaps not care so much about the "vicious cycle" if the incentives were aligned with "good" research. If cancer gets cured, at the end of the day I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over how. But the concern is the incentives are misaligned in favour of exploiting the metrics instead of "good" research.
mynameisnoone 3y ago
Research universities have devolved into memetic generation machines valuing quantity (publish) over quality (considered the "perish" camp) as a consequence of the upheaval in university socioeconomic demographic shifts post-WW2. Rigor is steadily being chipped away.
- consf 3y ago
  [dead]
orangesite 3y ago
They've created a system where literally the only people who are remotely interested in participating in that system are people who love gaming the system. Until they fix that, the rest of us will always have better options than that.
uberman 3y ago
Typically universites dont fund any but the most seed research of the most junior faculty. What they will provide is RAs and lab/center space. Even then, it is usually encombant on the researcher to buy thier RAs, course releases, summer salary, as well as pay for institutional overhead from grants. Of course the more you get in grants, the more overhead you can offset and typically the more you can publish thus the more likely you are to get tenure (assuming your institution even offers it any more). Granting organizations want there resources to go to proven successes in general and the more you publish and speak at conferences the more recognition you get for the funder. This is not to say that some funders won't risk a grant to a junior faculty member but senior facuty are likely to be safer bets. They PI the grant projects and junior faculty are participants, co-pi, and co-authors. Put in layman's terms, I am not likely to contract a guy with an interesting non conventional idea on how to build my house but you might and that is great for the new idea guy if you are willing to accept the risk. In the house building world, the senior is a general contractor or master builder. The juniors are apprentices with energy and ideas. Again though, I'm not got to contract with an apprentice to build my house or lead a multi million dollar research project.
- derbOac 3y ago
  The problem though is that the purpose of research is to develop new information. Building a house is an engineering and construction problem, more akin to a medical procedure, where you might want a tried and true method by an experienced practitioner. Research is similar in that you want someone with skill and knowledge doing the work. But there's a tension because in the extreme case, you could just find someone doing the same study they've done forever well and reliabily getting the same result, but that wouldn't be accomplishing the goal of research. What we have now is in between but probably closer to the latter approach, where funding agencies fund because it's likely to work in the sense of producing small p values, rather than because it generates new information. The story of Karikó is sad to me in part because it is so common, but most don't have the privilege of a historical event to underscore the problems and turn it into a fairy tale ending.

31 points by Anon84 3y ago

> "it is usually encombant on the researcher to buy thier RAs, course releases, summer salary" Honestly, this is a sick system. Hire a faculty member and then expect them to hire someone to perform one of their fundamental duties: teaching. It seems to me that the basic model needs to change. Hire faculty for what you want them to do. Want an instructor? Hire an instructor. Want a researcher, hire a researcher. Provide both with what they need, whether that is RAs, TAs, funding, lab space, or whatever.

mynameisnoone 3y ago
Yes. It's like don't expect an engineering manager to code and manage. Have a department with world-class lecturers and researchers, and let it be okay that they are often different people. For example, take the UC Davis computer science department: they had Sean Davis, a paragon of CS lecturers. Also Prof. Farrens with his infamous Monty Python-laden finals. On the research side, they also had bridge champion "Chip" Martel, Norman Matloff (h of 22), and Matt Bishop. Dan Gusfield was a rarity: both a good lecturer and a good researcher. Division of labor, and specialization of trade is a "good" value that shouldn't be ignored.
derbOac 3y ago
I always think it's like hiring a plumber to make money for you rather than actually replace your leaky pipe. At some point if everyone does that homeowners are making a lot of money but everyone has corroding plumbing.
uberman 3y ago
They do this already. Adjuncts are teaching faculty. Tenure usually comes with a research expectation and faculty in the tenure system typically have a reduced course load. If a research active faculty member wants to teach even less, then they use grant money to buy themselves releases. Typically even research faculty are expected to teach at least one course as are leadership faculty like deans. Though obviously the provost and president are unlikely to teach but rather raise a shit ton of philanthropy. For context, I have work and consulted for more than a decade at R1 universities that you have heard of.

mo_42 3y ago

I've been part of universities for 9 years from undergrad to PhD. I was only able to reflect on this system after I left. Universities always have been a system for selecting people who can keep it running in the future. So the first day as a freshman kicks off a test of serveral years if you're a fit. That's why we have different levels of degrees. People can drop out without much sunk costs. Otherwise only very few would try this journey and then the base for selecting good people would be low. What I mean with good people who keep it running has changed a lot. Historically, universities didn't have to justify themselves much. For governments, it was obvious because they provided knowledge gain, and, primarily, they provided well-educated people to work for the government. So universities selected the best people because they would become the next generation of teachers or drop out as educated governmental workers. Nowadays, the government and the public want to see research results (for funding) because this is supposed to be the purpose of universities. I think this is a misunderstanding and universities took part in creating it. So the people universities select for now are still good students but also ones that play by the new rules and crank out as many papers as possible. My main obstacle during the PhD was to adapt to a research style of looking up fashionable topics in the research community, writing an incremental paper und publishing it. My advisor even objected against some ideas because they're too risky.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
You're complicating things. Modern univ is run by sociopath MBAs that financialized institutions. They only care about getting in money. Prestige / paper numbers is secondary.
- leansensei 3y ago
  With this bogeyman MBA figure you are postulating, you are oversimplifying.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Ok I'll expand. If you haven't been living under a rock, you know that the cost of upper education has exploded over the last 3-4 decades. Tuition has increased far above inflation, while endowments have exploded. And yet, these are nonprofit organizations. There are no shareholders, no private ownership. Salaries are being heavily depressed in professors as financialization of departments results in humanities studies being axed. Teaching is either TAs or the rise of the minimum wage professor: the adjunct. There has been an arms race in facilities, but that does not explain all the increase. So: WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? Every college professor will tell you that administration has exploded in size. Wait, these colleges basically functioned perfectly well without huge administration orgs. WHy are they there? Because they, who spoke MBA to the rich benefactors (aka former captains of induasty) inserted themselves. And of course any MBA of any place anywhere, be it nonprofit charity, corporation, or administrator of a college, in the last 30-40 years has seen their pay dramatically rise. A "CEO" of a charity used to be ... a charity. They'd get paid peanuts. Now it's pretty routine for a substantial charity director to get paid millions. Because of course they are so valuable and amazing that they need high compensation to "retain" them lest they take their amazing talents to corporate world. College administrators get to point to the fundraising and tuition increases and the overall revenue increase to show their amazing abilities and how they need to be retained with high six figure or seven figure salaries, otherwise clearly the university would fall apart.

gklitz 3y ago

> Why couldn’t she get financial support? “You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a former faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There is a vicious cycle,” he says. Interesting. So, the idea doesn’t matter. What a weird conclusion. You are more likely to get a high paying job as a professional athlete if you have won a lot of tournaments, and you are more likely to win a lot of tournaments if you’re a highly paid professional athlete. So they conclude “Oh, so skill in the sport doesn’t matter?” Of cause it does!

scrubs 3y ago
Athletics have refs and a score and rules all simple enough to sort winners from losers. Papers don't. The analogy is flawed.
derbOac 3y ago
Except there's studies showing increasing turnover in academics and exiting being unrelated to research quality metrics. There's also research showing pretty clear seniority effects on grant receipt. You're raising a good point but my sense is it doesn't fit the data well. There's also a really basic question of whether grants per se should matter at all in things like tenure decisions. You could make an argument that they're a means to an end, and using them for hiring decisions is sort of a tail wagging the dog phenomenon.
j7ake 3y ago
This is incorrect way to think about it. Because optics matter more than whatever skill may be involved. The way to think about it is to imagine a non tenured person writing two identical grants. They take one grant and change their position to full professsor while other stays at non tenured. They are saying that the one that says full professor will get a higher score on average than the non tenured application.
hazbot 3y ago
But sport is by definition set up so what is measured is the result we care about. We would perhaps not care so much about the "vicious cycle" if the incentives were aligned with "good" research. If cancer gets cured, at the end of the day I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over how. But the concern is the incentives are misaligned in favour of exploiting the metrics instead of "good" research.

mynameisnoone 3y ago

Research universities have devolved into memetic generation machines valuing quantity (publish) over quality (considered the "perish" camp) as a consequence of the upheaval in university socioeconomic demographic shifts post-WW2. Rigor is steadily being chipped away.

consf 3y ago
[dead]

orangesite 3y ago

They've created a system where literally the only people who are remotely interested in participating in that system are people who love gaming the system. Until they fix that, the rest of us will always have better options than that.

uberman 3y ago

Typically universites dont fund any but the most seed research of the most junior faculty. What they will provide is RAs and lab/center space. Even then, it is usually encombant on the researcher to buy thier RAs, course releases, summer salary, as well as pay for institutional overhead from grants. Of course the more you get in grants, the more overhead you can offset and typically the more you can publish thus the more likely you are to get tenure (assuming your institution even offers it any more). Granting organizations want there resources to go to proven successes in general and the more you publish and speak at conferences the more recognition you get for the funder. This is not to say that some funders won't risk a grant to a junior faculty member but senior facuty are likely to be safer bets. They PI the grant projects and junior faculty are participants, co-pi, and co-authors. Put in layman's terms, I am not likely to contract a guy with an interesting non conventional idea on how to build my house but you might and that is great for the new idea guy if you are willing to accept the risk. In the house building world, the senior is a general contractor or master builder. The juniors are apprentices with energy and ideas. Again though, I'm not got to contract with an apprentice to build my house or lead a multi million dollar research project.

derbOac 3y ago
The problem though is that the purpose of research is to develop new information. Building a house is an engineering and construction problem, more akin to a medical procedure, where you might want a tried and true method by an experienced practitioner. Research is similar in that you want someone with skill and knowledge doing the work. But there's a tension because in the extreme case, you could just find someone doing the same study they've done forever well and reliabily getting the same result, but that wouldn't be accomplishing the goal of research. What we have now is in between but probably closer to the latter approach, where funding agencies fund because it's likely to work in the sense of producing small p values, rather than because it generates new information. The story of Karikó is sad to me in part because it is so common, but most don't have the privilege of a historical event to underscore the problems and turn it into a fairy tale ending.