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I didn't understand this: "10% of Princeton’s students are computer science majors Far more at MIT 10% of Princeton’s faculty are unlikely to

by kremlin 12y ago

I didn't understand this: "10% of Princeton’s students are computer science majors Far more at MIT 10% of Princeton’s faculty are unlikely to ever be in computer science! Ditto" It's the last two lines I don't understand. 10% of currently existing faculty are not likely to work in the CS department? Or it's unlikely that in the future 10% of Princeton faculty will work in the CS department? And the 'ditto'? Far more than 10% at MIT are unlikely to be in computer science?

nlawalker 12y ago
I think he's saying that "it's unlikely that Princeton will ever have 10% of its faculty dedicated to computer science". Despite the demand, universities want to remain balanced and avoid becoming trade schools. "Ditto" means "same for UW"; Ed Lazowska is the department chair at UW.
- jseliger 12y ago
  Despite the demand, universities want to remain balanced and avoid becoming trade schools. Take a look at Matthew Reed's Confessions of a Community College Dean as well. There are other factors at work: 1. Tenured faculty can remain until they die. Almost every school still has tenured faculty from popular areas in the 70s. 2. It can be dangerous to chase trends, thanks to tenure: if the school tenures a bunch of CS professors today, and then something else comes along tomorrow, those profs can remain for 50 years. 3. Mandatory retirement ages were eliminated by the Supreme Court in the late 80s and early 90s (again, see Reed's discussion), which lends extra importance to points 1 and 2.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  > Ed Lazowska is the department chair at UW. He was the department chair at UW when I was a CSE student in 1995 (and through when I graduated in 1998). He definitely isn't anymore (I hope!). He does have the Bill and Melinda chair of computer science, but this is something else entirely. The current chair of the department seems to be Hank Levy.
  - nlawalker 12y ago
    Thanks, you are absolutely correct.
hkmurakami 12y ago
Hard to parse this even as an alum. Maybe that faculty position numbers are a very political thing that doesn't increase or decrease too rapidly, whereas student number can fluctuate much quicker? BTW there is this student/alumni/faculty questionnaire floating around to "think about and foster the role of entrepreneurship at the university", and it seems like the administration is utterly clueless about how to approach things or what they even want to do: http://www.princeton.edu/entrepreneurship/ http://www.princeton.edu/entrepreneurship/ It reeks of "me too"-ism but I guess it might be better than doing nothing and sending the same old huge swath of kids into finance and consulting who aren't gungho about those fields in the first place.
hga 12y ago
Before the dot.com bust, for decades MIT's EECS department had 40% of the undergraduates (there's several degrees there, all require some CS and EE, the two relevant ones would be the CS focused one, 6-3, which few take nowadays, and the one that's sort of split between both, 6-2, which if I remember correctly is now the most common one). That fell by more than 1/2 after the crash, but as of late, like other schools such as Stanford, it's gone back up significantly, fairly close to the old numbers. However the Institute has always keep the department's size proportionately much smaller, like 6% if I remember the '80s figures correctly. That's because history is littered with formerly extremely popular fields like aeronautics which at some point crashed and never returned (aero/astro did so in the early '70s). So even for MIT far less than 10% of its faculty will "ever be in computer science" given your latter interpretation of the phrase and the fact that many EECS faculty are EE types.

by kremlin 12y ago

nlawalker 12y ago

I think he's saying that "it's unlikely that Princeton will ever have 10% of its faculty dedicated to computer science". Despite the demand, universities want to remain balanced and avoid becoming trade schools. "Ditto" means "same for UW"; Ed Lazowska is the department chair at UW.

jseliger 12y ago
Despite the demand, universities want to remain balanced and avoid becoming trade schools. Take a look at Matthew Reed's Confessions of a Community College Dean as well. There are other factors at work: 1. Tenured faculty can remain until they die. Almost every school still has tenured faculty from popular areas in the 70s. 2. It can be dangerous to chase trends, thanks to tenure: if the school tenures a bunch of CS professors today, and then something else comes along tomorrow, those profs can remain for 50 years. 3. Mandatory retirement ages were eliminated by the Supreme Court in the late 80s and early 90s (again, see Reed's discussion), which lends extra importance to points 1 and 2.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> Ed Lazowska is the department chair at UW. He was the department chair at UW when I was a CSE student in 1995 (and through when I graduated in 1998). He definitely isn't anymore (I hope!). He does have the Bill and Melinda chair of computer science, but this is something else entirely. The current chair of the department seems to be Hank Levy.
- nlawalker 12y ago
  Thanks, you are absolutely correct.

hkmurakami 12y ago

Hard to parse this even as an alum. Maybe that faculty position numbers are a very political thing that doesn't increase or decrease too rapidly, whereas student number can fluctuate much quicker? BTW there is this student/alumni/faculty questionnaire floating around to "think about and foster the role of entrepreneurship at the university", and it seems like the administration is utterly clueless about how to approach things or what they even want to do: http://www.princeton.edu/entrepreneurship/ http://www.princeton.edu/entrepreneurship/ It reeks of "me too"-ism but I guess it might be better than doing nothing and sending the same old huge swath of kids into finance and consulting who aren't gungho about those fields in the first place.

hga 12y ago

Before the dot.com bust, for decades MIT's EECS department had 40% of the undergraduates (there's several degrees there, all require some CS and EE, the two relevant ones would be the CS focused one, 6-3, which few take nowadays, and the one that's sort of split between both, 6-2, which if I remember correctly is now the most common one). That fell by more than 1/2 after the crash, but as of late, like other schools such as Stanford, it's gone back up significantly, fairly close to the old numbers. However the Institute has always keep the department's size proportionately much smaller, like 6% if I remember the '80s figures correctly. That's because history is littered with formerly extremely popular fields like aeronautics which at some point crashed and never returned (aero/astro did so in the early '70s). So even for MIT far less than 10% of its faculty will "ever be in computer science" given your latter interpretation of the phrase and the fact that many EECS faculty are EE types.