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Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

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Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#21

Post by baldfat »

I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure)

As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar equipped fitness rooms, no pretty dorms and everything upscale. No pay increase for staff and I actually went through 3 years with no cost of living increases while the cost for college went up 15%.

Then the idea that Public Education in the US is a failure (Totally false narrative except in the cities and other low income communities). So people believe that private investment and legislation will fix things. This just has people coming in making and taking the money from teachers and the community and taking them else where.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#22

Post by dasmoth »

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.

-- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)

Does make me think some people have been pondering this for a long while though.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#23

Post by chopin »

johan_larson wrote: post #12
bcrack wrote: post #7

>"could it possibly be … that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?" Sounds very reasonable. Does anybody have good examples of this approach? I have the impression that this is similar to the environment of Bell Labs during the "golden years".

You're going to need some sort of controls, if only to kick out the folks who retire in place.

And there it starts. Don't do that. In Germany we had this discussion in the 90's. All kinds of measures where taken into place to catch the slacking professors. Now we are left with a system the most talented don't want to work at.

Most academic people I know love their work. They do overtime although they are paid much less than a comparable position outside academia. Just live with the 5 percent or so slackers. The rest of the pack will squeeze out much more when not tortured with bureaucracy.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#24

Post by dagw »

worldsayshi wrote: post #15
jrs95 wrote: post #6

While I think there is a lot of truth to this, I don't see how it can effectively be applied to our existing educational institutions. They've sort of become a self-serving bureaucracy at this point, so even without misguided policy pushing them in the wrong direction, I don't think doing the best work they can is actually their primary focus.

Naive response: Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. Tell them to do their work to the best of their ability? Stop measuring things. Talk to them once in a while.

Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge.

My wife works in academia and all the 'managers' in her research department are experienced researchers that often split their time between management and research. And it just does not work according to her. They don't understand the job of a manager, deem it less important than their research duties and basically see dealing with 'minor' personnel issues as a waste of their time. To run any organization of a non-trivial size requires some structure and bureaucracy. And you need people to understand, set up and own those structures.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#25

Post by s_kilk »

n4r9 wrote: post #8

I'm sure this resonates with university lecturers all over the Western world. The late writer and university academic Mark Fisher has some interesting points about this effect in his 2009 book "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?"[0]. He saw it as an inevitable byproduct of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into the academic sphere. Setting targets and measuring performance indicators are justified wi…

I came here to post the same book, I'd highly recommend it.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#26

Post by ZeroGravitas »

This isn't an academic issue, the same is true of almost every white collar profession.

To apply standard numerical management techniques you either need to know exactly what a person needs to do as part of the process, or be able to evaluate the output, ideally both, and generally neither are true.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#27

Post by HarryHirsch »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

This is a bunch of cool sounding scientific nihilism, but it's false. Nclb was a great attempt to manage academia and it worked. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15531 http://www.nber.org/papers/w20511 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16745

The authors themselves admit that NCLB was a mixed bag: "Specifically, we find that NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th and (to a somewhat lesser extent) 8th graders. However, our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders."

You'd think that you can employ drill practice to improve results in mathematics, but that approach won't work in English. American math instruction feels quite alien for foreigners, the emphasis is on the application of algorithms, not on understanding why and how they work. Equipped with plenty drill practice, an Amarican child can fill in the correct bubble on the test, no matter if or not it understands mathematics. Any understanding of mathematics gained in that system is purely incidental.

That's all a hypothesis and would require further testing.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#28

Post by pmilot »

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system.

Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are lazy; but it does mean that a teacher who works hard and gets better results than average is not rewarded for it. It also means that bad teachers cannot be replaced by good ones.

Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. Perhaps the solution would be to replace unions with a professional order, similar to how engineers and lawyers are regulated.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#29

Post by maxerickson »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #27
yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

This is a bunch of cool sounding scientific nihilism, but it's false. Nclb was a great attempt to manage academia and it worked. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15531 http://www.nber.org/papers/w20511 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16745

The authors themselves admit that NCLB was a mixed bag: "Specifically, we find that NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th and (to a somewhat lesser extent) 8th graders. However, our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders." You'd think that you can employ drill practice to improve results in mathematics, but that approach won't work in Englis…

Drill practice is easy for English. Read.

The hard part is motivating people to actually do it.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#30

Post by golemotron »

It would be great to see Nassim Nicholas Taleb's response to this. He's been working on a draft called Skin In The Game.

Overall, I think that the GP is right but seeing that requires us to consider that nebulous ideas like character and cohesive culture need to be at the forefront more than market reasoning.

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