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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

#51

Post by CuriouslyC »

dasmoth wrote: post #22

“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…

It shouldn't be a surprise given the fact that physics was revolutionized by a patent clerk.

Additionally, having a relaxing job with lots of free time doesn't just free you to explore hard problems, it also promotes creativity. This is because stress is the ultimate creativity killer. Thus these sorts of jobs are really a recipe for deep thinking.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#52

Post by pg_is_a_butt »

Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

yeah, white men.

you're all idiots.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#53

Post by jessriedel »

pmilot wrote: post #28

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…

> Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them.

What are the examples in modern liberal democracies where governments exploited non-unionized workers?

The arguments for unions assume an adversarial relationship between employer and employees. But they don't go through for governments.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/bu...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#54

Post by icebraining »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #46
erelde wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have often argued that "being realist" is a failure in and of itself. If people said "well, there's a king and that's what it is", we'd never have got to where we are now. Ideologies ( and ideas ) are, in my view, stronger than facts, which often only represent the past, while ideas shape the future. (these days the word "fact" is a bit of a trigger, but I thought about that well before all that jazz, and the curre…

Can't you be a realist while still being idealistic? Isn't that a bit of an advantage, too - seeing the world for what it actually is? Searching for historical examples, JFK was both?

Fun fact: that's the original definition of the term Realpolitik, as coined by Ludwig von Rochau, a German writer and politician in the 19th century.

He said that the great achievement of the Enlightenment had been to show that might is not necessarily right. The mistake liberals made was to assume that the law of the strong had suddenly evaporated simply because it had been shown to be unjust. Rochau wrote that "to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitiker knows the simple pickaxe is more useful than the mightiest trumpet."

I've been reading "Realpolitik: A History" and I think there are some useful lessons for today.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#55

Post by dagw »

madez wrote: post #33
dagw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 issue…

Maybe the personnel issues are sometimes indeed minor and a waste of time. What are the symptoms your wife is observing?

Minor stuff like spending 3 weeks "unemployed" and without a salary because her boss couldn't be arsed/was too busy to sort out the paperwork, grant money almost getting lost in the shuffle, stuff like that.

And even if you perceive a personnel issue as genuinely minor and you genuinely do consider it a waste of time, telling someone that problems they perceive as genuine are so insignificant to you that you don't even want to consider them, despite that being part of your job, is a great way to build resentment and destroy teams. A good manager should be able to quickly and efficiently handle minor issues without making people feel ignored and insignificant.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#56

Post by CuriouslyC »

kev009 wrote: post #34

I think this is somewhat well understood in things like Sports Psychology. You don't tell a receiver to catch X number of throws per game, you just encourage them perform. Likewise, training that more accurately simulates performance is more effective than working toward some metric. I learned it from Pat McNamara who has a special way with words and delivery: "When we are consumed by the outcome it will sabotage our…

Current research indicates that the best way to promote performance is not to encourage someone's current performance, but instead encourage their development of skill mastery.

In the short term, rewards (like money) produce the best results of all, but they also seem to impair learning.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#57

Post by enord »

dasmoth wrote: post #22

“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…

If you're a private enterprise, anything you do can be reasonably related to money (revenue, profit, long term forecast etc.), and we have ample tools to measure performance, align incentives and evaluate risk over the money-abstraction. This works because money flows through the whole process and partakes in every transaction.

Academic pursuits are, monetarily speaking, money sinks. They might be worthwhile investments, but only so far as they deliver patents or attract grants. Academic professionals want to advance the state of the art, and only small parts of that work is applicable to the money-abstraction.

In order to prevent Science(TM) from grinding to a halt, we replace Money with some other measurable so we can apply our existing tools and make risk-assessment before granting money to academics who will (most certainly) spend every last cent of it to indulge their pursuits. We chose measurables in a trade-off between academic freedom + infinite spending and academic constraints + finite spending, because the supply of Science(TM) is practically unbounded.

I'm stating the obvious here in order to ask the question: What is the gosh-darned alternative?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#58

Post by CuriouslyC »

pmilot wrote: post #28

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…

It doesn't matter how good the people you hire are, the current educational system is absolutely horrible. A good teacher can salvage some results from the disaster, but what we really need to do is switch to a system that doesn't need superstars to produce results.

It is a sad state of affairs that the thing education teaches most effectively is that learning is a chore.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#59

Post by erelde »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #46
erelde wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have often argued that "being realist" is a failure in and of itself. If people said "well, there's a king and that's what it is", we'd never have got to where we are now. Ideologies ( and ideas ) are, in my view, stronger than facts, which often only represent the past, while ideas shape the future. (these days the word "fact" is a bit of a trigger, but I thought about that well before all that jazz, and the curre…

Can't you be a realist while still being idealistic? Isn't that a bit of an advantage, too - seeing the world for what it actually is? Searching for historical examples, JFK was both?

Expressed in a very rough way:

I think one has to be realist about their tools and idealist about their goals. And the drive is the most important factor. If they're just going through the motions without intent, without ideal, it won't lead anywhere. The will to preserve (imo absurd[0]) or the will to change.

Of course, there isn't any one true model of thought. So I'm surely wrong.

[0]: I don't think anything can last, civil rights included, but things can come and go

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#60

Post by CuriouslyC »

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.

Retiring in place is actually quite boring, and the feeling of uselessness that results is depressing. People won't actually do that unless the alternative is worse. If you hire people who are passionate about whatever it they were hired to work on, they might not do work that is profitable, but they'll do work that is interesting and has some benefit.
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