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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

#61

Post by jimhefferon »

baldfat wrote: post #21

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…

When I ask the admins at my school about this, they laugh. If you look at the pie chart of where the money goes, it basically goes to salary. So the rise in cost has to be from a rise in salaries paid.

They say the driver in the US is health care, but there are also more people on the payroll.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#62

Post by fsloth »

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.

Um, no, now you are playing the wrong game.

See, we have two ends to optimize the system and we have to choose one. Either the system encourages the most talented to thrive or it's designed for mediocre individual performance where the worst performers are kicked out. In the former high performers thrive while in the latter the best we get is guaranteed non-zero output.

There is a beautiful dualism in rewarding and measuring. It's actually quite hard to invent good measures for creative work, so whatever measure you come up with probably does not measure what you want it to measure. The second problem is from intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators like pay rises or the risk of losing ones job work fine only if the task is simple and mappable to linear performance - like, say, logging. For any creative efforts extrinsic motivators kill performance.

Thus, it's very hard to measure creative work, and even if you could, you would not really want to use that data for anything because that would kill performance.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#63

Post by merpnderp »

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…

Seems like in IT the spread of different process systems is exactly this. To reduce each job to a set of functions that people with similar levels of training can do the job at the same level of output, interchangeably. So we're left with jobs that are 90% following inane process and 10% producing something useful. All to make sure if we quit, we can be replaced in a few days.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#65

Post by mason240 »

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…

>You don't tell a receiver to catch X number of throws per game

They kind of do though. In the NFL, many contracts are incentive laden with bonuses for (in the case of a wide receiver) X number of catches or Y number of yards.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#66

Post by Fede_V »

That list is correct, but it's only half of the problem. The other other half of the problem is supply.

In fields like mathematics, physics, computer science, grad students have excellent non-academic options. There is an oversupply of PhD students with respect to the number of available positions, but the excess PhD students have fantastic career avenues.

In fields like the humanities, and, to a lesser extent, the molecular biology/ecology, there is a huge excess of PhD students, and there is a very limited number of career options outside of research (for bio, there is pharma, for everything else, eh). This is compounded by the fact that for professors, postdocs are an absolute steal (http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2017/01/price-doing-postdo...). Professors get to pay 50-55k (and that's on the high very high end) a year for a PhD trained researcher who will often work themselves to the bone in the hope of getting the publications that will allow them to become a professor. Thus - the very people who have the power to change the system instead greatly benefit from the status quo.

The real reform that has to take place is that PhD programs need to become way more selective. Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#67

Post by mseebach »

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".

[Google, Facebook, Microsoft] Research are probably similar in many ways -- well funded by rich companies that are self-interested in moving the field forward. We'll only know their true impact decades down the line, of course. MapReduce has certainly been very influential.

Bell Labs wasn't just a playground with infinite cash, they were very much supposed to figure out telecoms stuff for the benefit of Bell -- they just had a very wide berth for determining what that something was. I suspect the same is true for the aforementioned research departments.

(That said, I don't think either, nor Bell Labs, is a meaningful model for academia in general)

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#68

Post by iamcurious »

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…

A good solution for universities is to pay researchers a full salary for a 30 hour week. Where 10 hours must be dedicated to teaching and the rest can be used at their leisure. It is a happy arrangement for all parties.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#69

Post by csneeky »

pdimitar wrote: post #47
csneeky wrote: post #17

All employers want their employees to "do the job to the best of their ability". But the freedom given to you to decide how your success is measured is proportional to your experience and past performance. There are those in both academia and private industry that get a lot of freedom to do their work/research. But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature. The exceptionally strong and bright animal…

Scientists aren't employees. They are given the tools, real estate and funding to do their thing, usually through research grants or private funding. The fact that nowadays they are treated as employees is exactly the problem. ...Oh, and by the way, nature has no hierarchy.

Scientists are employees in many contexts (almost all contexts). We may just have to agree to disagree on that one. Be they in service for an NGO, school, or oligarch.

But to say nature has no hierarchy? I suppose "hierarchy" can mean many things. But in my case I mean fitness and selection for it. The most fit are at the top. Nature tends to select for those better suited to their environment. And those best suited thrive and push the success of us all forward. It is how you got here and have what you have. Intellectual, emotional, and physical traits are all subject to this selection. The thriving academics with the most freedom are closer to the top. The best employees (however you want to define employee) tend to be given the most freedom and trust.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#70

Post by sjg007 »

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…

Agree but checklists have been shown to reduce error all around.
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