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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

#151

Post by Paul-ish »

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…

I could see this working in mathematics and many branches of computer science. How would this work in environments that require large outlays of money to do experiments? Do you just hand untested individuals large sums of money and leave them alone?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#152

Post by BeetleB »

pdimitar wrote: post #38
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…

Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? One person in power (say, the dean) is enough to make sure grants are coming on time, and negotiate those beforehand. They need one accountant to make sure salaries, taxes etc. are in the legal bounds and people receive what they were promised. Honest question: what else is needed? Most of the managerial work I've witnessed in…

>Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers?

Conflict resolution, as one example. Plenty of faculty members ready to screw their students.

If you spend enough time there, it is really scary how much power professors have to screw their students over.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#153

Post by jknoepfler »

My take on the desire to regulate/manage is that some people would rather have an economy of perverse incentives than tolerate the inevitable abuses caused by lack of accountability. Management in the programming world feels the same way. At first, to many of us, this seems foolish and counter-productive, but then think: how does a university policy maker or a manager explain the rotten eggs (low output academics, unproductive developers) to their "boss," which might be the tax paying public or a budget strapped firm? How does a competitive university distinguish itself in a communicable/verifiable way? Could I be fired, or in the private sector sued for letting smart people fuck up unsupervised? It is difficult to trust others when the worst case outcome exposes us to catastrophic consequences.

I personally agree with the author, but I think there's serious work that could be done to mitigate or remove the incentives to manage, and I don't think those are as thin as "tell people to stop trying to control what they can't"

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#154

Post by Fede_V »

_delirium wrote: post #145
Fede_V wrote: post #66

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 m…

That's definitely a problem, but a fairly disjoint one. The fields with the worst oversupply problem oddly enough largely don't have the problem of this kind of metrics-based research micromanagement. It's hard to get a philosophy professorship, but when you do, nobody cares about your h-index. That's partly because there's less (almost no) grant money, so universities don't care that much about research metrics in t…

Biology is at the intersection of those fields. There is an oversupply problem, and it is definitely the worst offender for metrics-based research micromanagenent.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#155

Post by iamatworknow »

kylebenzle wrote: post #127
steve_g wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also a manager of managers. I agree 100% that managers/leadership makes a big difference in performance. But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important. Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically a…

I manage manager managers. I agree 200% the managers make a big difference in performance and we need more of them.

That's great, but I'd love to hear what your manager says about your recent performance. Is there any way I can sit down with him or her and maybe come up with a game plan of how we can improve their performance in helping you meet your managerial goals?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#156

Post by jessriedel »

anoonmoose wrote: post #141
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade…

Law is in crisis, the other three are all so (relatively speaking) small, unimportant, and gated by the genetic lottery that they're not worth discussing.

I could keep coming up with examples, both current and historical, because this is a general phenomenon. Anytime there is a large payoff for a small number of slots, along with an inability to instantly measure top performers, a filtering heirarchy is naturally constructed. Military officers (94% of commissioned officers do not retire with the military http://www.skyhinews.com/news/hamilton-military-retirement-8...), tech start-ups (duh), organized crime, trade guilds, investment banking etc., etc.

You can think such fields are a bad bet for newcomers, should be regulated, and so on, but it doesn't make sense to say that they are "in crisis". They can last for arbitrarily long times, and generally produce what they are expected to produce!

There's also little reason to think that academics and law aren't just as much determined by genetics as musics, sports, and acting.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#157

Post by Paul-ish »

anoonmoose wrote: post #141
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade…

Law is in crisis, the other three are all so (relatively speaking) small, unimportant, and gated by the genetic lottery that they're not worth discussing.

Perhaps what is best for someone isn't what is best for the field as a whole. The field itself may be fine even if the individuals in seem to be struggling from a high level.

For example in sports, if people weren't struggling to get into the NFL, it would probably be much less fun to watch (for those who watch it now) because the skill level would be much lower.

Could this be the same in academia? We have a very competitive funnel that only lets the best into the top spots? If that is the case the field isn't struggling, the people are. The solution wouldn't be to make things less competitive, it would be to have alternatives for people who don't make it into one of the coveted positions.

This is something I think a lot of specialized fields are struggling with. Over time (looking at century timescales) people have become increasingly specialized due to the nature of the economy. Specialization makes switching expensive. I think this is something we will have to grapple with as specialization continues.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#158

Post by lr4444lr »

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…

There's another aspect you should also mention embedded in the final clause which is often glossed over in judging the merits of education: work quality should be measured in performance of the actor, not in the results of the acted upon.

High quality pedagogy and quality scholarship are not necessarily correlated with who shows up to class or purchases books and journals. It's a separate part of the pipeline with different incentives.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#159

Post by jessriedel »

metaphorm wrote: post #137
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade…

just because a pathology is widespread does it not mean it isn't pathological.

pathological != "in crisis".

And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other industries and we do not socialize them all.)

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#160

Post by trishume »

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…

This sounds an awful lot like Google's 20% time and the "hack days" done by many other companies. Very few guidelines and no consequences for doing something insufficiently useful, but it ends up with a lot of valuable ideas anyway (and granted, some automated foosball tables).
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