Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 236 posts

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#41

Post by username90 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #27
throwaways885 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Limited"? UK tuition used to be much, much cheaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...

Yeah, it used to be that the government paid that and students went for free or got a grant. Starting back in 2002 they cut the amount the government paid and increased what students paid. So the unis didn't get any more money, the government just saved cash. Total BS imho, but don't get me started...

UK just wanted to stop funding EU students, since EU disallowed paying for your own students and not others. The problem is that English universities are inherently more attractive so UK has way more EU students than EU had UK students making UK support a disproportionally large number of students.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#42

Post by martin-t »

dandanua wrote: post #19
kleiba wrote: post #15

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…

It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.

Most people are reactive, not proactive.

Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.

Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.

Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.

When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#43

Post by username90 »

rambojazz wrote: post #8
sn41 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a pure math guy who absolutely loves the Canterbury Tales. The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about. (Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strange…

Sorry I don't know this Uni in particular, and I agree with your comment. But why is this such a big issue? I mean, a lot of universities do not have a pure-math faculty because they are dedicated to other faculties. I guess it depends on what the Uni wants to be. My Uni didn't have a physics department, or a medical one, or arts, or music... All of these faculties were however available in other Unis.

They want to sack the math department to create a machine learning department. But they still need people to teach the math classes for machine learning etc, and without the math professors they'd need machine learning professors or so who aren't as good at maths.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#44

Post by LatteLazy »

username90 wrote: post #41
LatteLazy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it used to be that the government paid that and students went for free or got a grant. Starting back in 2002 they cut the amount the government paid and increased what students paid. So the unis didn't get any more money, the government just saved cash. Total BS imho, but don't get me started...

UK just wanted to stop funding EU students, since EU disallowed paying for your own students and not others. The problem is that English universities are inherently more attractive so UK has way more EU students than EU had UK students making UK support a disproportionally large number of students.

One of the craziest things is that we still fund EU students 100% as long as they go home after graduation. I actually considered doing the same but I was to wedded to my UK friends and family.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#45

Post by melomal »

potamic wrote: post #38
kleiba wrote: post #15

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…

Sadly it's the same in software these days. I've seen places where the business teams outnumber the development teams. It's such a clusterfuck with everyone trying to steer the direction their way, when only so much can be built. Of course, when it comes to hiring more devs, "we don't have the budget for it".

Patched up software with increasing technical debt is how a business should be run, haven't you heard? Oh and in the mean time get more sales, create immediate displeasure and load up the outsourced customer support with angry clients. /s

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#46

Post by raverbashing »

throwaways885 wrote: post #25
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3

The Administrators make their power play: declaring faculty redundant. They no longer want pesky faculty thinking about things that don't earn money , so the math faculty has to go. The end goal is clear: a University is a business, being sold to students and Alumni, for the purpose of profit.

Reality is truly a comedy. One day teachers will be a thing of the past in universities.

One day?

Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#47

Post by antihero »

kleiba wrote: post #15

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…

It's almost as if a capitalist system rewards people who seek dollar signs instead of real progress, and is antithetical to what is genuine and good. Progress is merely a side-effect of capitalism. If people can gain capital without it, they will.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#48

Post by madpata »

throwaways885 wrote: post #25
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3

The Administrators make their power play: declaring faculty redundant. They no longer want pesky faculty thinking about things that don't earn money , so the math faculty has to go. The end goal is clear: a University is a business, being sold to students and Alumni, for the purpose of profit.

Reality is truly a comedy. One day teachers will be a thing of the past in universities.

I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#49

Post by anticristi »

kleiba wrote: post #15

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…

I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)?

As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.

So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.

Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".

I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#50

Post by kleiba »

cm2187 wrote: post #32
kleiba wrote: post #15

I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…

You still have to keep in mind that something like 90% of the technological advances of the XX century were born in US labs. So it’s not that broken.

Well, if technological advances is the only thing you care for, sure, then go ahead and get rid of stuff like pure maths.

However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?

Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.

Post reply on HN