71–80 of 236 posts
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> Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? DeepMind?
Alphabet is not a university.
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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.
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It's a play on "those who can, teach" which was a marketing campaign in the UK, which somewhat backfired within the UK and became the saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach". Clearly there are lots of people who genuinely choose to enter teaching, but in certain subjects, for some people, it is the de-facto profession if you cannot use your degree to do something else. See Avenue Q's "What can you do, with…
> It's a play on "those who can, teach" which was a marketing campaign in the UK, which somewhat backfired within the UK and became the saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach". Lol I think you’ve got that backwards! The marketing slogan was a play on the common criticism of teachers which is a quote of Shaw from around 1900.
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It looks like our civilization has passed its peak and now bouncing back to medieval ages.
Which is ironic considering that Medieval Literature, and Chaucer in particular, is one of the other things the University of Leicester were talking about getting rid of.
A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. It can be good or bad, it depends on the goals of the university and which faculties it wants to specialize on.
> A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well. Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they…
The UK university model doesn’t follow the liberal arts model. That’s not what we’re aiming to do over here. Especially at a very low-tier university like Leicester. Our degrees are more highly specialised than yours.
Don’t judge our universities by your model.
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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).
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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.
cm2187: I wonder if you realize that a significant factor in the US scientific prowess is a certain event in the XX century history of Europe which forced a huge number of scientists to move to the US because they weren't 'Aryan enough'. After said XX century event another wave of scientists arrived (or were brought) to the US, only these were 'quite Aryan' but facing career oblivion in Europe due to their past polit…
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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.
Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber te…
It's part of the MBAization of universities combined with typical company politics (the more people under you => the more important you are => the more you get paid). It's a recipe for a lavishly paid executive class running universities who try to run them like a business.
At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc).
The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000.
Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. Facilities and Plant, Campus police, not to even speak of the big ones like DoIT. (DoIT is all the IT people. Network support, web developers, DBAs etc.) I get that. At the same time, that's almost a 10 to 1 ratio. Keep in mind, the University of Wisconsin is one of the more frugal universities out there in this regard.
Again, I don't question that some of this is necessary, how much? I don't know. But having the numbers and the positions these people are employed in does put us in a better position to, at a minimum, have an informed discussion of the subject.
I know that if the University of Wisconsin shut down the math department because the web developers and DBAs at DoIT had to be paid, I would definitely be someone who would assume that to be an unwise decision. Just putting myself in the shoes of the people who care about the subject university.
But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past.