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University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

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Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#81

Post by morelisp »

chrisseaton wrote: post #75
morelisp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. 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.

"Your model" in this case means the model used by not only the US, but the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe, most of Asia, and generally the rest of the world - as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago.

Don't blame us when you misuse the damn word.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#82

Post by woofie11 »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #67
woofie11 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood. Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too. I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per y…

What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother? (Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often tha…

Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure.

You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure.

The flip side is you get paid a third of industry.

That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job.

As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs.

With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard:

1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love

2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life.

It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs.

Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#83

Post by chrisseaton »

morelisp wrote: post #81
chrisseaton wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. 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.

"Your model" in this case means the model used by not only the US, but the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe, most of Asia, and generally the rest of the world - as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago. Don't blame us when you misuse the damn word.

> as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago

I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#84

Post by znpy »

madpata wrote: post #48
throwaways885 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This might not be 100% bad as a model, as long as it is properly implemented. One important thing would be the role of teachers in doing exercises and Q&A instead of plain lecture recitation from the books.

Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see.

Long story short, most researcher and professors are evaluated on the basis of the output of their research (number of publications, journals, h-index and that kind of stuff).

Teaching is really an overhead, and a lot of researchers/professors game the system by making things as standard as possible in their own interest (and whatever about the students).

I had seen this myself during a surprisingly short exam (circuit theory): taken in the morning, the professor had corrected ALL of the exams before 3:30 pm. The trick was in using simple numbers (the computations were not the hard part of the exam), skimming briefly the piece of paper and then checking if the numbers in the solution matched his own numbers in his already-solved exam. Duh. I had to go there, ask to have the exam evaluated in front of me, and for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.

You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper. (I had learned from the book instead of his lessons because I had a full-time job -- and thus he hadn't recognized the procedure)

Anyway, I had to keep my temper and explain. He agreed and assigned me the points.

To come back to the original point: somebody might think he's just an asshole (and btw they wouldn't be wrong) but if you know about the back-office dynamics you'd understand that he was/is just minimizing the overhead. In a wrong way, but still, that's what he was/is doing.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#85

Post by threatofrain »

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.

Right now their endowment is looking perilously low. Is that normal for a UK university? If the university goes bankrupt, can they expect government bailout?

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#87

Post by cm2187 »

stablenode wrote: post #64
cm2187 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On your first point, it is certainly the case that many scientists came from abroad, and in fact that is still the case today, you don't need Nazi persecutions for that. But we are talking about whether the academic system produces game changing research, not where the researchers were born (in fact if anything,the fact that people are attracted by this model is a testimony to its effectiveness).

As for the 90%, agree, that's where I found that number. But do the exercise of listing all the major technological advances you can think of that mattered on the XX century, and I think you will likely end up close to that.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#88

Post by morelisp »

chrisseaton wrote: post #83
morelisp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your model" in this case means the model used by not only the US, but the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe, most of Asia, and generally the rest of the world - as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago. Don't blame us when you misuse the damn word.

> as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.

The seven liberal arts are the foundation of the European university system and not a modern American invention.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#89

Post by chrisseaton »

morelisp wrote: post #88
chrisseaton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.

The seven liberal arts are the foundation of the European university system and not a modern American invention.

No, only if we go back as far as the medieval ages, so not in practice, which is what I said.

Wikipedia explains

> Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Almost zero people in Europe will have done a liberal arts education. As a mainstream thing it's really a uniquely American idea.

And again, where is this idea of the UK doing liberal arts 30 years ago from? That's a bizarre claim not grounded in any kind of reality.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#90

Post by morelisp »

chrisseaton wrote: post #89
morelisp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The seven liberal arts are the foundation of the European university system and not a modern American invention.

No, only if we go back as far as the medieval ages, so not in practice, which is what I said. Wikipedia explains > Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin Coll…

I am going to repeat my original point:

> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts.

This is utterly impossible to understand as anything other than a reference the specific medieval seven liberal arts which do historically and practically underpin the definition of the unversity as distinct from other forms of tertiary education, not the "modern" concept of a liberal arts education.

Go grind your political axe elsewhere.

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