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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

#161

Post by woofie11 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #103
woofie11 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strin…

tl;dr: financial stability suffices to ensure academic freedom; rich financial rewards are not necessary.

<--- Perfect summary.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#162

Post by qzw »

hedberg10 wrote: post #22
inglor_cz wrote: post #12

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…

Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, administrate.

I don’t know if this attitude is a cause or an effect of the failures in the American education system. In many other countries, especially in Asia, teachers are respected if not outright revered. Their status is often comparable to medical doctors and other professional classes. So people who choose to teach are not seen as unfit to engage in other endeavors. But in America there’s this undercurrent of contempt for those who would choose to teach. It just seems like a rather self-defeating attitude for a society to have, especially in a world where knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage. It seems like our current anti-science, pro-ignorance culture is more or less an inevitable outcome of such an attitude.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#163

Post by mhh__ »

hntrader wrote: post #13

The part about synergy between faculties is accurate. Having strong pure math academics helps out the various applied math departments in indirect ways that I've seen. This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they…

Tao is arguably one of the most famous mathematicians on earth, I'm pretty sure he's on a decent salary.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#164

Post by grumple »

If their math faculty is of similar quality to (or worse than) what we had at my top 25 university, they aren't going to lose much of value. I was a math major. Our math department was so bad - because the faculty was truly, magnificently inept at teaching - that our engineering school created their own versions of every required math class so the engineers could actually learn the required math.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#165

Post by skindoe »

jancsika wrote: post #145
inglor_cz wrote: post #12

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…

> events on the currently hot social justice topics. Namespace collision detected: 1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents. 2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior…

> a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.

"Newly discovered primary documents" something makes me doubt that this is what the professors are looking into...

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#166

Post by daniel-thompson »

renewiltord wrote: post #146

This is good. Too long have universities maintained the illusion that all subjects are worth studying. They are not. And we have a valuation mechanism - pay. The truth is that some subjects need far fewer participants than others. You don’t need the marginal new mathematician or historian or geographer. We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their pr…

This is classic short-term MBA thinking. It completely misses that theoretical researchers are an integral part of a diverse research ecosystem, that researcher diversity is more than the sum of its parts (or in MBA-speak, is synergistic), that some theoretical work eventually does become economically valuable as it filters into applied sciences, and that this might take longer than one or two quarters after publication.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#167

Post by mplanchard »

woofie11 wrote: post #56
anticristi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ificatio…

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…

Not sure where you went to school, but this definitely isn’t the case everywhere. I went to a state school, and freshly minted faculty were making 60-80k, while folks with tenure were in the 100-125K range. The only people making salaries like you describe were higher level administrators and of course the football coach.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#168

Post by lumost »

preommr wrote: post #142
the_only_law wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, just let me purchase the fucking credentials without having to follow curriculum at their speed or pay for any of the things that won't benefit me anymore

I've been saying this for a long time now. Modern universities are a mix of two contradictory ideas. It's a place for "higher learning"; trying to fit the same role as institutions from hundreds of years ago where academic learning was much rarer and was fitted for the aristocracy. While simultaneously being something that you need for a job to make money. Oh, and also the people doing the teaching are more intereste…

From what I understand, a top-notch professor of philosophy at a first-tier university will teach 1-2 classes per semester to 300ish students per class for which they will earn no more than 300k per year ( although typically 3-6x less ).

This works out to roughly $250 per student per semester. It's difficult to price the work of T.As as they are often students themselves, but assuming each student requires an average of 2 hours per week of dedicated grading/tutoring time, then at $20/hr the total cost of providing a first tier class should be $730 dollars.

This number is roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 the cost of a class at a community college, 1/6th of the effective cost per class for UMass Amherst, and roughly 1/10th the effective price per class of MIT.

I can assure you that the lecturer at your community college is not making 300k either. But this calculation does show that most of the tuition costs do not end up in the hands of the teaching staff, and that providing a first rate education could be done for an order of magnitude lower cost than current first tier universities charge.

Or hell, offer professors 1 million per year and still charge 1/3rd the price of MIT.

Re: University of Leicester firing all pure math faculty

#169

Post by tomp »

waterhouse wrote: post #133
bilbo0s wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just throw this out here to put some numbers on this so people understand it's more than just a political narrative. 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…

"Yes, Minister" has an episode about a hospital with 500 employees and no patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staf…

2019: all these empty hospitals with too much staff and no patients?! Let's close them down, save some money!

2020: why is our medical system running at 90% capacity in normal times?! Why don't we have some idle capacity for emergencies (natural disaster, pandemic, war)?

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