'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research.

Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting.

Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable).

Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).

Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.

In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.

Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.

Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.

I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.

> I’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.

The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them.

You mentioned startups. Basically that means create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.

I don't know how much accounting is done on the university side to itemize research bills. What my advisor told me was when I was going through the ringer was that once you have the money, it's yours - you can do whatever you want with it short of embezzlement. All that matters is you make progress on the thing the funding agency granted you the money for, doesn't matter if you ran over budget or spent $100.

The research and discoveries that are most deserving of a Nobel Prize are precisely the sort that are unexpected and unpredicted in advance. All this "Monday morning quarterbacking" by everyone who now suggest that this discovery should have been obvious 20+ years ago or that the talent of those who made the discovery should have been obvious is rather silly.

Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.