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

My alma mater, which is a research university, last year had 8000 employees for 12000 students (6000 undergrad, 6000 grad), of whom 1200 were faculty and 3000 were staff. Of the staff about 1000 were in administration-related roles (management ~200, business operations~500, office support ~300). There are about 500 dedicated research staff, which includes post-docs, research associates, and non-teaching research faculty. Research staff is the largest single employee category for the staff.

What is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I think it is in the next paragraph.

A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I completely agree.

Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants.

Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications.

So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse.

I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance.

As I said in other comments, a solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. However, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.

Well just know you're not alone. I hope you got out without killing your passions.

Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fucking day. I hope to get others to join me in this paradigm shift. We all fucking rely on arxiv anyways and I'm pretty sure more of us find works via twitter/google scholar/semantic scholar/word of mouth more than we find works via journal/conference listings (twitter post of "just got accepted" counts as former, not latter).

I'm not so sure we need "disruption" as much as we need to just cut off the fucking leeches. The problem was turning school into a business. Thinking that profits align with education of students. But we have no strong evidence that higher ranked schools produce higher quality students, but rather only better connected ones.

Idk, maybe the private sector can disrupt it. But they'd have to perform a pretty similar feat, though there is a monetary benefit. Because the world is disillusioned that Stanford students are substantially better than Boston College students, you can pay the BC student less. In fact, many places do, but the issue is Stanford has a huge fucking media arm so we don't hear about that. They can also stop using number of papers as criteria but rather quality of papers (i.e. use domain experts to hire domain experts. Novel idea, I know...)

I'm just shooting in the dark here. I'd actually like to hear other peoples suggestions. Even if we're just spitballing at this point (I don't think anyone has strong solutions yet, that's okay), we just need to get the ball rolling at this point instead of talking about what a ball's relationship to an apple or the sour more rounder apples that are orange.

“Inside the AS/400” by Soltis quotes a story of IBM’s Rochester group developing the System/3 minicomputer (followed by the incompatible System/38, later rebranded the AS/400 and later still the i) under the guise of an “accounting machine”.

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.