What about the psychology angle?
I get the feeling Katalin Karikó got a lot of that flak because she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by comparison).
- Your views on this?
'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
201–210 of 361 posts
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theorist who needs a pencil and paper and maybe a fancy computer when you can fund an expensive lab full of state of the art lasers and optics or any other type of expensive technology. Do you want to come…
Not really, at least in my experience. Overhead is fungible, so they get roughly the same cut of everything that comes in (to a first approximation). That means the support the institution will put behind a shoot-for-the-stars research centre grant is way different than what a theorist looking to pay for 5 grad students will get, but the institution is happy to proportionately support that as well. Especially R1's th…
Oh I should note that capex and opex aren't treated the same in grant-land either, and funding agencies can put limits on university overhead for infrastructure grants etc. so that's not all apples to apples.
The benefit to the university for soft salary or funding grad students etc. in both scenarios is the same, but getting money for a new computer cluster or a synchrotron or whatever isn't, typically.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look into the difficulties faced by the University of Austin [1] (not the University of Texas at Austin). This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school tea…
U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.
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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#204[dead]
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
A corollary to your story, from my partner who started as Payroll at a university and now is the Accounting Manager, reporting to the Financial Controller. > prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Over the four years she has been there, faculty have received 3 3-5% annual raises. Staff have received ... 1 1% raise. Faculty and sta…
> Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing. That's a very unusual university. I have never heard of such a thing. During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff. The $7000 you mention is less than my pay was cut. Staff were unaffected. > They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". I don't believe this if you are talking about a US univ…
Without outing her university, I will add the (possible) caveat of "private Catholic university".
> During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff.
The only real benefit to staff during COVID's early days was in the (where else) athletics department (and this is very much not a sports school), where all the coaching and related staff were kept on at full pay, and only "required" on their own recognizance to "spend time keeping up with relevant information in your field".
> That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for.
The various schools thought process is "We (the school) knows the bill details, supervisor signed off, so, Finance just needs the sum total and to send payment".
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…
Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet. The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This…
There are countries where students are not charged tuition (or, if tuition is charged, it is meagre) and there overhead from grants is most definitely seen as important revenue.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#207My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…
And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.
Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?
I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?
Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?
Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.
You're talking about shifting a culture, and the culture is defined by the people. The current doctoral student mentality will define the future of academia, and most doctoral students are disheartened by the idea of writing grants for their careers. So, any future cultural solution will start with doctoral students. A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total nu…
In some European countries, PhD students are paid a salary equivalent to a middle-class income in that country, and PhD slots are already few. Nevertheless, even there there is the same grant culture that everyone is complaining about here. I don’t see how the three things you propose would fix things.
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be a shame if the formula were to "leak" accidentally, resulting in commercialization taking place in another country with looser IP laws, and saving thousands of people's lives in the process.
There is a patent, the formula is not secret. Someone needs to pay for the work to get it approved by the FDA.
I thought that the formula was not secret, but that's actually not the case: apparently, patents like this are written so that they cover a whole class of molecules without specifying exactly which one, or something of that sort. (I forgot the details.)
Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off. He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems…
Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.
Professors - particularly newly hired ones, need to spend almost all their time selling. Between that and teaching courses, they have little time for research. That's off loaded to their grad students.
When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.