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

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

#231

Post by waterheater »

AlbertCory wrote: post #211
waterheater wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to comple…

I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake." The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. " So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.

>anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards

Highly insightful.

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

#232

Post by robwwilliams »

exmadscientist wrote: post #56
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My 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…

> 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) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

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

#233

Post by GabeIsko »

vineyardmike wrote: post #115
stavros wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations. If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms. Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your ter…

It's a weird chicken and egg scenario, isn't it? Grants should really be going to universities that have the equipment to do proper research. Universities rely on grants to fund their operations and lab maintenance. The whole thing just kind of gets grinned down. Additionally, there is public pressure to reduce government spending to lower taxes for private companies - who themselves are also slashing RnD budgets unless they can get a grant.

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

#234

Post by robwwilliams »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #101
exmadscientist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants) Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calcul…

That statement is flat out false. You can buy as many computers as you can justify on an NIH research project. I have bought several dozens over 35 years without a peep.

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

#235

Post by staunton »

ModernMech wrote: post #58
staunton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that should play a role for getting university "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a role for Einstein.

Being a good teacher absolutely plays a role in teaching positions. Source: I work in such a teaching position and have served on several search committees.

The question was about getting such a position. Do you know any case where a hiring decision was decided by somebody being thought to be bad at teaching? Or somebody being significantly better at teaching than somebody else? How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality? (Not necessarily the same as teaching experience)

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

#236

Post by GabeIsko »

fritzo wrote: post #189
tombert wrote: post #150

Earlier 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.

I do get the sense that it wasn't as bad in the past. My grandfather, as an aerospace engineer would talk about how the entire culture changed around the 80s, and it came at the expense of diligent engineering. I looked at some of the management reports from his heyday. The management structure has it's own problems - it's pretty inscrutable waterfall management. But, I definitely know they weren't working on sales.

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

#237

Post by ChuckMcM »

golem14 wrote: post #207
ChuckMcM wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might cost more, and for this purpose would be overkill.

Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]

My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.

[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)

[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.

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

#238

Post by 11101010001100 »

rdiddly wrote: post #70

Being currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical gro…

Sorry but no one needs more cargo cult science.

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

#239

Post by robwwilliams »

tnecniv wrote: post #222
fritzo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s really all a professor does. You’re the boss of 5-10 people that are researching your half baked ideas Turing them into quarter baked ideas. Managing them + other obligations take up all their time. Very little is spent getting their hands dirty.

Why all of this cynicism? Science research at many universities is awesome and efficient. And in biomedical research and CS it is kicking ass. We are a gloomy bunch here in HN.

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

#240

Post by GabeIsko »

ilya_m wrote: post #87
thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My 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…

> I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.…

It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable.

Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".

In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.

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