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

As a woman who wonders how we solve this, I feel like the piece doesn't cast light on actionable means to make real progress. It implicitly seems to assume a thing the world calls sexism but offers no real solutions.

Presumably, Grady was a big factor here. Why was he such a problem? There's no real explanation for his behavior and we are unlikely to ever learn anything meaningful about what drove his decisions.

It airs dirty laundry, which is perhaps an essential first step in being able to analyze the problem space: First, we have to overcome the taboo against speaking of such things.

But then the initial attempts to speak of it tend to fall within some Overton Window of acceptable assumptions and this seems to do little or nothing to give women a viable path forward.

There's a kind of passing the buck phenomenon I think, for lack of a better way of putting it, combined with denial about the nature of research which is at its best by definition novel and risky. Basically no one wants to actually pay for anything, except for the federal government. The state or university doesn't say "we happily fund scientific advances", they expect it to be funded by the federal government. I always liken it to hiring a plumber, but with the expectation that they make money for you instead of fixing your plumbing, or that you hire them ostensibly for the latter but actually for the former. At some point there has to be service or product provision that is being paid for, and in our current society this is the federal government.

There are many complicating factors, like the fact that "funding" for all intents and purposes as far as a university is concerned means "federal government" (this isn't actually true but is mostly true), or that the evaluations of grants are based on current consensus about what is likely to produce significant findings, which deincentivizes novel research, or that projects rather than persons are funded, or that universities are administratively topheavy, or that the funding system also incentivizes pyramid schemes of graduate school, etc.

There are functional departments and universities where people can supportively function in the current zeitgeist, and some smart people can get funding for good grants. But the incentive structures are incredibly perverse now at most institutions, and basically boil down to how much money you bring in in the form of indirect funds on grants. I have been in conversations with colleagues at other universities, who were arguing about faculty who were bringing in large grant amounts, but from non-federal sources, with no indirect funds, and how this was unacceptable because it didn't benefit the university financially sufficiently even though it paid for grad students etc.

Yes universities have costs etc but in the current system Karikó's experience was bound to happen. Peter Higgs has said he would never be hired today and it's probably true. All of this will continue, or you just won't hear about certain advances because they will be shut down and never develop.

Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted.

Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they will happily carry on a discussion of whatever process you describe for that misnomer.

Voila! Your karma has been granted.

Now you just have to devote a tiny tiny amount of time and energy downstream to clarify that you weren't talking about "actually money laundering" in the sense of, you know, "general money", but rather something else entirely.

In my analogy, that tiny tiny amount of time and energy is like the lab equipment that the university provides to the poor little grant recipient.