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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

#251

Post by atrettel »

tnecniv wrote: post #221
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…

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that. I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

When I got my PhD (at a public university), I almost got charged for the out-of-state part of this fictitious tuition because I did not switch my residency to the state where I got my PhD. The requirements for residency were pretty onerous from what I remember and I would have been unlikely to qualify. Instead, I took my "preliminary exam". Upon passing the exam, my title changed from "PhD student" to "PhD candidate" and it waived the out-of-state tuition for the rest of my PhD. So universities take this stuff seriously but have arcane procedures for edge cases like this that kinda make a mockery of the whole thing. That said, I'm grateful I did not have pay in the end!

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

#252

Post by moregrist »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #226
tnecniv wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that. I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

How does treating the tuition as a charge and payment (instead of the tuition being zero) benefit the university?

It transfers money from grant funds into the University general fund, where it can be used for other purposes, like paying for less lucrative departments and administrative salaries. More or less, this plus the ph.d. student’s stipend is the cost of the student, and both can be charged to a grant that the student is working on.

This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).

Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.

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

#253

Post by AlbertCory »

waterheater wrote: post #231
AlbertCory wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cribbed from Skin in the Game (Taleb)

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

#254

Post by hodgesrm »

wavemode wrote: post #26
hodgesrm wrote: post #2

> “I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said. A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds…

woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?

#3 factor was brilliant. According to other accounts she also speaks her mind very forthrightly. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-universi...

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

#255

Post by BurningFrog »

quacked wrote: post #104
mjburgess wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive. Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible)…

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation wit…

I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

ubermonkey wrote: post #245
gedy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".

Cancel culture is just a term for "if you say something terrible, there may be consequences." Being opposed to consequences for saying or doing terrible things is, apparently, a key tenet of the American right. When someone uses the term "anti-woke," what they are signaling is an opposition to things like fairness, awareness of systemic racism and sexism, and the ability of LGBTQ folks to live openly without fear. As…

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by staunton »

bee_rider wrote: post #247
staunton wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Most grad students, particularly ones they are interested in staying in, end up having to do some teaching or have a teaching assistant role at some point. I’m sure it is a + on the resume. Nothing individually is a deal breaker or deal maker, everything is factored in, right?

That seems consistent with my claim. Teaching experience is a "plus", no attempt is made to evaluate the quality of someone's teaching. A few CVs I've seen don't even mention teaching experience despite people having some.

There definitely are deal breakers: no (high enough impact) publications would be an easy one. There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've seen. Staying in the same country (or even the same university) is a hard deal breaker in a lot of places...

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

#258

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Const-me wrote: post #51
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it's not just academia either. I've seen brilliant innovative engineers get buried because they don't spend the requisite 75% of their time managing the bureaucracy of large orgs.

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. If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business. If they curr…

> Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.

Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.

Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.

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

#259

Post by hodgesrm »

bell-cot wrote: post #30
hodgesrm wrote: post #2

> “I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said. A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds…

> ...but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system. Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for rev…

Fully agree on your 50 years ago point. The crux of the matter seems to be how grants are awarded. Alzheimers Disease research is a case in point. [0]

What do do about it? There should be a "crazy ideas bin" that forces a percentage of funds for big research problems to be directed to investigations of off the wall approaches. We would find out who the good revolutionaries are and could even count them.

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

#260

Post by cvwright »

robwwilliams wrote: post #242
cvwright wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why obscene? Is rent obscene. Building, supporting, and growing research space does have expenses. And federal grants require much administrative support. Overheads are typically 50% on top of the direct research support-$1 support for every $2 of research effort. Completely reasonable.

50% was on the low end, 10 years ago when I submitted my first proposal. I’ve been out of the game for a while now, but I don’t think the rates have gone down.
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