'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by ftyers » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 3:18 AM UTC

moregrist wrote: post #252

pfannkuchen wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

NSF definitely does, and it's often (at least at R1) of >50%

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

#282

Post by infamouscow » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 3:31 AM UTC

robwwilliams wrote: post #239

tnecniv wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Define many.

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

#283

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 3:42 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#284

Post by caddemon » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 3:52 AM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #190

Her book Breaking Through [1] also goes into more detail about this. Basically academia is now ruled by the same rotten economic lenses as the rest of the economy. Everything is about profits, labs are evaluated in "grant $/sqft." and people are evaluated on a "resume" or dumb metrics like papers published. It's really hopeless how this economic virus infects every little corner of our world and turns it to shit. Thi…

At least profits have some rough relationship with reality in most industries. In academia it is the worst of both worlds. You need to be a start up hype man type (or something adjacent anyway) to get the grants, but you only need to deliver a paper at the end - not an actually functional product or organization. So we do not see the same upside that a market driven approach might have for eventually finding a stable state, only the downside of being ruthlessly metric driven.

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

#285

Post by caddemon » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 3:59 AM UTC

tverbeure wrote: post #50

m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years. The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that har…

Biomedical sciences are pretty bad in general. There are truly tough problems but I also think that industry is way too intertwined with academia right now, which causes cascading effects and perhaps parts of the cultural rot to spread. Obviously the economic incentives/legal concerns you've described are a different story, but the initial mistake you've mentioned that enabled the whole scenario I'm guessing is part of a larger pattern with the quality of pharma research.

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

#286

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

Startups work under the "fire fast" mentality, where if someone isn't working out, you axe them asap. For a professor, ramp-up period can be a couple semesters to over a year for them to experience all the seasons of faculty life. You want someone who will stick around for 3+ years. Firing fast is something you want to do under only as a last resort.

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

#287

Post by yCombLinks » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

I wish every self-righteous chode ended their arguments with Q.E.D., it would save so much time.

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

#288

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

rmah wrote: post #176

jltsiren wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic hiring processes are ridiculous. Not because anyone wants it that way but because citizens like to complain. They complain when they think tax/tuition money is being used for inapproriate or frivolous purposes. They complain when they see nepotism and corruption. They complain about perceived political biases and discrimination. And so on. Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new…

Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a que…

> Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers.

Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.

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

#289

Post by caddemon » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #178

geodel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are bunch of other "cost of doing business" like bribing politicians or govt officials to get work done, expense on lobbying, paying fine rather than doing right thing by businesses and so on. I don't see people at large take this as just a cost of doing business and not something to be fixed by setting up and enforcing rules.

You're comparing lazy researchers in universities with corruption in government. If you don't see the obvious differences in nature and consequence, I'm really not sure what to tell you. But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.

I largely agree with your complaint but I don't think the causation is quite that simple. "Bean counters" didn't show up to a highly competitive field and decide to redefine the competition. It used to be relatively easy to get a faculty position, and there used to be a relatively small number of people/papers to keep up with. As academic science grew, both in the complexity of open questions and the size of the aspiring faculty population, there was going to necessarily be some changes to academic output and its evaluation.

Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.

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

#290

Post by klyrs » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #263

ubermonkey wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny you should mention "systemic sexism" when 60% of college students are women. If there's systemic sexism in the academic environment, it's against boys and young men.

Curious take. When it's noted that 90% of people in tech are men, it's often said that it just isn't in women's nature to pursue work in tech; or perhaps they just don't like taking the risks that men do. Is it not in men's nature to pursue education, or is it merely not risky enough?

And supposing that 60/40 split is evidence of systemic sexism towards men, what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?