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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

#321

Post by TeMPOraL »

robwwilliams wrote: post #232
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…

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.

Would they still be if they cut down on building sports facilities?

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

#322

Post by Fomite »

cycomanic wrote: post #134
KennyBlanken wrote: post #85

Earlier 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…

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting. Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly compa…

"Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load)."

They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).

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

#323

Post by Fomite »

FireBeyond wrote: post #166
cycomanic wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting. Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly compa…

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…

"And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches."

I've never been at a university where I've been able to tell the finance office "Just pay it" without pushback.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

justinclift wrote: post #300
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 hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ... In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago. These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too. Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male…

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by Fomite »

mlsu wrote: post #135

Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to…

They often fund new departments or centers within existing universities, because despite all the complaining about overhead rates, setting up an organization required to house, support, accept funding for, etc. research is non-trivial.

My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation

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

#326

Post by Fomite »

noobermin wrote: post #82
tverbeure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?

This is often a clause in our commercialization agreements - that if a company sits on it, the license reverts back to us.

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

#327

Post by Fomite »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #29
ska wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really quality vs quantity. The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resour…

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…

My department is actively pivoting away from more expensive researchers towards theorists, implementation scientists, etc.

Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewed in the context of being expensive.

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

#328

Post by Fomite »

ccooffee wrote: post #111
StableAlkyne wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is that research grants are not used fully as a research funding source - a typical university administration will skim about a quarter of every grant for "administrative costs." It's not called out as corruption because it's the norm, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of tax-funded R&D dollars that actually make it to R&D As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-…

> It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive. From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenan…

There's an extensive negotiation period to arrive at these rates - universities don't get to just pick.

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

#329

Post by Fomite »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #138
ccooffee wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive. From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenan…

I don't know how much accounting is done on the university side to itemize research bills. What my advisor told me was when I was going through the ringer was that once you have the money, it's yours - you can do whatever you want with it short of embezzlement. All that matters is you make progress on the thing the funding agency granted you the money for, doesn't matter if you ran over budget or spent $100.

I work at a state university, and how we spend our allocated funding, and whether we go over budget, both matter quite a bit.

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

klyrs wrote: post #290
leereeves wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 directi…

[deleted]
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