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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

#331

Post by MrRolleyes »

WalterBright wrote: post #148
godelski wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of…

Any source of funding will spawn an industry designed around extracting every dollar from it.

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

#332

Post by MrRolleyes »

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…

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

#333

Post by Sai_ »

mlsu wrote: post #313
Sai_ wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azim Premji University? Wealthy people are definitely setting up universities except they are outside the US. The center of gravity of academia is shifting eastward imho. Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.

Yes, this is what I'm worried about. The US ought to treat this malaise as an issue of basic national security.

They were treating the malaise by importing people but now, with widespread internet access and isolationist politics, I fail to see how US can continue to be the default destination for academics across the board.

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

#334

Post by leereeves »

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…

> what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?

A legacy of systemic sexism from the time when those tenured professors were in school.

The split is 50/50 among all professors.

> Is it not in men's nature to pursue education

School is a poor fit for boys' nature (to the point that boys' nature is defined as a disease to be medicated). Perhaps it's time to consider that the system is poorly designed, and expecting children to sit still for hours at a time is unwise.

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

#335

Post by j7ake »

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’s more expensive for the prof to hire the student.

At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.

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

#336

Post by lbeltrame »

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…

50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...

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

#337

Post by pxmpxm »

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…

Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.

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

#338

Post by kelipso »

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…

Overhead for government contractors are typically 100% or their salary or more for research work, so percentages like that (whether fair or not) are pretty standard.

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

#339

Post by kelipso »

queuebert wrote: post #241
robwwilliams wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.

No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.

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

#340

Post by ModernMech »

Fomite wrote: post #311
ModernMech wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also expensive, because lab start up costs money. The cost of a faculty recruitment in the sciences can be well into the hundreds of thousands.

Yeah, this is definitely another thing. It takes a couple years of ramping up a lab to recoup that. I've seen startup packages in the millions. It's getting crazy stupid lol. I guess they figured that particular researcher had such promising research it was a good investment.
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