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

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

#341

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

staunton wrote: post #262

ModernMech wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institut…

> Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plagu…

Government investing money in private sector research is not communism. And there is no central planning going on here, it's quite distributed. At the top the people making the decisions on how much money to be allocated to research are democratically elected in free and fair elections. At the bottom, the people using the money are distributed across thousands of independent organizations, working on their own things.

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

#342

Post by wrycoder » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #71

wrycoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read yesterday that there are now more administrators than students at Harvard, but ‘only’ one third as many teachers as students.

Harvard is at 19,000 employees for 23,000 students - but I'd be surprised if most of the employees are administrators, as this includes the plumbers, the janitors, the gardeners, the campus cops, the cooks, etc, etc. My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).

The article I saw was this one - It claims 10,000 administrators and support staff compared to 7500 undergraduates. I'm guessing your numbers include all employees and all students, including graduate students? Clearly, one should compare administrators etc. who are focused on undergrads with the number of undergrads. The link below includes a reference to the original study, so I suppose one could tease out the proper numbers. But, in any case, there are a lot of administrators these days.

Thanks for the info.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/at-harvard-there-are-2600-more...

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

#343

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

staunton wrote: post #235

ModernMech wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a good teacher absolutely plays a role in teaching positions. Source: I work in such a teaching position and have served on several search committees.

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)

> Do you know any case where a hiring decision was decided by somebody being thought to be bad at teaching?

Personally no, but I'm sure they exist. For my debarment, hiring decisions are usually unanimous or with a few salty holdouts, but overall we only hire if the vote is overwhelming. If it seems split, we hold off.

> How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality?

The way we do it, during the on-campus interview, the candidate gives a lecture of their choice in front of a class of students. We record it and observe. Students submit feedback.

You can also use recommendation letters. We require at least 3.

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

#344

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

staunton wrote: post #257

bee_rider wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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...

We've absolutely hired teaching faculty without a Ph.D. (therefore lacking in publications) due to their excellent teaching ability. See my other reply about how we evaluate their ability.

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

#345

Post by ModernMech » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #321

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.

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

They often bring in a lot of money and attract students. Sports facilities are one of the main questions on tours. It's an arms race really, because you can't entice many students to join the school with your course syllabuses and the number of books in the library. So schools invest in other shiny things to catch students' attensions.

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

#346

Post by robwwilliams » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

cvwright wrote: post #260

robwwilliams wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They actually have gone down. Feds have tightened up. I would guess the national average is about 52% and at that overhead rate university do lose money!

Here is old news that the HN community needs to catch up on.

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...

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

#347

Post by rdiddly » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

11101010001100 wrote: post #238

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…

Sorry but no one needs more cargo cult science.

No one needs more failed startups either, but if your point is that some ideas are bad, yeah no kidding. In fact most of them are.

A cargo cult by the way would be another great example of misapprehending the world as a simple deterministic or linear place where the more mock airstrips an isolated tribe builds and the more trappings of European culture they adopt or imitate (e.g. crucifixes), the more material wealth they'll get.

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

#348

Post by nvm0n2 » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #312

ip26 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the funding model would have to be different. I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.

Well, no, I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about research. I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially re…

That's been done dozens of times, we just call them corporate labs instead of universities. And it works fine. There's no reason to care about the university as an institutional form, they just suck in so many ways that are all resolved by proper companies.

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

#349

Post by txru » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 5:30 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #215

ubermonkey wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

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".

It's mostly the association of the founding people, like being announced by Bari Weiss, and what their press releases look like.

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

#350

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

golem14 wrote: post #314

ChuckMcM wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might co…

Yeah, isn't that crazy? 3x overhead? For what? I want to support the research, not the university.

I agree. The university will argue that if they didn’t exist there would not be a place to do research.