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Academia Is Eating Its Young

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Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#61

Post by impendia »

bokonist wrote: post #58
michaelochurch wrote: post #35

I've been doing a lot of analysis of organizational decline over the past month, and what characterizes R&D (including academia) is extreme convexity: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... Convexity pertains to the shape of the curve for output (profits, value added, impact) per input (investment, skill, effort, and just plain luck). It pertains to desirable risk behavior (convex => seek ris…

Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different. The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual interests, etc. Naturally, as with any career track that looks pretty sweet, people rush to enter the field. Thus the great numbers of grad students. There are basically three ways…

> Option b) is the path the universities took

You're sort of right, but we aren't deliberately weeding out people.

This year, I was on the hiring committee for a tenure-track mathematics hire in my academic department. The job market is extraordinarily competitive this year, and sucks rocks for candidates. It follows that we were able to hire somebody truly outstanding.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#62

Post by jessriedel »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
michaelochurch wrote: post #35

I've been doing a lot of analysis of organizational decline over the past month, and what characterizes R&D (including academia) is extreme convexity: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... Convexity pertains to the shape of the curve for output (profits, value added, impact) per input (investment, skill, effort, and just plain luck). It pertains to desirable risk behavior (convex => seek ris…

This is silly. It's purely a historical fluke that the role of professor (scientist/teacher) even exists. There is no reason whatsoever why the same person should both create new knowledge and also teach calculus/cs 101/etc. I was good at research, but I sucked at teaching [1]. In contrast, many people are really terrible researchers, but actually pretty good teachers. (As you note, there is a glut of such people, so…

It's hardly a fluke that the creation and dispersion of knowledge are tied together. The reason research universities exist is because undergrad were willing to pay money to learn from people at the forefront of knowledge. The problem isn't having (most) of those researchers teaching, it's that our society now wants to send 50% of people to college rather than the historical norm of order 1%. The researchers are spread too thin, and the mixed bag of lecturers must necessarily pick up the slack.

If you correct for the fact that the best researchers have zero incentive to teach (i.e. by just selecting those researchers and lecturers who are internally motivated to teach regardless of incentives) the researchers are way better on average.

There's a place for great researchers who suck at teaching or are so great at research that teaching is a waste, e.g. the institute for advanced study. (And frankly, most of the researchers at the institute should probably be teaching the best grad students.) But, as someone who was a grad student after going to a fancy undergrad school, I think it's clear that having most researchers teach is a fantastic Good Thing.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#63

Post by impendia »

microarchitect wrote: post #45
ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…

Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D. A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.

Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities.

Also, the IAS does things like have "special years" devoted to a particular topic, and then a ton of professors in that area take their sabbatical that year to go to IAS for a year. It would be difficult for a university to do that.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#64

Post by graycat »

rogueriver wrote: post #21

1. Couldn't read the article, but get the gist. 2. Years ago I got a B.A. in business. 3. I can honestly say 90% of the courses were, pretty much a waste if time. I literally had one instructor tell his students, "I really don't want to be here, so I don't exect you to even show up". Being young and naive, I went to a few of his classes; He literally read, verbatim, from a Accounting Book. 4. The Internet can teach a…

> 6. The most successful tech guys I have know dropped out of school, and learned to program on their own

To a large extent, given the values of US universities, that's mostly inevitable.

What are such values? In a university, the profs are expected to be doing 'research', not just teaching what's already on the shelves of the libraries or in commercial products. In computer science, the 'research' is supposed to be finding the 'fundamentals' of computing, e.g., the question P versus NP.

So, there can be some first courses in computer science that concentrate on teaching a programming language, maybe Java, and then some later courses in algorithms, data structures, compilers, database, etc., but, still, turning out people ready to 'hit the ground running' in a serious programming team is not really the goal.

Now, there are community colleges, but there is a 'quality' problem: First, the better students tend to go to universities. Second, where is a community college going to get someone who is a right up to date software team leader to teach and, also, do a really good job teaching with preparing the course materials and giving individual attention to the students?

Net, at least in the US, it's long been the case in computing that mostly or even entirely have to be self-taught. Heck, I've taught computing to undergraduates at Georgetown and to graduate students at Ohio State but I essentially never took a course in computing and, instead, was self-taught and before such teaching had a good career going in industry.

Self-taught's largely where it's at. Sorry 'bout that!

Solution? If you can think of a topic that needs some good teaching, then get smart on the topic, write a book, sell it in some form, maybe Kindle, develop some lectures and put them on YouTube, have a blog, etc.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#65

Post by jessriedel »

(This will be hopeless to find in this massive thread, but...)

The OPs service-have laymen fund science-solves exactly the wrong problem (though he's on the right track.) The problem is not too little money, it's too much research because of the massive incentives to crank out crap, and the inability of the expert funding committees to sort through it all. Kickstarting this will just lead to funding the flashiest pseudoscience. We need to allow researchers more freedom to produce rarely, not encourage hype even more.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#66

Post by anologwintermut »

microarchitect wrote: post #32

The article is rather vague on what he thinks are the problem with academia. All I can see is this: Instead, it’s the politics, the inefficiency, and the in-bred hostility towards change has driven these incredible people out of academia. Good luck getting politics out of human systems involving more than a few tens of people. It's just inevitable. I don't know what he specifically means by inefficiency and in-bred h…

I think academia is eating the young if it lets people do that in exchange for producing papers that the PI gets the credit for. Precisely because it isn't the case in all of academia, in the parts where it is, I think it really is eating the young.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#67

Post by shawn-butler »

Gormo wrote: post #28
shawn-butler wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not entirely clear that you know what the Royal Society actually did. It was hardly a model. The Royal Institution is more along the lines of what you describe. Or here in the US, the Wood's Hole oceanographic institute. It was pretty much propped up by the Rockefellers.

A better historical parallel in America would be the American Philisophical Society [1], founded by Benjamin Frankin in 18th-century Philadelphia. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philosophical_Society

A fine institution; it served as kind of a national library, museum, even a pseudo-patent office until there were actual federal institutions funded for those purposes. Pretty significant no doubt, but it never conducted original research apart from "paying" for the publication of the Proceedings.

Wasn't until around 1940s that they even started having grants and postdocs, but they aren't significant enough stipends to conduct original research.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#68

Post by simonster »

microarchitect wrote: post #45
ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…

Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D. A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.

There is also evidence that your graduate students do better research if they teach. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#69

Post by bokonist »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
michaelochurch wrote: post #35

I've been doing a lot of analysis of organizational decline over the past month, and what characterizes R&D (including academia) is extreme convexity: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... Convexity pertains to the shape of the curve for output (profits, value added, impact) per input (investment, skill, effort, and just plain luck). It pertains to desirable risk behavior (convex => seek ris…

This is silly. It's purely a historical fluke that the role of professor (scientist/teacher) even exists. There is no reason whatsoever why the same person should both create new knowledge and also teach calculus/cs 101/etc. I was good at research, but I sucked at teaching [1]. In contrast, many people are really terrible researchers, but actually pretty good teachers. (As you note, there is a glut of such people, so…

My ideal world: Basic courses should be taught by professional teachers. Intermediate courses should be taught by practitioners who also have good teaching skills. So an junior year software engineering course might be taught by a Google programmer who was good at teaching and was taking a one year sabbatical from Google to teach. Or the course might be taught by a programming researcher who was good at teaching. Master level courses should basically be the student doing an apprenticeship under an existing master practitioner. So someone wanting to be a computer science researcher would apprentice with an existing researcher. Someone wanting to be an engineer at Google would do an apprenticeship at Google.

Re: Academia Is Eating Its Young

#70

Post by takluyver »

aheilbut wrote: post #34
ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…

One existing institution that is fairly close to you're imagining is the HHMI. However, I think you are making two assumptions about research that are incorrect. First, it isn't at all clear that separating teaching from research entirely would be a good thing; researchers need to be trained, and trainees bring diverse skills and perspectives to the labs in which they work. Second, many of the "smaller problems" have…

Yes, I think the funding is the key. There are already funders who see it as their mission to support scientists and allow them to tackle interesting questions. But in the end, they have a limited pot of money to dish out, and they have to somehow make a decision about what's worth funding. That brings us back to spending a lot of time writing grant applications and trying to justify the work.

Ultimately, 'gentleman scientists' were probably able to follow their interests because they were rich enough that they didn't need to worry about earning a daily wage. That's still possible, but we'd much rather let science be done by anyone who's interested and good at it.

The OP mentions Microryza, their crowdfunding platform for science. That's a very interesting approach, but I think it only works if you already have some kind of paid job in science: the projects I've looked at are all asking for much less than a year's salary for one person.

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