I have worked at EPFL for a short time as as post-doc, and it really is a great school. Its Ph.D. students are excellent, and so what he says has to be taken seriously. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that much of how Academia works today is inevitable. How many people are truly excellent in any job? Always only a small percentage. Let's say that in Academia the percentage is especially high, as high as 20%…
what happens to that percentage when a country decides that it doesn't have enough STEM people and forces people down an educational pipeline. And compromises its educational integrity in the process?
They should have never let business schools into universities. This is the result, academia is now censored, for-profit, tepid corporatism. A factory of managers crushing creativity with the jackboot of workplace professionalism.
What evidence do you have that business schools are the source of the problem?
Graeber's essay "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" describes the "tyranny of managerialism":
"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications [...]" (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars)
Doesn't answer your question, because it's about deeper institutional forces than the mere existence of business schools. But I found it an interesting read.
The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamenta…
I don't have a problem with science being a business. I have a problem with it being presented to kids as some idealistic pure thing.
Or someone speaking out of experience? I can testify[1] on the nefarious influence of MBA-like groupthink in academia: gigantic counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, obsession with pseudo-measurability of everything, from impact factors over “quality assessment” to “standardization” of examination and “competence matrices”. Top-down bogus coming from people who failed in the corporate world and met their Peter’s p…
while your characterization rings true for academia, I hardly believe that those attributes are the provenance of MBAs. The irony is that we are in an age of scientism (as Feynman would say) and it's precisely the popularization of science itself that has led to 'pseudo-measurability' that you speak of. I remember chuckling that my humanities classes were grading essays via mathematical rubric at a time when the math…
You probably hit the nail with the popularization of science as the culprit for our captains-of-society’s obsession with measurability. And even more so with the institutionalized greed of law school sycophants. I don’t know about the role of the business schools — maybe I’m to harsh for my colleagues. But I noted that at least at my alma mater and its acquisitioned satellite colleges, the managerial caste consists of civil engineers with an MBA, only, and it’s a recurring pattern.
The noble idea of a res publica litterarum, or a universitas scientiarum — it’s lost since the post-war baby boom.
I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.
It may just be an artifact of the expanding population. It wasn't too long ago that many young people also harbored an idealism about working for big companies: go to college, get a nearly guaranteed job at a corporation, work there for 25-30 years, retire with a pension. But we all know that each of these steps is less guaranteed today than it was for the previous generation, sometimes significantly so. It's the sam…
Given that GDP/capita has expanded plenty, I don't think that's a very good explanation. An economy in which actual growth can't keep up with population should see a falling GDP/capita.
Can we explain why we seem to see an increasingly competitive society despite there being more actual stuff to go around?
while a PhD doesn't carry that much cachet anymore, doesn't that make 'PhD dropout' even worse? Isn't the impression then, that 'You couldn't finish even the lowered standards for the PhD' or 'You couldn't finish what you started' or 'You had the poor judgement to bite off something you couldn't handle'? I suppose the last isn't so bad given that the age that most Americans start grad school is just over 22
Depending on your point of view, 'PhD dropout' could also carry connotations of having sound judgement and the audacity to act accordingly and quit despite doing so being somewhat controversial.
is highschool dropout the highest honor of them all then?
It's interesting to think though, that government funding has produced nearly every single form of medicine we have, it funded einstein, it was indirectly responsible for the internet. The problem is that you have to pay a bunch of parasites to support the few who are actually advancing the human race.
It's inefficient and creates negative externalities.
yes. But I would not want someone to force me to fund Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies. Moreover, your example has survivorship bias . There are plenty of completely rediculous people you probably would'nt want to fund. For me, one such person is Thomas Cavalier-Smith.
Am I supposed to know why you have a problem with Thomas Cavalier-Smith, or is that just a non-sequitur?
no, just that I have a problem with him. But if you are curious: so much wasted effort. I am not a fan of siloing sciences, but TCS puts into stark perspective Rutherford's epithet "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - and what TCS has done is stamp collecting at its worst. Over, and over again.
This student makes some excellent points, and it's a bit scary how some things reinforce each other. Some journals, Nature being the most notable, chase impact factor above all else. The only thing they truly care about is that the papers they publish get cited. This means highly original work, which frequently doesn't get cited much for a long time, is less desirable than a turn-the-crank paper from a respected name…
I'm not claiming you're wrong, but why isn't it possible for the student to simply no longer place any value in getting a PhD? That is what they claim, and intelligent people often make decisions on principle that make little practical sense.
The optimistic answer is that we pass on to our children what we wish were true for us, hoping that this time it will be different. The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamenta…
The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it. This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.
My mother talked me out of a computer science path many years ago. My biggest regrets are letting her talk me out of it and then getting myself locked into another career path, mortgage, etc. One (but not the only) reason why is the current differences in job markets between my field and comp science. The other big reason is that I feel like I'm nearly illiterate. (I'm not illiterate. I can hack on code, but I'm very much a coding 'immigrant'. I'm certainly too much of an immigrant to pursue a job in the field at this time. And I'm too bogged down in other responsibilities to truly pursue the experience that I need to gain enough literacy to get a programming job.)