Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#121

Post by baldfat » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

jimhefferon wrote: post #61

baldfat wrote: post #21

I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure) As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar…

When I ask the admins at my school about this, they laugh. If you look at the pie chart of where the money goes, it basically goes to salary. So the rise in cost has to be from a rise in salaries paid. They say the driver in the US is health care, but there are also more people on the payroll.

LOL it is also the Admins that got the biggest increase in that pie. I lost all faith in any college admins and is 100% why I left.

There is no evidence that the payroll of colleges have increased and evidence points to lower salaries in since 1970. Administration numbers have increased 4 fold. Less then half of professors are full time now.

> https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#122

Post by geodel » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

unfamiliar wrote: post #77

worldsayshi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive response: Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. Tell them to do their work to the best of their ability? Stop measuring things. Talk to them once in a while.

Who's going to do this whole "throw out the bureaucrats" thing? Because as far as I can tell, bureaucrats are in charge of those decisions.

Put educationists and researchers in charge. They are never biased, hold dogmatic beliefs or politically motivated. So they will do just fine.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#123

Post by deong » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

arcanus wrote: post #118

deong wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that always infuriated me about computer science (my field), is that I don't actually need the big research grant. There are people who do, of course, but I could do most of what I found interesting and useful with a high-end desktop PC and some free time. But universities don't operate that way anymore. It doesn't matter that all I need is $5K and some time -- the university needs their 40% cut of a multi-…

> 40% cut of a multi-year 40%?!? I would kill for overhead that low. Most places are over 50 now. I've heard of 70% at the absolute top.

I've been out of academia for a few years now, but I think my university took 40%, and the department took some more on top. The total was probably 60% or so.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#124

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #27

yummyfajitas wrote: post #14

This is a bunch of cool sounding scientific nihilism, but it's false. Nclb was a great attempt to manage academia and it worked. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15531 http://www.nber.org/papers/w20511 http://www.nber.org/papers/w16745

The authors themselves admit that NCLB was a mixed bag: "Specifically, we find that NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th and (to a somewhat lesser extent) 8th graders. However, our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders." You'd think that you can employ drill practice to improve results in mathematics, but that approach won't work in Englis…

That's net positive - an increase in some subjects and neutral in others.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#125

Post by jccalhoun » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

I'm currently a lecturer at a small midwestern liberal arts university. I don't know what kind of job I will have next year because the Dean decided that there will no longer be one year full time contracts and they won't add any more three year contracts. Theoretically they want to have more tenure track job but in practice our department isn't getting any more.

So at worst I will be part time next year which means I won't have insurance. Best case one of the job applications I have pans out and I get a tenure track job.

The reason for the change is, of course, money. It is cheaper to hire 5 part time people to teach the load of 3 full time people because the part timers get less pay and no benefits. Of course finding 2 extra people who are qualified doesn't seem to be something they are worried about...

Strangely, they haven't suggested switching to part-time administrators...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#126

Post by sevensor » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

wpietri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to…

I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…

From ground level, though, it's really easy to see the dysfunctional cultures growing up around metrics. At the factory where I used to work, we'd zig-zag from metric to metric. Yield one quarter, Cpk the next, scrap rate the quarter after that. Special cross-departmental teams to manage the metric. Regardless of which metric was chosen, people would do really dumb things to try to meet it. If scrap rate was the metric, we'd send terrible material through the line to keep the scrap rate low. If yield was the metric, we'd scrap anything that was even slightly abnormal. Cpk was the worst (or maybe the best), because we just adjusted our spec limits until Cpk was acceptable.

The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#127

Post by kylebenzle » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

steve_g wrote: post #112

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…

I am also a manager of managers. I agree 100% that managers/leadership makes a big difference in performance. But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important. Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically a…

I manage manager managers. I agree 200% the managers make a big difference in performance and we need more of them.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#128

Post by kylebenzle » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #109

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…

This thread reads like an argument on the merits of standardized testing in school. I suppose if you value employees who are trained by rote and operate in a manner reflecting that training...

I think this argument against "rote learning" is basically defunct. The bottom line is unless we want to live socialistalically and force roles on children like in Germany we need to teach ALL the stuff to ALL the children, and the only way to do that is to blast through the material with tons of homework, rote learning, after school tutoring, standard testing, etc.

So it is a choice we make, tell everyone what to do from an early age and allow them to focus, or try and teach all the things to everyone, using standard testing to make sure everyone is at least keeping their head above water.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#129

Post by zeteo » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

dasmoth wrote: post #22

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to…

There's a long tradition of important advances in knowledge being made by people with an undemanding job [1] [2]. The 19th century university became a hotbed of research because the teaching workload was relatively light and they didn't require that you also did research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_a...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#130

Post by rhino369 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

pmilot wrote: post #28

My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system. Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are…

They probably aren't hiring good people, at least they aren't hiring enough good people. The problem is that there aren't enough "good people" to go around. Challenging PhD programs weed out people who aren't self motivated to succeed. Teacher education programs do not. Most other fields education programs have a hard time doing it.

That advice is basically "just hire great people." No shit. The reason you need management is because that usually isn't possible.