“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University” • Hacker News Board

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#141

Post by bshanks » Mon, Sep 07, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #87

I keep hearing about how miserable things are in academia and have come to perhaps a surprising conclusion: research and education need to be broken up. I know that there's arguments that the two should stay entangled, and that new research feeds quickly into education blah blah blah. But I personally think that the world is far better off with large, dedicated, quasi-commercial R&D labs and institutions like Xerox-P…

Imo at least the following important subjects would be too unprofitable for industrial research labs: philosophy, pure mathematics, particle physics, astrophysics, religious studies, philology, history, anthropology.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#142

Post by bshanks » Mon, Sep 07, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

aardvarks wrote: post #70

plg wrote: post #2

"I found scientists to be more preoccupied by their own survival in a very competitive research environment than by the development of a true understanding of the world." I have found this as well. However it's important to remember that before one can do good work, one has to find funding for the good work. It's a complex problem.

That's a pretty good 3-sentence summary - reflects my experience as well. To expand a bit...it's not that nearly everyone doesn't start out super excited about their subjects and motivated by advancing human knowledge. It's that shortly post-PhD, you realize that in order to continue doing this work you find exciting and meaningful, you have to get money (for supplies, equipment, office space, not to mention your own…

I propose one simple reform. The grant-giving institutions are currently (in the aggregate) spending $X of money per year to pay the salary of various people. Some of these people are employed as tenured professors, some as non-yet-tenured tenure track professors, some as postdocs, some as students. The salary of the postdocs and students (if any) is coming entirely from the $X, the salary of the professors is coming partly from interest on the schools' endowments. The number of postdocs and students is (almost) directly proportional to $X.

The proposal: the grant-giving institution instead earmark Z% of $X for endowing new tenured professor chairs at the schools.

This reduces the ratio of (postdocs + students) per professor. In the extreme case, if all institutions set Z=100%, there would be only professors and no students or postdocs; the number of professors would be less than the number of professors+postdocs+students is today, but this number would be growing at a substantially faster rate (there will be some critical value of Z, large but <100%, such that the the number of students funded is roughly equal to or slightly greater than the replacement rate of retiring professors). Note that this is not all-or-nothing; you can incrementally convince one grant-giving institution at a time to implement this reform, with Z set at various levels, and see incremental benefits.

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#143

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 07, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

qCOVET wrote: post #67

elliptic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?

I believe University of Waterloo is one of the few that does full ownership of work by Prof (I could be wrong) .. and year after year, they beat the biggest Universities in Canada for being ranked as the #1 in entrepreneurship, tech commercialization and innovation. I think its the subsequent economic impact that counts, rather than sequestering innovation for the sake of a few bucks in 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ownership model.…

[deleted]

Re: “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”

#144

Post by adminprof » Wed, Sep 09, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #140

adminprof wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The misinformation about adjuncts is pretty widespread. Adjuncts have indeed been hired way more at teaching colleges and for-profit colleges. But research universities haven't really changed their hiring tendencies much, if at all. It's just that there are a lot more non-R1 universities now that statistically, a higher % of new instructors are adjuncts. Nearly everyone I know that graduated with a PhD from an R1 uni…

For years fulltime profs number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...

That Wikipedia page is the most hilarious wtf I have ever seen. I did not see this "Then I read the reference and it said "To this end, the TIAA-CREF Institute surveyed full-time college and university faculty age 60 and older regarding issues related to whether and when to retire." The survey is about seniors (in terms of age) because TIAA-CREF is a retirement account company, not "senior tenure" whatever that means. I'm actually more surprised that the number of professors over 60 is not 100% since that's the only population surveyed.

The rest of the Wikipedia page is similarly biased, "Today (2015), adjunct professors, hired for their low cost only, rather than expertise, make up more than half the teaching faculty at United States universities." I can't tell if the Wikipedia article is intentionally ridiculous or if it's some parody article.