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

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

#161

Post by jltsiren »

quacked wrote: post #104
mjburgess wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive. Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible)…

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation wit…

Academic hiring processes are ridiculous. Not because anyone wants it that way but because citizens like to complain. They complain when they think tax/tuition money is being used for inapproriate or frivolous purposes. They complain when they see nepotism and corruption. They complain about perceived political biases and discrimination. And so on.

Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new processes are put in place to prevent that specific harm in the future. On the other hand, nobody really cares about effective and efficient use of tax money. People surely complain about waste, but the complaints are rarely specific enough to have consequences. Given a choice between preventing a specific harm and using tax money better, people almost always choose preventing the specific harm.

The salaries are what they are, because universities can't afford to pay more. There is only so much tax/tuition money available to them. People like to complain about administrative bloat, but it's their fault really. Every time people complain about something specific in the academia, they are advocating for giving more money to the administration to fix that, and for giving less money to the people who teach and do research. That's just the way public management works.

Additionally, academic hiring processes are more involved than in the industry, because there is less responsibility. Not despite it. People are effectively given money to do things they would do anyway, and the employer often can't tell the difference between a good hire and a bad hire, except maybe much later. If you can't fix you mistakes in a timely manner, you'll probably want to think things through before making the decision.

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

#162

Post by neuronerdgirl »

bitzun wrote: post #81
Almondsetat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use your honorific every time you are mentioned

When someone is a PhD, and you know this, and you choose to use ms/mr/mrs instead of dr (or omitting an honorific altogether, the most common, unobjectionable choice), it can easily be interpreted as condescension.

Also like the one time you most typically use the Dr honorific is specifically when you are speaking about the person in reference to their profession.

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

#163

Post by etrautmann »

mlsu wrote: post #135

Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó. It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer. I think it might seem difficult to…

Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome.

It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.

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

#164

Post by rewmie »

finnh wrote: post #152
rewmie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives. The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them. You mentioned startups. Basically that means…

That was GP's point - that things are much better for engineers than people in academia (and perhaps science).

I guess my point is that engineering and academia are not independent and mutually exclusive sets.

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

#165

Post by jacquesm »

godelski wrote: post #127
exmadscientist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the…

> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. For anyone questioning this line, let's remember a few things - Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then g…

This is really painful to read.

That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.

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

#166

Post by FireBeyond »

cycomanic wrote: post #134
KennyBlanken wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting. Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly compa…

A corollary to your story, from my partner who started as Payroll at a university and now is the Accounting Manager, reporting to the Financial Controller.

> prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Over the four years she has been there, faculty have received 3 3-5% annual raises. Staff have received ... 1 1% raise.

Faculty and staff were allowed to start working remotely where appropriate during COVID, or "expand the use of a home office".

Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.

Faculty also lobbied for "increasing flexibility for students" by "offering all classes all terms", regardless of enrollment. In practice, this has lead to numerous professors and adjuncts getting paid for teaching a class that often has 2 or even 1 student enrolled.

> As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

In fact, the university recently found themselves in a near 8 digit budget deficit, with every department overrunning. And then faculty tried to throw Finance under the bus - "How could this happen?"

Finance's answer - "Because your departments generally refuse to do purchase orders and an approval process. The first time we hear of most of your expenses is when you hand us an invoice and say 'we bought something, please pay for it'". It also ignores the reality that for the most part, Finance is a facilitator, not an arbitrator. Faculty are adults - if they're given a budget (which they largely come up with themselves), then stick to it.

Things easily go both ways.

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

#167

Post by FireBeyond »

zamalek wrote: post #55

My experience in university convinced me that: modern universities are not institutions of learning or discovery, they are businesses and are only concerned about the bottom line. As always, enshittification follows (and arguably happened a long time ago already). That includes amazing short-term decision making at the cost of long-term sustainability.

Tangential quote I heard once, "Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached".

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

#168

Post by johnvaluk »

HansHamster wrote: post #114
stavros wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

The grant has restrictions on how the money can be used and the university takes a sizeable chunk of this (because they can). Then out of generosity and the pure kindness of their heart they might give you back a small chunk of that sum without the same restrictions.

This isn't fair. Researchers put an extraordinary burden on administration in an academic institution. Research by its very nature is cutting edge and is always testing limits. "I want it now!" ignores existing streamlined processes and administration often provides value by enforcing compliance. This kind of oversight also minimizes a lot of abuse.

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

#169

Post by Eumenes »

Almondsetat wrote: post #60
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Dr. Karikó

are we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use your honorific every time you are mentioned

How do you know if someone is a PhD? They'll tell you.

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

#170

Post by godelski »

WalterBright wrote: post #148
godelski wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of…

Any source of funding will spawn an industry designed around extracting every dollar from it.

Exactly. Or equally: money can only exchange hands by means of a leaky bucket. But I'd say that it's not a big problem that the bucket is leaky. Goodhart's Hell is when that extraction industry dominates or that bucket isn't so much leaky as it is missing the bottom which differentiates it from a tube. Some people call this peak capitalism and it's right to complain, but I think this happens in whatever system you use, just exhibits itself in whatever metric dominates (in our case capital/dollars. Also typically capital/dollars in communism too because both systems are explicitly about capital ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
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