Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate • Hacker News Board

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#211

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

kpw94 wrote: post #132

tiedieconderoga wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with tenure, you would need to be extremely passionate about education or research to go into academia in fields like software or mech/chem/EE. The opportunity cost is easily 6 figures/yr, for your entire career. The hours are long, the pay is laughable, the kids are not alright, you must publish or perish...maybe these universities are intentionally selecting for professors who will have a high tolerance for ab…

Since Texas is the topic: university salaries are public and used to be published in a Texas Tribune. A visiting professor at a Texas university, with probably no intention of tenure based on his career, was paid $340k/y back in the 2010s: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-creator-of-C++-Bjarne-Stro... Of course he's not a nobody, but if Texas universities pay that kind of money to superstar professors, for small sti…

~$200K is about starting comp for fresh graduates at a FAANG. When a fresh college grad can make more than a tenured professor, it's awfully hard to convince people to take that first rung into academia, where you're getting paid a lot less than $200K.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#212

Post by trilbyglens » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #196

bjt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat rac…

I struggle to see how this benefits Texas , though. Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants, but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs along with them. It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it extr…

It's almost as though the state leadership is utterly incompetent :)

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#213

Post by caddemon » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

ano-ther wrote: post #140

Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this: > […] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM f…

I don't agree with this as a state policy, but I don't know if it is as disastrous for UT as Aaronson makes it out to be.

The academic job market is an absolute fucking bloodbath. Plenty of very qualified up and coming researchers struggle to get TT positions at major research universities. If they stay in academia, many postdoc for an absurdly long time or settle for career stagnating instructor positions (even though their focus had been research), or maybe just become a researcher within someone else's lab. An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd think.

I guess it comes down to how badly you think the current system is performing at selection. But the competitiveness is absolutely insane, that part is objective.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#214

Post by tombert » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

ghufran_syed wrote: post #158

tombert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not just grades K through 3 anymore [1]. The law is pretty broad and moreover the legal costs default to the defendant. Even if my wife didn't do something that was officially illegal, we'd be stuck counter-suing to reclaim legal costs. [1] https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-ap...

Thanks for the info - but this implies that following the state curriculum would be a pretty easy defence, wouldn't it? So if a teacher wanted to teach about "sexual orientation and gender identity", even outside of the "existing state standards", they could still do so as part of "reproductive health instruction that students can choose not to take" [1] [2]. The closest reference I can find for the legal stuff is he…

Sure, but when there’s zero repercussions to a frivolous lawsuit, there’s likely to be a frivolous lawsuit. If a parent can easily lie and try and extort money, it can still be an awful, expensive, exhausting process for my wife. Even if it doesn’t cost us any money directly (which to be completely honest I don’t buy), there’s still the exhausting and awful process of having to defend herself in court.

Edit:

I would also like to point out that even if you were right on the technicalities, you understand why this would be an immensely unappealing thing for a prospective teacher. It would be much easier to simply move to a state that doesn’t have a vague, poorly defined, conspiratorial law that is likely to make our lives unpleasant.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#215

Post by larkost » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #162

ano-ther wrote: post #140

Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this: > […] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM f…

This comment presumes that public universities are the proper venues for this type of research. They're not. The only reason people are foregoing higher salaries to work at universities is because universities have pushed private research almost completely off the map. And even if public research is necessary, it doesn't need to be part of the university system. Ever heard of the NSA? They do research, yet somehow th…

How do you suppose that universities have pushed industry out of research? The reality is that industry has bay-and-large decided it only wants to do the development part of R&D, and leave the research to someone else. Universities have stepped in to fill that gap.

Of course this is messy, for example industry is very involved in the research in AI, but in places like medical technologies near 100% of the early development of everything from drugs to most devices is done out of Universities, and there is nothing stopping industry from trying to step in there.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#216

Post by haweemwho » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #124

bluGill wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much research do we need? Sure there are advances to make in physics, but do we really need another paper explaining why Richard III wasn't completely evil, or whatever similar activity English professors research? How much more research into the real nature of the Greeks do we need? Don't get me wrong, both are interesting subjects, and the thinking that goes into those papers is worth teaching/knowing. However…

This is a pretty myopic view of how scientific discoveries happen. This is a good time to remind people that truth-tables were first created by Wittgenstein, who wrote some pretty obscure and borderline indecipherable books on natural language, placed well inside the walls of the humanities departments. Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it…

> but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#217

Post by romwell » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #200

ano-ther wrote: post #140

Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as this: > […] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM f…

> More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, I wonder. For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries. Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way. After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities. And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic caree…

> For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries.

Do you imply the universities will magically get more money somehow?

>Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for their bucks that way.

Scott Aarsonson knows. They won't.

Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure exists.

>After all, there are industrial research labs that play in the same league as the top research universities.

Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom line is always there, and it guides which research gets funded.

>And there are other forces that make people want to pursue academic careers.

...most of which are given by tenure.

>Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.

As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not.

All that aside, great research takes time and persistence, and culture, and environment, and working groups. All that disappears once your core is transient.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#218

Post by professorthread » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

orange_joe wrote: post #9

I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.

Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on student evaluation scores, which study after study show are poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular; easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#219

Post by sterlind » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #204

bjt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat rac…

The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point. The point is t…

you hire faculty to 1) train students 2) to do cutting edge work 3) on fundamental/basic research and unprofitable but important topics. academia's not just an internship.

Re: Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate

#220

Post by caddemon » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #204

bjt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in spending those dollars to fund the academic rat rac…

The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're right, funding the rat race isn't the point. The point is t…

The smartest people in a field are not necessarily the best at training, especially if they care more about their own research end goals than trainee outcomes and/or have never gotten proper guidance on how to effectively mentor.

Whether someone would be/is a good graduate student mentor is a total side dish when it comes to hiring and tenure decisions too. Grants, publications, professional connections, research topic/vision, are all more frequently discussed.