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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

#31

Post by StableAlkyne »

queuebert wrote: post #12

Academia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be. I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is mo…

Part of it is that research grants are not used fully as a research funding source - a typical university administration will skim about a quarter of every grant for "administrative costs." It's not called out as corruption because it's the norm, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of tax-funded R&D dollars that actually make it to R&D

As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-preserving interest to value grant-earners

It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

It would also help lower some of the pressure to publish or perish, since a lot of that comes from the need to chase grants.

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

#32

Post by thelittlenag »

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension 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). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths.

The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.

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

#33

Post by Etheryte »

queuebert wrote: post #12

Academia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be. I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is mo…

While I see where you're coming from, I'm very conflicted on your approach to address this. I don't think throwing more money at the problem fixes the underlying issues, if anything, I would expect them to deepen. There was an article making the rounds some time ago on HN how something like three quarters of medical studies had either strong data analysis errors in them or had complete bogus data, to the point where it was impossible to tell whether the results had any grain of truth to them. That's an absurd ratio, and not something I would want to fund.

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

#34

Post by throw_pm23 »

hodgesrm wrote: post #2

> “I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said. A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds…

A revolution will likely make things even worse. Once you decide on selecting a certain trait, a thousand imposters will pop up immediately, who superficially match all the criteria that you wanted to select for.

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

#35

Post by bell-cot »

wrycoder wrote: post #23
bell-cot wrote: post #8

Well...yes. Treating the actual high-value workers like sh*t has been American Academia's SOP for how many years now?

I read yesterday that there are now more administrators than students at Harvard, but ‘only’ one third as many teachers as students.

Yep. And Harvard is anything but alone in that respect.

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

#37

Post by shrubble »

Reminder that:

1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award.

2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell College who knew more about transistors than MIT : https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...

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

#38

Post by IshKebab »

thelittlenag wrote: post #32

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension 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). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" re…

Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.

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

#40

Post by ska »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #29
ska wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really quality vs quantity. The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resour…

But it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theorist who needs a pencil and paper and maybe a fancy computer when you can fund an expensive lab full of state of the art lasers and optics or any other type of expensive technology. Do you want to come…

Not really, at least in my experience. Overhead is fungible, so they get roughly the same cut of everything that comes in (to a first approximation).

That means the support the institution will put behind a shoot-for-the-stars research centre grant is way different than what a theorist looking to pay for 5 grad students will get, but the institution is happy to proportionately support that as well. Especially R1's that are trying to play the prestige game aggressively, they'll push for a "world class" faculty page pretty much across the board. But they don't all get the same offices.

Institutions' reliance on overhead to fund operations varies wildly as well, which makes the calculus different.

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