'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó(thedp.com)
thedp.com
'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó
https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/10/penn-katalin-kariko-university-relationship-mistreatment
360 comments
> 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 money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.
The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.
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 money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.
The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.
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)
Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.
Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.
Aboard the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier) in the late 1970s, I automated some of my division's reports by writing BASIC programs on a "programmable calculator" — a desktop in all but name — that was owned by the air wing (IIRC) and used for setting up missions.
(It was a day of celebration when the 8K of RAM was upgraded to 16K.)
(It was a day of celebration when the 8K of RAM was upgraded to 16K.)
It's also not actually true.
The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant.
However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).
The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant.
However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).
Yep, I'm referring to a historical anecdote, not current practice.
It'll be tough to dig up a solid citation for the HP "calculator" story but I've heard it from more than one reasonably-credible source, e.g.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_not... .
It'll be tough to dig up a solid citation for the HP "calculator" story but I've heard it from more than one reasonably-credible source, e.g.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_not... .
I've heard the same about the DEC PDP branding — a “Programmable Data Processor” could slip through where a “computer” couldn't.
“Inside the AS/400” by Soltis quotes a story of IBM’s Rochester group developing the System/3 minicomputer (followed by the incompatible System/38, later rebranded the AS/400 and later still the i) under the guise of an “accounting machine”.
Oh, I totally believe it!
I just wanted to explain that although "No computers on NIH grants" is still current practice at most universities, it shouldn't be.
I just wanted to explain that although "No computers on NIH grants" is still current practice at most universities, it shouldn't be.
That statement is flat out false. You can buy as many computers as you can justify on an NIH research project. I have bought several dozens over 35 years without a peep.
Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that.
I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.
I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.
When I got my PhD (at a public university), I almost got charged for the out-of-state part of this fictitious tuition because I did not switch my residency to the state where I got my PhD. The requirements for residency were pretty onerous from what I remember and I would have been unlikely to qualify. Instead, I took my "preliminary exam". Upon passing the exam, my title changed from "PhD student" to "PhD candidate" and it waived the out-of-state tuition for the rest of my PhD. So universities take this stuff seriously but have arcane procedures for edge cases like this that kinda make a mockery of the whole thing. That said, I'm grateful I did not have pay in the end!
How does treating the tuition as a charge and payment (instead of the tuition being zero) benefit the university?
It transfers money from grant funds into the University general fund, where it can be used for other purposes, like paying for less lucrative departments and administrative salaries. More or less, this plus the ph.d. student’s stipend is the cost of the student, and both can be charged to a grant that the student is working on.
This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).
Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.
This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).
Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.
It’s more expensive for the prof to hire the student.
At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.
At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.
> 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).
The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.
This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.
The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.
This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.
In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this.
In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.
In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.
Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.
Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.
This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost always accept that).
No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.
Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point.
I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.
I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.
A small independent group might have low overhead but from what I see in the ML research space those types of groups are very limited in what they can do. These small groups also tend to work as subcontractors for large groups anyway, so the overhead advantage becomes somewhat moot. Just submitting research proposals to funding organizations regularly in order to get consistent funding requires a large group, especially these days with lower funding per project. Basically, five researchers and an admin won't survive very long without latching onto bigger groups. Also it's pretty well known that universities are cheaper than contractors by a wide margin.
Not true at all in USA. Check out overheads at Salk Institute or other high profile non-profits.
Would they still be if they cut down on building sports facilities?
They often bring in a lot of money and attract students. Sports facilities are one of the main questions on tours. It's an arms race really, because you can't entice many students to join the school with your course syllabuses and the number of books in the library. So schools invest in other shiny things to catch students' attensions.
"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers"
This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.
Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.
This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.
Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.
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).
Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.
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).
Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.
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 with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.
In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.
My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.
In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.
In the medium term, on average, the market tends to kill-off sheer stupidity. It is kinda traumatic in the short-term to see how much stupidity is rewarded, of course. (And here, are VCs anything more than serial idiots?)
But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service.
I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.
But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service.
I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.
A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. One thing to remember is that not all VCs are the same and there probably are some which are very good at what they do.
Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.
Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.
> A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money.
This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm.
As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.
This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm.
As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.
I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.
There's also inmediate feedback
150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st
The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done
150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st
The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done
Given very few tenure-track faculty are making $150K, it's more like "A 85K salary has a ticking clock - and considers themselves lucky to have it - wherein if they don't meet some fairly steep performance goals, they are automatically fired."
Startups work under the "fire fast" mentality, where if someone isn't working out, you axe them asap. For a professor, ramp-up period can be a couple semesters to over a year for them to experience all the seasons of faculty life. You want someone who will stick around for 3+ years. Firing fast is something you want to do under only as a last resort.
It's also expensive, because lab start up costs money. The cost of a faculty recruitment in the sciences can be well into the hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, this is definitely another thing. It takes a couple years of ramping up a lab to recoup that. I've seen startup packages in the millions. It's getting crazy stupid lol. I guess they figured that particular researcher had such promising research it was a good investment.
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.
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.
Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a question of incentives and priorities.
> Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers.
Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.
Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.
This - my university is actually a fairly lean organization that's continually pushed more and more administrative burden onto faculty.
A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most regulations are written in blood, there are tangible reasons for most administrative positions. Even the admins I don't like and I think are a waste of space are that way because of them, and I can envision a useful person being in their place.
A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most regulations are written in blood, there are tangible reasons for most administrative positions. Even the admins I don't like and I think are a waste of space are that way because of them, and I can envision a useful person being in their place.
They can't do that though. All those administrators are preventing the faculty from abusing their position. Most of the abuse are the type of thing that someone has done in the past. What you really seem to be claiming is that the loss from faculty abuse is in general less than the costs of those administrators. I'm not sure if this is true or not - this is the real debate that we are not having. (I'm sure in some cases it is true, but in others it is not)
As for beautification projects: that projects often bring in big donars. It is hard to say if they are worth the costs or not, but we need to start by being clear. A ugly brutalist building would be a lot cheaper but probably is too far the other way.
As for beautification projects: that projects often bring in big donars. It is hard to say if they are worth the costs or not, but we need to start by being clear. A ugly brutalist building would be a lot cheaper but probably is too far the other way.
What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia.
They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.
They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.
Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.
So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.
> Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.
cue the audience laughter
cue the audience laughter
This behavior is known to all parties. It's openly advertised and discussed by the admin office people.
You don’t think so?
It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.
It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.
> 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 goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment.
- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.
- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student.
- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)
- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)
- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award).
- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues
- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)
- Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall
- Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for.
- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work.
Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee.
Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?
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 goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment.
- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.
- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student.
- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)
- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)
- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award).
- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues
- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)
- Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall
- Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for.
- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work.
Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee.
Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?
This is really painful to read.
That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.
That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.
Well just know you're not alone. I hope you got out without killing your passions.
Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fucking day. I hope to get others to join me in this paradigm shift. We all fucking rely on arxiv anyways and I'm pretty sure more of us find works via twitter/google scholar/semantic scholar/word of mouth more than we find works via journal/conference listings (twitter post of "just got accepted" counts as former, not latter).
I'm not so sure we need "disruption" as much as we need to just cut off the fucking leeches. The problem was turning school into a business. Thinking that profits align with education of students. But we have no strong evidence that higher ranked schools produce higher quality students, but rather only better connected ones.
Idk, maybe the private sector can disrupt it. But they'd have to perform a pretty similar feat, though there is a monetary benefit. Because the world is disillusioned that Stanford students are substantially better than Boston College students, you can pay the BC student less. In fact, many places do, but the issue is Stanford has a huge fucking media arm so we don't hear about that. They can also stop using number of papers as criteria but rather quality of papers (i.e. use domain experts to hire domain experts. Novel idea, I know...)
I'm just shooting in the dark here. I'd actually like to hear other peoples suggestions. Even if we're just spitballing at this point (I don't think anyone has strong solutions yet, that's okay), we just need to get the ball rolling at this point instead of talking about what a ball's relationship to an apple or the sour more rounder apples that are orange.
Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fucking day. I hope to get others to join me in this paradigm shift. We all fucking rely on arxiv anyways and I'm pretty sure more of us find works via twitter/google scholar/semantic scholar/word of mouth more than we find works via journal/conference listings (twitter post of "just got accepted" counts as former, not latter).
I'm not so sure we need "disruption" as much as we need to just cut off the fucking leeches. The problem was turning school into a business. Thinking that profits align with education of students. But we have no strong evidence that higher ranked schools produce higher quality students, but rather only better connected ones.
Idk, maybe the private sector can disrupt it. But they'd have to perform a pretty similar feat, though there is a monetary benefit. Because the world is disillusioned that Stanford students are substantially better than Boston College students, you can pay the BC student less. In fact, many places do, but the issue is Stanford has a huge fucking media arm so we don't hear about that. They can also stop using number of papers as criteria but rather quality of papers (i.e. use domain experts to hire domain experts. Novel idea, I know...)
I'm just shooting in the dark here. I'd actually like to hear other peoples suggestions. Even if we're just spitballing at this point (I don't think anyone has strong solutions yet, that's okay), we just need to get the ball rolling at this point instead of talking about what a ball's relationship to an apple or the sour more rounder apples that are orange.
I got lucky: I never went in. My family more or less imploded in the middle of my highschool track and I went to work instead and that put me on a faster road to a lot of interaction with the computers of the day than school would have given me and that led to an interesting career. If that hadn't happened I may well have ended up in academia and I somehow feel I dodged a bullet there because my ideas of what university was like at the time seem to have very much been informed by pink glasses and meeting the occasional very interesting person who was part of the academic world.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot I like about academia. Honestly, there hasn't been any other point of time in my life that I've been able to dedicate so much of my time to learning and researching. Even as I'm in a long term internship, that freedom is slipping away. Academia is supposed to be about protecting that freedom to explore and learn, but simply too much bullshit took over. Bureaucrats love metrics regardless of the value of those metrics. Maybe I wouldn't feel as disenfranchised if I wasn't in the fast moving world of ML with where peer review is like playing a slot machine except bigger schools and big labs get access to slot machines with higher payout rates (I see no quality difference between works from different institutions, rather the arxiv wave primes reviewers or language/proprietary {models,datasets} also prime reviewers).
I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.
I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.
>- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)
Typically they will only take 1 credit after entering candidacy though, down from 9, so overall tuition drops significantly.
> It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess
Sounds like you should have asked for a more appropriate amount of money in the grant.
> If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.
Grants can often be extended and funding can be supplemented.
> Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay
Sure, but we are compensated by other academics reviewing our papers for no financial compensation.
> Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall
They take copyright over the submitted manuscript. I maintain copyright over preprints. Anyway, the point of writing the research is to distribute it, not to own copyright over it, so I don't see the problem. You can choose the venue, and not all venues take copyright over the submitted manuscript. If copyright is important, then choose one of those venues.
Typically they will only take 1 credit after entering candidacy though, down from 9, so overall tuition drops significantly.
> It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess
Sounds like you should have asked for a more appropriate amount of money in the grant.
> If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.
Grants can often be extended and funding can be supplemented.
> Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay
Sure, but we are compensated by other academics reviewing our papers for no financial compensation.
> Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall
They take copyright over the submitted manuscript. I maintain copyright over preprints. Anyway, the point of writing the research is to distribute it, not to own copyright over it, so I don't see the problem. You can choose the venue, and not all venues take copyright over the submitted manuscript. If copyright is important, then choose one of those venues.
A bunch of this is just...wrong.
"- 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 goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment."
There are a number of ways to cover students - TAships, university level scholarships, and grant funding. For grant funding, the cost of the credits is something we can budget for, is in my university markedly lower than an undergraduates, and is budgeted for. This is portraying "We had to budget for someone working" in a weirdly salacious light.
"- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding."
It's not better to buy shitty lab equipment - while grants don't like funding large capital purchases that will cross projects (except for the grants for this), the equipment doesn't vaporize. The cluster nodes and servers I bought for my first project are still running, and indeed go in applications for new grants as equipments I have, in a section often titled "Facilities and Equipment".
As for not spending it out in time, there's what's called a "No Cost Extension", which is "Hey, we didn't spend the money in time, can we have a bit more time?". The NSF grants the first one of these automatically, and one grant I'm on is on it's third (a program office has been very understanding about the difficulties of conducting research in hospitals during a pandemic).
I've never had pushback from a program for getting an NCE unless it was genuinely something where we messed up spending somehow.
"- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student."
Nope, they're 100% students. This is both good and bad for them, but it's true. They're just expected to spend half - or less - of their time in classes, and the rest on research.
"- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)"
Every university I have been at has had a mechanism for a massive cut in tuition once a graduate student has passed their preliminary exams and become a candidate. It's a big enough one that literally my first instruction to my students is "File your ADB waiver please."
"- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)"
When my students are "on approach" they see me and their committee more and more. They're just expected to drive those meetings more as well.
"- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award)."
Again, this is simply incorrect.
"- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues"
Perhaps in the most abstract sense, in that scholarship is a metric by which I was judged for tenure and promotion, and without that, I don't have a job and thus am not paid. But there has never been a "paper bounty" or something like that for any position I've been in.
Venues do matter, and some places are cutthroat about it, but other places aren't. In my department for example, publications that are in respectable journals appropriate for your discipline will carry you all the way to full professor.
"- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)"
I consider this part of my service obligation, and indeed when filling out annual reports and the like, list reviewerships and editorial positions.
The rest of your stuff on publication is actually refreshingly correct.
"- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work."
I sit on my college's tenure and promotion committee. This just actively isn't true. We look at the difference between solo and co-authored papers, where a particular individual is on a paper and the balance between first, last and middle authorships (I'm in a field that doesn't alphabetize). We also consider whether someone is expected to be there, or is anticipated to contribute a lot to work that others will end up being the lead for (as a modeler, this is occasionally the position I'm in).
Then there's positions that give considerably more weight to teaching or service.
"- 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 goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment."
There are a number of ways to cover students - TAships, university level scholarships, and grant funding. For grant funding, the cost of the credits is something we can budget for, is in my university markedly lower than an undergraduates, and is budgeted for. This is portraying "We had to budget for someone working" in a weirdly salacious light.
"- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding."
It's not better to buy shitty lab equipment - while grants don't like funding large capital purchases that will cross projects (except for the grants for this), the equipment doesn't vaporize. The cluster nodes and servers I bought for my first project are still running, and indeed go in applications for new grants as equipments I have, in a section often titled "Facilities and Equipment".
As for not spending it out in time, there's what's called a "No Cost Extension", which is "Hey, we didn't spend the money in time, can we have a bit more time?". The NSF grants the first one of these automatically, and one grant I'm on is on it's third (a program office has been very understanding about the difficulties of conducting research in hospitals during a pandemic).
I've never had pushback from a program for getting an NCE unless it was genuinely something where we messed up spending somehow.
"- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student."
Nope, they're 100% students. This is both good and bad for them, but it's true. They're just expected to spend half - or less - of their time in classes, and the rest on research.
"- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)"
Every university I have been at has had a mechanism for a massive cut in tuition once a graduate student has passed their preliminary exams and become a candidate. It's a big enough one that literally my first instruction to my students is "File your ADB waiver please."
"- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)"
When my students are "on approach" they see me and their committee more and more. They're just expected to drive those meetings more as well.
"- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award)."
Again, this is simply incorrect.
"- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues"
Perhaps in the most abstract sense, in that scholarship is a metric by which I was judged for tenure and promotion, and without that, I don't have a job and thus am not paid. But there has never been a "paper bounty" or something like that for any position I've been in.
Venues do matter, and some places are cutthroat about it, but other places aren't. In my department for example, publications that are in respectable journals appropriate for your discipline will carry you all the way to full professor.
"- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)"
I consider this part of my service obligation, and indeed when filling out annual reports and the like, list reviewerships and editorial positions.
The rest of your stuff on publication is actually refreshingly correct.
"- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work."
I sit on my college's tenure and promotion committee. This just actively isn't true. We look at the difference between solo and co-authored papers, where a particular individual is on a paper and the balance between first, last and middle authorships (I'm in a field that doesn't alphabetize). We also consider whether someone is expected to be there, or is anticipated to contribute a lot to work that others will end up being the lead for (as a modeler, this is occasionally the position I'm in).
Then there's positions that give considerably more weight to teaching or service.
I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it?
This makes zero sense to me.
This makes zero sense to me.
They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations.
They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.
They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.
Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.
It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations.
If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms.
Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your term) because the university gets a cut. The university administration pays salaries, endowments, whatever with that money. They also buy that durable equipment that was excluded in the contract from their “general fund”, washing the connection to the original grant.
If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms.
Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your term) because the university gets a cut. The university administration pays salaries, endowments, whatever with that money. They also buy that durable equipment that was excluded in the contract from their “general fund”, washing the connection to the original grant.
To provide a helpful analogy:
Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted.
Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they will happily carry on a discussion of whatever process you describe for that misnomer.
Voila! Your karma has been granted.
Now you just have to devote a tiny tiny amount of time and energy downstream to clarify that you weren't talking about "actually money laundering" in the sense of, you know, "general money", but rather something else entirely.
In my analogy, that tiny tiny amount of time and energy is like the lab equipment that the university provides to the poor little grant recipient.
Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted.
Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they will happily carry on a discussion of whatever process you describe for that misnomer.
Voila! Your karma has been granted.
Now you just have to devote a tiny tiny amount of time and energy downstream to clarify that you weren't talking about "actually money laundering" in the sense of, you know, "general money", but rather something else entirely.
In my analogy, that tiny tiny amount of time and energy is like the lab equipment that the university provides to the poor little grant recipient.
It's funny that you use "academia is like the mafia" as an example that we are supposed to find outrageous. The labor structure of academia has a number of similarities with how gangs operate: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...
This article was quite sloppy and inaccurate.
First, it makes the common mistake of comparing a graduate student stipends are low, while failing to assign any value at all to tuition. Many Ph.D.s are supported by grants, and their tuition is covered and is not taxed. That doesn't mean the tuition has no value, nor that money isn't exchanged to pay for that tuition. Real money is used to pay for that, and it provides a number of benefits to the student including access to the campus and all associated resources (libraries, gyms, labs, events, technology, workspaces, etc.)
People working at McDonalds don't have access to those resources from their job, so it's unfair to not include that when calculating their total compensation. When you do, they come out a lot better than low level drug dealers, as this article tries to argue.
It goes on to argue how graduate students are precariously employed. Quite the opposite, Ph.D. students are usually funded for 3-4 years under a grant. At least in the US, I don't know of many other jobs with guaranteed 4 year contracts, especially entry level. Most places are at-will and you can be fired on the spot. Ph.D. students are regarded as students, and therefore often aren't fired when they make mistakes (even big ones), because it's expected that their role is to learn.
That's another thing, is that this article focuses primarily on how the Ph.D. student is shortchanged by not being paid (in dollars) as much as a low-level employee at a corporation, but it doesn't spend any time on how such employees have different expectations. Ask a Ph.D. student if they want more money, and they say "Hell yes!" tell them they have to wear a uniform and arrive at 7:00am to open the lab, and they're fired if they're late twice, and every second of their day will be scheduled and tracked, they will be suddenly less enthusiastic at the prospect of making a couple extra bucks.
First, it makes the common mistake of comparing a graduate student stipends are low, while failing to assign any value at all to tuition. Many Ph.D.s are supported by grants, and their tuition is covered and is not taxed. That doesn't mean the tuition has no value, nor that money isn't exchanged to pay for that tuition. Real money is used to pay for that, and it provides a number of benefits to the student including access to the campus and all associated resources (libraries, gyms, labs, events, technology, workspaces, etc.)
People working at McDonalds don't have access to those resources from their job, so it's unfair to not include that when calculating their total compensation. When you do, they come out a lot better than low level drug dealers, as this article tries to argue.
It goes on to argue how graduate students are precariously employed. Quite the opposite, Ph.D. students are usually funded for 3-4 years under a grant. At least in the US, I don't know of many other jobs with guaranteed 4 year contracts, especially entry level. Most places are at-will and you can be fired on the spot. Ph.D. students are regarded as students, and therefore often aren't fired when they make mistakes (even big ones), because it's expected that their role is to learn.
That's another thing, is that this article focuses primarily on how the Ph.D. student is shortchanged by not being paid (in dollars) as much as a low-level employee at a corporation, but it doesn't spend any time on how such employees have different expectations. Ask a Ph.D. student if they want more money, and they say "Hell yes!" tell them they have to wear a uniform and arrive at 7:00am to open the lab, and they're fired if they're late twice, and every second of their day will be scheduled and tracked, they will be suddenly less enthusiastic at the prospect of making a couple extra bucks.
It's a weird chicken and egg scenario, isn't it? Grants should really be going to universities that have the equipment to do proper research. Universities rely on grants to fund their operations and lab maintenance. The whole thing just kind of gets grinned down. Additionally, there is public pressure to reduce government spending to lower taxes for private companies - who themselves are also slashing RnD budgets unless they can get a grant.
Ahh I see what you mean, thanks for explaining.
I'm not an expert so a pinch of salt is warranted but:
When you give some one money with legally recognized conditions then the organization has to honor those conditions. e.g donate money to a charity and tell them that it is to be used purchasing pens then that is all that money can be used for.
So if I understand correctly the 'scheme' here is that Lab A applies for and receives a grant that has stipulation X. As part of this process a portion of that grant goes to the hosting university without that stipulation. The university is free to spend that money however they wish, including providing some funds to Lab A for things that they really need but were not provided for under the grant.
When you give some one money with legally recognized conditions then the organization has to honor those conditions. e.g donate money to a charity and tell them that it is to be used purchasing pens then that is all that money can be used for.
So if I understand correctly the 'scheme' here is that Lab A applies for and receives a grant that has stipulation X. As part of this process a portion of that grant goes to the hosting university without that stipulation. The university is free to spend that money however they wish, including providing some funds to Lab A for things that they really need but were not provided for under the grant.
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.
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My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off.
He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people.
Also universities pay shit.
He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people.
Also universities pay shit.
Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.
It’s really all a professor does. You’re the boss of 5-10 people that are researching your half baked ideas Turing them into quarter baked ideas. Managing them + other obligations take up all their time. Very little is spent getting their hands dirty.
Why all of this cynicism? Science research at many universities is awesome and efficient. And in biomedical research and CS it is kicking ass. We are a gloomy bunch here in HN.
That does not match my experience with multiple universities and national labs, as a grad student and a member of research staff. Not at all. Where the heck are you at where it's actually working out for once?
Define many.
I do get the sense that it wasn't as bad in the past. My grandfather, as an aerospace engineer would talk about how the entire culture changed around the 80s, and it came at the expense of diligent engineering. I looked at some of the management reports from his heyday. The management structure has it's own problems - it's pretty inscrutable waterfall management. But, I definitely know they weren't working on sales.
Professors - particularly newly hired ones, need to spend almost all their time selling. Between that and teaching courses, they have little time for research. That's off loaded to their grad students.
When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.
When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.
I can't speak for most engineers (and I really can't speak for my dad either), but I think my dad is in a more researchey position at a BigCo. I think he does do proposals but I think a majority of his time is research now.
> 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
This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities.
"Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request."
"But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research."
"Yes, but they bring in overhead."
Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead:
"We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."
This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities.
"Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request."
"But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research."
"Yes, but they bring in overhead."
Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead:
"We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."
Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research.
Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.
Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.
Having tried to write a large grant recently, can slightly comment. I attempted to work with a university, because like most grants, never available without an academic tie-in. In a pithy way, the only individual grants are mostly NEA/NEH grants about writing books about writing books (also applied for those).
The university I worked with had a 40+% overhead rate auto-included. This could not be negotiated. If you want to work with us, we add this amount to our Govt. request.
The university added a lot of extra work because of this. I basically brought them a proposal, I literally walked over to their partnership office and said "I've written a proposal I'd like to work with you on." It was mostly written, and said I think "some number" would be reasonable. They said, we don't apply without 40+% overhead, rewrite the whole grant so it works with our overhead and faculty tie-in requirements. I said that seems very large, and then none of the other numbers work. They said, write with 40+%.
The eventual result was that the university wanted me to work as a sub-contractor being paid less than a different contractor they were going to hire as a specialist, so I could have the pleasure of partnering with them.
Also, it needs to be completed a month before the deadline, because then all our internals need to churn over the money numbers (and predictably came back a check mark). I was glad it lost.
The university I worked with had a 40+% overhead rate auto-included. This could not be negotiated. If you want to work with us, we add this amount to our Govt. request.
The university added a lot of extra work because of this. I basically brought them a proposal, I literally walked over to their partnership office and said "I've written a proposal I'd like to work with you on." It was mostly written, and said I think "some number" would be reasonable. They said, we don't apply without 40+% overhead, rewrite the whole grant so it works with our overhead and faculty tie-in requirements. I said that seems very large, and then none of the other numbers work. They said, write with 40+%.
The eventual result was that the university wanted me to work as a sub-contractor being paid less than a different contractor they were going to hire as a specialist, so I could have the pleasure of partnering with them.
Also, it needs to be completed a month before the deadline, because then all our internals need to churn over the money numbers (and predictably came back a check mark). I was glad it lost.
See also How Hollywood Studios Manage To Officially Lose Money On Movies That Make A Billion Dollars
For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...
For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...
wikipedia EN does not make that so clear, but they do also mention that the book itself by Winston Groom sold a million+ more copies after the movie came out..
there are remarkable stories of swindling of all kinds out of Hollywood, of course! great movie too
there are remarkable stories of swindling of all kinds out of Hollywood, of course! great movie too
Why obscene? Is rent obscene. Building, supporting, and growing research space does have expenses. And federal grants require much administrative support. Overheads are typically 50% on top of the direct research support-$1 support for every $2 of research effort. Completely reasonable.
50% was on the low end, 10 years ago when I submitted my first proposal. I’ve been out of the game for a while now, but I don’t think the rates have gone down.
My kingdom for someone, someday sitting down and figuring out what the average corporation's overhead rate would be if they had to account for it like universities. Because as much as it seems high, there's no real comparison, because no sane company would accept an accounting scheme where their internet connections, phone lines, lights and heat, administrative assistants, copy paper, building maintenance, etc. couldn't be included as part of the cost of doing business, but had to be shuffled to some other category.
In my experience, when universities are allowed to submit straightforward total cost bids for things like contracts, we're often fairly competitive with private industry.
In my experience, when universities are allowed to submit straightforward total cost bids for things like contracts, we're often fairly competitive with private industry.
They actually have gone down. Feds have tightened up. I would guess the national average is about 52% and at that overhead rate university do lose money!
Here is old news that the HN community needs to catch up on.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...
Here is old news that the HN community needs to catch up on.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...
American universities are a fantastic scheme. I'm working on a project right now to see if I can bring this to high schools. They're a massive machine to move money from taxpayers into certain organizations very effectively. That's why you'll see that the loudest voices for student loan forgiveness go to these universities. Come on, you have a Divinities degree from Harvard? That's a fictional thing. Of course you're advocating for student loan debt discharge by the taxpayers. Ideally, if you're running the university, everyone gets $1 m to spend on university, and you charge $1 m.
Once we get school vouchers going we can do that for high school too. It's going to be a revolution, man. Pure money printing.
And what's anyone going to try to say? You can't touch US universities or schools. Education is important! I think I could probably give one or two poor kids a scholarship and trot them out every now and then.
Once we get school vouchers going we can do that for high school too. It's going to be a revolution, man. Pure money printing.
And what's anyone going to try to say? You can't touch US universities or schools. Education is important! I think I could probably give one or two poor kids a scholarship and trot them out every now and then.
Harvard’s Divinity School is basically why the university exists in the first place and is very real.
The cost of tuition for undergrads at schools is certainly ridiculous and a way to siphon money from the government though. That said, I take umbrage with the people that complain about liberal arts degrees. The education is as valuable as any other kind of education in that it hones critical thinking skills in a specific discipline. Those skills are applicable to many, many jobs. The engineers I knew and liberal arts students I knew that struggled to get jobs after college struggled because they had nothing else on their resume when they graduated because they put zero thought into getting a job until school was over.
The cost of tuition for undergrads at schools is certainly ridiculous and a way to siphon money from the government though. That said, I take umbrage with the people that complain about liberal arts degrees. The education is as valuable as any other kind of education in that it hones critical thinking skills in a specific discipline. Those skills are applicable to many, many jobs. The engineers I knew and liberal arts students I knew that struggled to get jobs after college struggled because they had nothing else on their resume when they graduated because they put zero thought into getting a job until school was over.
I've worked in postsecondary policy for a dozen years and while this perspective is cynical,it's painfully close to reality in many cases. "Paying the Price" by Sarah Goldrick-Rab chronicles some horrifying case studies , if you're interested.
... Harvard Divinity is considered one of the best divinity schools in the world.
> 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".
Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.
I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.
Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.
I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.
It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable.
Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".
In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.
Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".
In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.
> Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__.
I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.
I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.
I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard.
In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.
Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.
Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.
In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.
Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.
Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.
> Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built.
There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.
In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)
There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.
In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)
Sitting on our tenure and promotion committee, I'd be extremely skeptical about someone having 30 graduate students doing a good job supervising them, and we consider having a lab of 3-5 students to be fairly productive for a pre-tenure faculty member.
I think the causation is reversed - if you're successful enough at writing grants, which involves convincing your peers that your research is that good, to support 30 graduate students, you've already met the qualifications for tenure which involves convincing your peers that your research is good enough to want you in their department for as long as possible.
Personally, my work load is worse post-tenure.
I think the causation is reversed - if you're successful enough at writing grants, which involves convincing your peers that your research is that good, to support 30 graduate students, you've already met the qualifications for tenure which involves convincing your peers that your research is good enough to want you in their department for as long as possible.
Personally, my work load is worse post-tenure.
Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.
This is hilarious. I've been lectured by several PhD's that insist the NSF is an unbiased organization, doling out grants based purely on scientific merit.
Of course, it is nothing of the sort.
Of course, it is nothing of the sort.
> The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ...
In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago.
These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too.
Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc.
Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent.
And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(
In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago.
These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too.
Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc.
Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent.
And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(
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I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor.
All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".
On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you
All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".
On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you
I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?
There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.
> Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.
Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless.
We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.
Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless.
We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.
Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.
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 acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too).
I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.
The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.
I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.
The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.
We have been increasing funding for 50 years and the problem has not been fixed. America currently sets the record in science funding (in raw amount and percentage of gdp) for any society in History and it seems to have these issues. Even if increasing funding would solve the problem, it is, at best, a short term fix. So long as there is growth in the system you can hide a lot of blight and rot. There is enough to go around so the zero sum bad actors don’t take the full pie. But the long problem with such a solution is that you cannot increase funding indefinitely. At somepoint there is a limit to how much money society can allocate to these projects. We need to make our spending work properly.
Yeah any increase in funding needs to go to meaningfully different grant processes. Giving more money to the existing funding structures will not fix a damn thing. Because the present system is just woefully unscaleable. More money to current NIH -> more PhD students -> tenure track competition remains fucking ridiculous.
We have been increasing funding in some ways. But, for example, the amount for a non-modular NIH R01 hasn't changed since the Clinton administration. A lot of individual grants are just as much work as they have been, more competitive, but pays for less science.
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)_/¯).
50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...
And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.
Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?
I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?
Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?
Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.
I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?
Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?
Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.
A couple things:
1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money.
2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits.
3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects.
You just have to state it in advance.
4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough.
1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money.
2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits.
3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects.
You just have to state it in advance.
4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough.
Thanks, this is very helpful (and hopeful).
> I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.
That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.
You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.
That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.
Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might cost more, and for this purpose would be overkill.
Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]
My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.
[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)
[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.
Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]
My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.
[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)
[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.
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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 bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead.
Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000.
Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead):
* the building
* the real estate the building sits on
* the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods)
* security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people)
* the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc.
* construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies
* grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal
* technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff
* business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this.
* all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.
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 bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead.
Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000.
Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead):
* the building
* the real estate the building sits on
* the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods)
* security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people)
* the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc.
* construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies
* grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal
* technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff
* business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this.
* all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.
Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue:
> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).
Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."
Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.
> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).
Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."
Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.
I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not thelittlenag.
> 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.
You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.
You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.
First, charities are closer to research funders than grant recipients. They are more likely to hire contractors to do the actual work or just send the money instead of doing the work themselves.
Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.
Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.
Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.
Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.
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 comparable).
Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).
Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.
In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.
Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). 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.
For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.
Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.
I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.
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 comparable).
Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).
Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.
In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.
Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). 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.
For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.
Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.
I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.
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.
> 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.
> Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.
That's a very unusual university. I have never heard of such a thing. During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff. The $7000 you mention is less than my pay was cut. Staff were unaffected.
> They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks".
I don't believe this if you are talking about a US university. That's just not how it works.
> And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.
That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for. First and foremost, they have to confirm it's legal. After that, they have to confirm they're in compliance with tax laws. I'm not even getting into state laws if it's a public university and all the other potential problems. Paying a bill without knowing what it's for would simply never, ever happen at a US university.
That's a very unusual university. I have never heard of such a thing. During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff. The $7000 you mention is less than my pay was cut. Staff were unaffected.
> They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks".
I don't believe this if you are talking about a US university. That's just not how it works.
> And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.
That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for. First and foremost, they have to confirm it's legal. After that, they have to confirm they're in compliance with tax laws. I'm not even getting into state laws if it's a public university and all the other potential problems. Paying a bill without knowing what it's for would simply never, ever happen at a US university.
Without outing her university, I will add the (possible) caveat of "private Catholic university".
> During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff.
The only real benefit to staff during COVID's early days was in the (where else) athletics department (and this is very much not a sports school), where all the coaching and related staff were kept on at full pay, and only "required" on their own recognizance to "spend time keeping up with relevant information in your field".
> That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for.
The various schools thought process is "We (the school) knows the bill details, supervisor signed off, so, Finance just needs the sum total and to send payment".
> During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff.
The only real benefit to staff during COVID's early days was in the (where else) athletics department (and this is very much not a sports school), where all the coaching and related staff were kept on at full pay, and only "required" on their own recognizance to "spend time keeping up with relevant information in your field".
> That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for.
The various schools thought process is "We (the school) knows the bill details, supervisor signed off, so, Finance just needs the sum total and to send payment".
The university your partner works at sounds like non of the universities I have worked at or heard of.
Regarding home office, when covid hit we went to all online teaching with a lead time of a few weeks (changing an in person course to online teaching is not straight forward). There was no funding for setting up the home office and rules around covid meant that you couldn't even deduce your office at home from taxes.
Even when we went to hybrid teaching there was no central support for kitting out lecture halls with cameras/microphones etc. Academics often used some research (or personal) funds for purchasing cameras etc.
About flights and misuse of funds. I find it hard to believe that people could purchase flights with their cards at all universities I have been at you had to use the approved travel agent for flights. Also the only people allowed to fly business were high level management/admin, no matter where funding was from. Also I don't have an issue with submitting receipts, however I don't see why I have to spend the time on scanning receipts which I also have to send in as original. Moreover why do I need to know freaking tax codes for a train ticket or some lab consumables? Isn't that exactly what finance's job is?
Regarding home office, when covid hit we went to all online teaching with a lead time of a few weeks (changing an in person course to online teaching is not straight forward). There was no funding for setting up the home office and rules around covid meant that you couldn't even deduce your office at home from taxes.
Even when we went to hybrid teaching there was no central support for kitting out lecture halls with cameras/microphones etc. Academics often used some research (or personal) funds for purchasing cameras etc.
About flights and misuse of funds. I find it hard to believe that people could purchase flights with their cards at all universities I have been at you had to use the approved travel agent for flights. Also the only people allowed to fly business were high level management/admin, no matter where funding was from. Also I don't have an issue with submitting receipts, however I don't see why I have to spend the time on scanning receipts which I also have to send in as original. Moreover why do I need to know freaking tax codes for a train ticket or some lab consumables? Isn't that exactly what finance's job is?
"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."
I've never been at a university where I've been able to tell the finance office "Just pay it" without pushback.
I've never been at a university where I've been able to tell the finance office "Just pay it" without pushback.
"Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load)."
They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).
They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).
Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet.
The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.
The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.
There are countries where students are not charged tuition (or, if tuition is charged, it is meagre) and there overhead from grants is most definitely seen as important revenue.
Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.
Physics Nobel winner Peter Higgs (of the boson) said the same ten years ago: “Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
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...
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...
I also find it's worth reflecting that there was a time when things were not so insane. Being unable to work at Cambridge due to a lack of advanced degress, Wittgenstein was famously pushed, at 40, to just submit his Tractatus as a PhD thesis so that he could get his PhD from Cambridge.
One of his examiners, G.E. Moore, stated the following on his examiners report:
"I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."
Having spent a good bit of time in academia I cannot imagine an institution that would make a statement so both humble and honest. Wittgenstein today would remain an interesting weirdo that, since never being formerly accredited, would be wildly considered as not worth taking seriously.
What terrifies me about today's academic environment is not only the it's own decline in quality, but it's staunch refusal to admit any knowledge created outside its walls as admissible.
One of his examiners, G.E. Moore, stated the following on his examiners report:
"I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."
Having spent a good bit of time in academia I cannot imagine an institution that would make a statement so both humble and honest. Wittgenstein today would remain an interesting weirdo that, since never being formerly accredited, would be wildly considered as not worth taking seriously.
What terrifies me about today's academic environment is not only the it's own decline in quality, but it's staunch refusal to admit any knowledge created outside its walls as admissible.
You describe a time when things weren't insane, but describe Wittgenstein being seriously considered for a PhD for a work that brought us language games and asserts "All propositions are of equal value" as an example. I tried to scribble truth tables and manipulate symbols on a chalkboard to work out how this makes sense, but I remembered that there is no such thing as truth or falsehood, so I guess I can't really judge.
That's a bit reductive. However, you're in good company: Wittgenstein himself disagreed with much of his Tractatus later in life.
3) Stephen Cook was denied tenure position at UCB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook
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 attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play.
I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.
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 attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play.
I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.
Look into the difficulties faced by the University of Austin [1] (not the University of Texas at Austin).
This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22.
Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin
[2] https://www.aaup.org/
This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22.
Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin
[2] https://www.aaup.org/
U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.
Do you think a university defined from the jump as a left-wing institution would face similar difficulties?
One of the founding tenets of U of Austin is noted as being declared that they would not factor race, gender, or class into admissions because they "stand(s) firmly against that sort of discrimination". I’m amused, but not surprised, that in the minds of some that’s a conservative idea.
One of the founding tenets of U of Austin is noted as being declared that they would not factor race, gender, or class into admissions because they "stand(s) firmly against that sort of discrimination". I’m amused, but not surprised, that in the minds of some that’s a conservative idea.
I think any institution founded for a political agenda (vs. an educational one) would likely be seen as a boondoggle, yes. And I think that's the correct viewpoint.
I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".
Belief in free speeh and other traditional values of academic inquiry is considered right wing at best, harmful at worst.
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Cancel culture is just a term for "if you say something terrible, there may be consequences." Being opposed to consequences for saying or doing terrible things is, apparently, a key tenet of the American right.
When someone uses the term "anti-woke," what they are signaling is an opposition to things like fairness, awareness of systemic racism and sexism, and the ability of LGBTQ folks to live openly without fear. As with the prior paragraph, though, opposition to these things is a key position of the American Republican party.
Q.E.D.
When someone uses the term "anti-woke," what they are signaling is an opposition to things like fairness, awareness of systemic racism and sexism, and the ability of LGBTQ folks to live openly without fear. As with the prior paragraph, though, opposition to these things is a key position of the American Republican party.
Q.E.D.
The Q.E.D. really seals the deal for me. I don’t know anyone outside of high school who still writes online like that. To be honest though, it’s a pretty good indicator, along with the immediate onslaught of *isms, that your perspectives are sufficiently crystallized that no amount of discussion here will change your views. This kind of energy does exceptionally well on reddit, are you familiar?
Excellent job completely ignoring the substance of my comment because, apparently, you're triggered by latin abbreviations.
I wish every self-righteous chode ended their arguments with Q.E.D., it would save so much time.
Funny you should mention "systemic sexism" when 60% of college students are women. If there's systemic sexism in the academic environment, it's against boys and young men.
Curious take. When it's noted that 90% of people in tech are men, it's often said that it just isn't in women's nature to pursue work in tech; or perhaps they just don't like taking the risks that men do. Is it not in men's nature to pursue education, or is it merely not risky enough?
And supposing that 60/40 split is evidence of systemic sexism towards men, what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?
And supposing that 60/40 split is evidence of systemic sexism towards men, what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?
> what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?
A legacy of systemic sexism from the time when those tenured professors were in school.
The split is 50/50 among all professors.
> Is it not in men's nature to pursue education
School is a poor fit for boys' nature (to the point that boys' nature is defined as a disease to be medicated). Perhaps it's time to consider that the system is poorly designed, and expecting children to sit still for hours at a time is unwise.
A legacy of systemic sexism from the time when those tenured professors were in school.
The split is 50/50 among all professors.
> Is it not in men's nature to pursue education
School is a poor fit for boys' nature (to the point that boys' nature is defined as a disease to be medicated). Perhaps it's time to consider that the system is poorly designed, and expecting children to sit still for hours at a time is unwise.
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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.
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.
I agree, the funding model would have to be different.
I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.
I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.
Well, no, I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about research.
I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them.
Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.
I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them.
Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.
That's been done dozens of times, we just call them corporate labs instead of universities. And it works fine. There's no reason to care about the university as an institutional form, they just suck in so many ways that are all resolved by proper companies.
Yes, there are many different purposes of a modern university. There are plenty of non-R1 universities that focus more on education. No model is "better", but it might be more or less appropriate for different students or professors depending on their goals.
Isn’t constant evaluation the problem? If you don’t have to churn out papers to meet evaluation requirements then most of the perverse incentives disappear.
It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]
It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]
They often fund new departments or centers within existing universities, because despite all the complaining about overhead rates, setting up an organization required to house, support, accept funding for, etc. research is non-trivial.
My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation
My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation
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Today they make companies. Karikó went private to great success.
Azim Premji University? Wealthy people are definitely setting up universities except they are outside the US. The center of gravity of academia is shifting eastward imho.
Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.
Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.
Yes, this is what I'm worried about. The US ought to treat this malaise as an issue of basic national security.
They were treating the malaise by importing people but now, with widespread internet access and isolationist politics, I fail to see how US can continue to be the default destination for academics across the board.
Her book Breaking Through [1] also goes into more detail about this. Basically academia is now ruled by the same rotten economic lenses as the rest of the economy. Everything is about profits, labs are evaluated in "grant $/sqft." and people are evaluated on a "resume" or dumb metrics like papers published. It's really hopeless how this economic virus infects every little corner of our world and turns it to shit.
This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly.
[1] https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34
This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly.
[1] https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34
At least profits have some rough relationship with reality in most industries. In academia it is the worst of both worlds. You need to be a start up hype man type (or something adjacent anyway) to get the grants, but you only need to deliver a paper at the end - not an actually functional product or organization. So we do not see the same upside that a market driven approach might have for eventually finding a stable state, only the downside of being ruthlessly metric driven.
Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.
The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.
The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.
This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years.
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?
It would be a shame if the formula were to "leak" accidentally, resulting in commercialization taking place in another country with looser IP laws, and saving thousands of people's lives in the process.
There is a patent, the formula is not secret. Someone needs to pay for the work to get it approved by the FDA.
I thought that the formula was not secret, but that's actually not the case: apparently, patents like this are written so that they cover a whole class of molecules without specifying exactly which one, or something of that sort. (I forgot the details.)
Why is it legal for patents to be like that? Wasn't the premise of them supposed to be "we'll fully disclose the details of this thing in exchange for a temporary monopoly on making it"?
I think that what they’re saying is that no one would pay for the expensive trials and approval process, since they wouldn’t have enough time to make their money back from it. So even if it were leaked, it still wouldn’t get produced.
It was given back to the original developer. But nobody is willing to invest in getting it to market.
This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.
This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.
This is often a clause in our commercialization agreements - that if a company sits on it, the license reverts back to us.
On this subject, I recommend the book "Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics?" by Evelleen Richards. Pharmaceutical companies have no intrinsic motivation to provide (1) cures at (2) a price one could purchase without health insurance.
Biomedical sciences are pretty bad in general. There are truly tough problems but I also think that industry is way too intertwined with academia right now, which causes cascading effects and perhaps parts of the cultural rot to spread. Obviously the economic incentives/legal concerns you've described are a different story, but the initial mistake you've mentioned that enabled the whole scenario I'm guessing is part of a larger pattern with the quality of pharma research.
I think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident.
Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives.
ie., the "Accident" is the norm
Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives.
ie., the "Accident" is the norm
I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to complex political problems tend to be either elaborate or manipulative.
Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake."
The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. "
So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.
The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. "
So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.
>anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards
Highly insightful.
Highly insightful.
cribbed from Skin in the Game (Taleb)
Sadly it's not just academia either. I've seen brilliant innovative engineers get buried because they don't spend the requisite 75% of their time managing the bureaucracy of large orgs.
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.
If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business.
If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer.
They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.
If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business.
If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer.
They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.
> Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.
Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.
Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.
Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.
Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.
> brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry.
Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries.
That should create an arbitrage opportunity.
Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries.
That should create an arbitrage opportunity.
> 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 create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.
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 create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.
I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets.
What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
> What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.
Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.
What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.
Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.
This is argument is at the center of much of the administrative bloat. It is the same if we consider the arguments around UBI, free public transport etc.
Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".
Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".
Well, there are bunch of other "cost of doing business" like bribing politicians or govt officials to get work done, expense on lobbying, paying fine rather than doing right thing by businesses and so on. I don't see people at large take this as just a cost of doing business and not something to be fixed by setting up and enforcing rules.
I would say there really isn't any fundamental difference. Any system requires a balance, and you never want that balance point at an extreme because that's where one type of cost is at a maximum. If you squeeze out all freeloaders, then your enforcement regime will eat >90% of the resources. If you remove all overhead, then the freeloaders will consume >90% of the resources. That's as true of academia as it is of law enforcement and government. Police and the judicial system need some amount of leeway to keep things sane. "Bribery" is a strong word that is used to label a vast range of activities, and no human system has ever been created that does not contain some amount of influence and persuasion. (And mostly, we just choose to call it bribery if someone else is doing it. It's defined by who more than by what.)
Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.
(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)
Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.
(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)
You're comparing lazy researchers in universities with corruption in government. If you don't see the obvious differences in nature and consequence, I'm really not sure what to tell you.
But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.
But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.
I largely agree with your complaint but I don't think the causation is quite that simple. "Bean counters" didn't show up to a highly competitive field and decide to redefine the competition. It used to be relatively easy to get a faculty position, and there used to be a relatively small number of people/papers to keep up with. As academic science grew, both in the complexity of open questions and the size of the aspiring faculty population, there was going to necessarily be some changes to academic output and its evaluation.
Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.
Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.
>What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.
Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.
What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.
Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.
Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.
What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.
Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.
But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.
You're talking about shifting a culture, and the culture is defined by the people. The current doctoral student mentality will define the future of academia, and most doctoral students are disheartened by the idea of writing grants for their careers. So, any future cultural solution will start with doctoral students.
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
However, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
However, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).
In some European countries, PhD students are paid a salary equivalent to a middle-class income in that country, and PhD slots are already few. Nevertheless, even there there is the same grant culture that everyone is complaining about here. I don’t see how the three things you propose would fix things.
If you're taking about sustaining a culture change, the doctoral students must be selected such that they will both seek academic research and avoid grant-seeking behaviors. That's why I think it's a solution, but I suppose it's not THE solution.
A few more ideas which come to mind right now include:
- Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers.
- Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education.
- Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research.
- Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD.
I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.
A few more ideas which come to mind right now include:
- Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers.
- Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education.
- Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research.
- Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD.
I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.
You don't value and promote a single or even a handful of archetypes. You value and promote a healthy diversity of approaches. Not just diversity amongst individuals but also between institutions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford all had meaningfully different research philosophies, it wouldn't be quite so obvious how to game the system.
If the NIH gave some grants like they already do, some grants that would target someone like Karikó, some grants that would target reproducibility experts, etc. (in addition to some that may be a combination of such criteria) it would be a much more complicated political game to try to be an ideal imposter. You'd still have some but I think there would be many more filtered out, and more true positives kept.
If the NIH gave some grants like they already do, some grants that would target someone like Karikó, some grants that would target reproducibility experts, etc. (in addition to some that may be a combination of such criteria) it would be a much more complicated political game to try to be an ideal imposter. You'd still have some but I think there would be many more filtered out, and more true positives kept.
I've been in rooms with Academics with egos so big it displaces enough oxygen to make it stifling. No one will challenge their behavior because it may affect their career. IMHO it is the due to the culture of Academia which is often win lose and credit based. This eventually leads to unethical behavior in some cases - falsification of data, theft of ideas and believe it or not sabotage. Any type or advancement is almost strictly based on what you can take credit for doing.
There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
Academia makes what it measures (papers that get cited). You do not need brilliant minds to do this kind of work: you just need hard-working, highly motivated "midwits" and you can pay them accordingly.
A complementary story to the one about Karikó is one about a researcher in Texas who, prior to the pandemic, kept getting his grant proposals for a coronavirus vaccine denied because "no one cares about coronaviruses".
I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.
But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.
But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
IMO there is nothing to wonder as it is part of everything in life. Brilliant candidates not getting job, brilliant students not getting thru school/college admissions, brilliant players not getting into school/college/professional teams of choice and so on.
Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.
Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.
> This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.
I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.
Being currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical ground for ideas nobody else has thought of or is willing to consider. Just like startups, somebody is going to discover something huge in there. Even if you were willing to say a university isn't a place of ideas for their own sake, and is instead nothing more than a venture capital firm like their bureaucrats seem to be asserting - in short even with the profit/greed motive intact, it still seems like a dumb strategy to model the world as linear and boring.
Sorry but no one needs more cargo cult science.
No one needs more failed startups either, but if your point is that some ideas are bad, yeah no kidding. In fact most of them are.
A cargo cult by the way would be another great example of misapprehending the world as a simple deterministic or linear place where the more mock airstrips an isolated tribe builds and the more trappings of European culture they adopt or imitate (e.g. crucifixes), the more material wealth they'll get.
A cargo cult by the way would be another great example of misapprehending the world as a simple deterministic or linear place where the more mock airstrips an isolated tribe builds and the more trappings of European culture they adopt or imitate (e.g. crucifixes), the more material wealth they'll get.
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 more money for science out there.
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 more money for science out there.
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 resourced to really handle that.
It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.
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 resourced to really handle that.
It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.
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 up with a ground breaking theory or do you want to turn the crank and measure some value a little more precise? There is value in both, but the universities really bias towards the latter because it's more expensive and needs more and bigger grants to get done.
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.
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.
Oh I should note that capex and opex aren't treated the same in grant-land either, and funding agencies can put limits on university overhead for infrastructure grants etc. so that's not all apples to apples.
The benefit to the university for soft salary or funding grad students etc. in both scenarios is the same, but getting money for a new computer cluster or a synchrotron or whatever isn't, typically.
The benefit to the university for soft salary or funding grad students etc. in both scenarios is the same, but getting money for a new computer cluster or a synchrotron or whatever isn't, typically.
It's more likely the other way around. For most grants I'm aware off universities can't charge overheads on equipment so a theoretician with lots of phd students brings in more overhead than an experimentalist that needs lots of equipment. Obviously the reality is much more complex, depending on country it's easier or more difficult to get funding as a theoretician (in the US it's supposedly much more difficult), theory groups are typically smaller, experimental research often results in more publicity... And all this really depends on the field.
I think pitting theory against experiments does not address the issues. The big problem IMO is that the funding systems are so competitive and at the same time (initially) have a large luck component, that it incentives short term, low risk research.
I think pitting theory against experiments does not address the issues. The big problem IMO is that the funding systems are so competitive and at the same time (initially) have a large luck component, that it incentives short term, low risk research.
The overhead rate for R1s is closer to 70%.
My department is actively pivoting away from more expensive researchers towards theorists, implementation scientists, etc.
Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewed in the context of being expensive.
Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewed in the context of being expensive.
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.
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.
> 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.
From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.
Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")
From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.
Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")
I don't know how much accounting is done on the university side to itemize research bills. What my advisor told me was when I was going through the ringer was that once you have the money, it's yours - you can do whatever you want with it short of embezzlement. All that matters is you make progress on the thing the funding agency granted you the money for, doesn't matter if you ran over budget or spent $100.
I work at a state university, and how we spend our allocated funding, and whether we go over budget, both matter quite a bit.
There's an extensive negotiation period to arrive at these rates - universities don't get to just pick.
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.
I think this attitude is actually a big part of the problem. Because research is largely government funded there is big political pressure to show that the research leads to measurable outcomes and that there is zero misuse or waste of funding. This is what has lead to the current system of big administrative bodies just focused on tracking how funding is used (and we can't really blame universities for the situation, reporting requirements on everything they do have increased dramatically).
On the other hand nobody cares about the waste in private industry, we are perfectly fine with paying a certain amount for e.g. a Facebook ad even though they just wasted a huge amount of money on a big VR bet.. Maybe we should just admit that there will be wastage and we can't easily measure scientific outcomes and just say we are happy with the overall benefit we get from science/academia for the price we pay for it (which in the broad picture is quite small).
On the other hand nobody cares about the waste in private industry, we are perfectly fine with paying a certain amount for e.g. a Facebook ad even though they just wasted a huge amount of money on a big VR bet.. Maybe we should just admit that there will be wastage and we can't easily measure scientific outcomes and just say we are happy with the overall benefit we get from science/academia for the price we pay for it (which in the broad picture is quite small).
If the desire to inflate results comes from the intense competition, not incompetence, then more money would fix it. The fact that the top universities are suffering big fake research scandals would bolster this. Personally I've known many competent scientists who left for greener pastures not because they couldn't cut it but because they wanted higher pay and less stress.
My dad was a professor and would joke that the way a tenure committee made their decision was that they'd print out all your papers, put them in a folder, and then throw it down a stairwell. If your packet made it to the bottom, it would be an easy yes. If it made it halfway down it would be marginal. If it only made it down a few steps it would be a definite no.
There's also the old aphorism that tenure committees can't read, but they can count.
There's also the old aphorism that tenure committees can't read, but they can count.
This is more of a Thomas Kuhn moment than anything else, where the mainstream doesn't accept new theories that will upend their own work.
I think the opposite, we need more raw labor aimed at replicating scientific results. Today our institutions are so tiny they can hardly afford what few projects are funded to completion.
In many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.
Not a very helpful sentence in the context.
Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.
We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?
Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.
Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.
Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.
We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?
Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.
Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.
I'm not sure you are disagreeing with me.
I'm just stating a situation I've observed first hand both in the academic world and in the business world.
I'm just stating a situation I've observed first hand both in the academic world and in the business world.
While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground.
Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?
UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?
UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
but the people you have to convince are the people who are doling out tax payer money for research. By definition they don't know your fabulous discovery only you know that. So you need to convince someone else that the idea you have is worth investigating and they should give you money to do it. So the people who are best at convincing other people are the people who get the grants and who get to do the research.
Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows.
Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.
Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows.
Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.
I don't disagree this is the reality. What I am trying to say, is that I hope the people who dole out taxpayer funds can spot people like Dr. Karikó and support them.
Let me try a sports analogy. In American football, each team takes turns (rounds) to draft new players. There are college players who are already famous, had fantastic careers at the college level, and all the scouting agencies said they are can't miss. Then there are college players who played for unknown schools and the scouts don't even have a grade for them. As a result, teams dedicate the first three rounds drafting the players everyone says are can't miss (the good fundraiser in the Academic world). However, the great teams are the ones who can find the hidden gems and draft unknowns in later rounds because they can see the talent (the hypothetical talent scout who spotted the potential of messenger RNA research 20 years ago).
Let me try a sports analogy. In American football, each team takes turns (rounds) to draft new players. There are college players who are already famous, had fantastic careers at the college level, and all the scouting agencies said they are can't miss. Then there are college players who played for unknown schools and the scouts don't even have a grade for them. As a result, teams dedicate the first three rounds drafting the players everyone says are can't miss (the good fundraiser in the Academic world). However, the great teams are the ones who can find the hidden gems and draft unknowns in later rounds because they can see the talent (the hypothetical talent scout who spotted the potential of messenger RNA research 20 years ago).
there is more to the analogy too. Once you have convinced a large player that your offering is important and have raised money successfully, everything gets a lot easier. Have a big grant and work at a top University attracting more money is a hell of a lot easier. Get into YC, guess what raising your Series A just increased in probability by about 20X.
Just a reminder Einstien who was the most revolutionary scientist since Newton was unable to secure a teaching position prior to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year. Why do we think academia has suddenly magically changed?
To be fair, he wrote those papers after not getting a job as a professor. He graduated in 1900, applied for teaching positions for two years after that, and then had his annus mirabilis in 1905, that's when he wrote the papers you're referring to. After that, he then applied again, and had a teaching position in 1908, then a full professorship in 1911. So, it's not that people looked at three Nobel-prize caliber discoveries, and said "you're not faculty quality, Mr. Einstein"
> unable to secure a teaching position *prior* to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year
Next time I apply for a job, I'll write "Someday, I'm going to publish 3 papers that change how we understand physics" and I'm sure they'll hire me. Who wouldn't?
Was he a good teacher?
Maybe that should play a role for getting university "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a role for Einstein.
Being a good teacher absolutely plays a role in teaching positions. Source: I work in such a teaching position and have served on several search committees.
The question was about getting such a position. Do you know any case where a hiring decision was decided by somebody being thought to be bad at teaching? Or somebody being significantly better at teaching than somebody else? How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality? (Not necessarily the same as teaching experience)
> Do you know any case where a hiring decision was decided by somebody being thought to be bad at teaching?
Personally no, but I'm sure they exist. For my debarment, hiring decisions are usually unanimous or with a few salty holdouts, but overall we only hire if the vote is overwhelming. If it seems split, we hold off.
> How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality?
The way we do it, during the on-campus interview, the candidate gives a lecture of their choice in front of a class of students. We record it and observe. Students submit feedback.
You can also use recommendation letters. We require at least 3.
Personally no, but I'm sure they exist. For my debarment, hiring decisions are usually unanimous or with a few salty holdouts, but overall we only hire if the vote is overwhelming. If it seems split, we hold off.
> How does a hiring committee evaluate somebody's teaching quality?
The way we do it, during the on-campus interview, the candidate gives a lecture of their choice in front of a class of students. We record it and observe. Students submit feedback.
You can also use recommendation letters. We require at least 3.
Most grad students, particularly ones they are interested in staying in, end up having to do some teaching or have a teaching assistant role at some point. I’m sure it is a + on the resume. Nothing individually is a deal breaker or deal maker, everything is factored in, right?
That seems consistent with my claim. Teaching experience is a "plus", no attempt is made to evaluate the quality of someone's teaching. A few CVs I've seen don't even mention teaching experience despite people having some.
There definitely are deal breakers: no (high enough impact) publications would be an easy one. There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've seen. Staying in the same country (or even the same university) is a hard deal breaker in a lot of places...
There definitely are deal breakers: no (high enough impact) publications would be an easy one. There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've seen. Staying in the same country (or even the same university) is a hard deal breaker in a lot of places...
> There is no amount of teaching quality, be it proven and famed, that would offset that in places I've seen. Staying in the same country (or even the same university) is a hard deal breaker in a lot of places...
We've absolutely hired teaching faculty without a Ph.D. (therefore lacking in publications) due to their excellent teaching ability. See my other reply about how we evaluate their ability.
We've absolutely hired teaching faculty without a Ph.D. (therefore lacking in publications) due to their excellent teaching ability. See my other reply about how we evaluate their ability.
[deleted]
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.
Harvard is at 19,000 employees for 23,000 students - but I'd be surprised if most of the employees are administrators, as this includes the plumbers, the janitors, the gardeners, the campus cops, the cooks, etc, etc.
My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).
My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).
The article I saw was this one - It claims 10,000 administrators and support staff compared to 7500 undergraduates. I'm guessing your numbers include all employees and all students, including graduate students? Clearly, one should compare administrators etc. who are focused on undergrads with the number of undergrads. The link below includes a reference to the original study, so I suppose one could tease out the proper numbers. But, in any case, there are a lot of administrators these days.
Thanks for the info.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/at-harvard-there-are-2600-more...
Thanks for the info.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/at-harvard-there-are-2600-more...
Did you school have much of a research arm? That's where you can get a lot of mismatch between the ratios because you have whole cadres of people who don't teach anyone at all or teach a few small classes because their jobs are research focused.
My alma mater, which is a research university, last year had 8000 employees for 12000 students (6000 undergrad, 6000 grad), of whom 1200 were faculty and 3000 were staff. Of the staff about 1000 were in administration-related roles (management ~200, business operations~500, office support ~300). There are about 500 dedicated research staff, which includes post-docs, research associates, and non-teaching research faculty. Research staff is the largest single employee category for the staff.
Yep. And Harvard is anything but alone in that respect.
> “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 like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.
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 like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.
> ...but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed.
Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system.
Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?
Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system.
Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?
Fully agree on your 50 years ago point. The crux of the matter seems to be how grants are awarded. Alzheimers Disease research is a case in point. [0]
What do do about it? There should be a "crazy ideas bin" that forces a percentage of funds for big research problems to be directed to investigations of off the wall approaches. We would find out who the good revolutionaries are and could even count them.
What do do about it? There should be a "crazy ideas bin" that forces a percentage of funds for big research problems to be directed to investigations of off the wall approaches. We would find out who the good revolutionaries are and could even count them.
woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?
She was admonished for speaking in her native Hungarian.
In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.
In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.
The real question has a real simple answer: Ivy leagues and equivalents are how the ruling class grooms its next generation. We put them on a pedestal because being part of the ruling class comes with benefits.
Ah yeah, the allowed kind of racism. My favourite.
I don't think requiring everyone speak the same language is racism, necessarily. If it's "speak English to include everyone in work conversation" then it's fine. If it's "don't speak Hungarian on the phone to your parents because fuck you" then no, that's bad.
I have worked in environments where teammates speak in their native language (spoken by a small minority of people at the company) and it has an exclusionary effect. Once a team (perhaps unintentionally) begins to favour those with the right native language, and a critical mass of speakers is reached, it can sometimes result in mono lingual, mono cultural teams who find it hard to hire or retain other people.
It really depends on the specific criticism and how it was phrased.
I have worked in environments where teammates speak in their native language (spoken by a small minority of people at the company) and it has an exclusionary effect. Once a team (perhaps unintentionally) begins to favour those with the right native language, and a critical mass of speakers is reached, it can sometimes result in mono lingual, mono cultural teams who find it hard to hire or retain other people.
It really depends on the specific criticism and how it was phrased.
#3 factor was brilliant. According to other accounts she also speaks her mind very forthrightly. [0]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-universi...
[0] https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-universi...
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.
This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.
The people who seek professorships aren't motivated by money, they're motivated by prestige and tenure. If they wanted money, they'd have gone directly into the private sector.
But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year.
This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet.
But for most, eventually they have to give up on their dream and do something else - except post-docs are underpaid, so they start off in a worse financial position than they otherwise would.
This has a domino effect, because those post-docs compete for jobs with fresh PhDs who never wanted to stay in academia anyway.
The effect is compounded by universities increasingly relying on adjuncts as a way to cut costs (adjunct professors are heavily exploited, and they take the abuse because they feel like they need to boost their resume to get a tenured position). So, there are even fewer tenure track positions to go around
The only way to fix it is to either reduce the number of PhDs awarded every year (not going to happen) or incentive an increase in the number of professorships at universities.
But: there just aren't enough professorships to support the amount of PhDs we mint every year.
This is causes people to go off and postdoc for years hoping somewhere will accept them. Through a combination of luck and skill, some get a job as a prof and go through the tenure gauntlet.
But for most, eventually they have to give up on their dream and do something else - except post-docs are underpaid, so they start off in a worse financial position than they otherwise would.
This has a domino effect, because those post-docs compete for jobs with fresh PhDs who never wanted to stay in academia anyway.
The effect is compounded by universities increasingly relying on adjuncts as a way to cut costs (adjunct professors are heavily exploited, and they take the abuse because they feel like they need to boost their resume to get a tenured position). So, there are even fewer tenure track positions to go around
The only way to fix it is to either reduce the number of PhDs awarded every year (not going to happen) or incentive an increase in the number of professorships at universities.
In a way, this explains why many international Ph.Ds go back to their home countries these days to join local universities. It is good for these countries.
Yes, and from a purely economic standpoint, we're betting that the handful that do stay are worth the investment of capital and resources.
> Unless something changes, this isn’t going to go well," Grady told Karikó, according to her memoir.
While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate.
> In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.
But this is just petty and cruel.
While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate.
> In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.
But this is just petty and cruel.
Tangentially related, but her daughter is Susan Francia, who is an Olympic gold medalist rower. It's wild to me when you see family members at the top of their completely different fields.
My favorite little bit about all this:
https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-...
> In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
> That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”
https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-...
> In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
> That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”
As someone who is not in academia, I'm curious how dysfunctional the incentive structures of these institutions really are? Is it more the case that aggrieved professors doing actually good research is just a rare situation bound to happen every once in a while?
Everyone thinks their research is important, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Not every chair, board, or panel can fully understand every topic, especially when it's highly specialized, much less predict its impact.
So often, people feel like they're being neglected when they're just not visible because they haven't communicated something to an audience they either don't recognize or don't value. They often write grants that don't explain the value of their work in a way that can be presented to people who don't already understand the value of the subject.
And if they're already pessimistic about support, they won't ask for support. If they're too focused on their work and not paying attention to the new hires, they won't realize they need to talk to their department about which faculty are using which labs this semester. In general, even when faculty talk to each other, they aren't always listening - at least not beyond anything that might directly be of interest to them.
And rarely does anyone ask, "How does all of this work, anyway?"
In a way, you're seeing the system working. Despite Karikó being unhappy with Penn State, she was able to perform and carry out research that did not prove critical until a global pandemic, her research was able to be located, accessed, and used, and she was subsequently recognized for it.
We can't reward potential. It's unfortunate that she felt unsupported by her department, but she did have personal advocates who helped to advance her, and she certainly wasn't the only researcher at Penn State - was she treated any differently to them?
And being blunt, if it were obvious that her research was valuable, wouldn't it have already been done by others, making this story pointless? Is it possible to be recognized for being a hidden gem before you're found?
So often, people feel like they're being neglected when they're just not visible because they haven't communicated something to an audience they either don't recognize or don't value. They often write grants that don't explain the value of their work in a way that can be presented to people who don't already understand the value of the subject.
And if they're already pessimistic about support, they won't ask for support. If they're too focused on their work and not paying attention to the new hires, they won't realize they need to talk to their department about which faculty are using which labs this semester. In general, even when faculty talk to each other, they aren't always listening - at least not beyond anything that might directly be of interest to them.
And rarely does anyone ask, "How does all of this work, anyway?"
In a way, you're seeing the system working. Despite Karikó being unhappy with Penn State, she was able to perform and carry out research that did not prove critical until a global pandemic, her research was able to be located, accessed, and used, and she was subsequently recognized for it.
We can't reward potential. It's unfortunate that she felt unsupported by her department, but she did have personal advocates who helped to advance her, and she certainly wasn't the only researcher at Penn State - was she treated any differently to them?
And being blunt, if it were obvious that her research was valuable, wouldn't it have already been done by others, making this story pointless? Is it possible to be recognized for being a hidden gem before you're found?
I've been in academics as a tenured faculty member and in other capacities and this story rings very true to me. Obviously extreme but by the same token clearly illustrative of prototypical problems. Note that this isn't the first Nobel prize winner in recent years to point out similar issues.
There's a kind of passing the buck phenomenon I think, for lack of a better way of putting it, combined with denial about the nature of research which is at its best by definition novel and risky. Basically no one wants to actually pay for anything, except for the federal government. The state or university doesn't say "we happily fund scientific advances", they expect it to be funded by the federal government. I always liken it to hiring a plumber, but with the expectation that they make money for you instead of fixing your plumbing, or that you hire them ostensibly for the latter but actually for the former. At some point there has to be service or product provision that is being paid for, and in our current society this is the federal government.
There are many complicating factors, like the fact that "funding" for all intents and purposes as far as a university is concerned means "federal government" (this isn't actually true but is mostly true), or that the evaluations of grants are based on current consensus about what is likely to produce significant findings, which deincentivizes novel research, or that projects rather than persons are funded, or that universities are administratively topheavy, or that the funding system also incentivizes pyramid schemes of graduate school, etc.
There are functional departments and universities where people can supportively function in the current zeitgeist, and some smart people can get funding for good grants. But the incentive structures are incredibly perverse now at most institutions, and basically boil down to how much money you bring in in the form of indirect funds on grants. I have been in conversations with colleagues at other universities, who were arguing about faculty who were bringing in large grant amounts, but from non-federal sources, with no indirect funds, and how this was unacceptable because it didn't benefit the university financially sufficiently even though it paid for grad students etc.
Yes universities have costs etc but in the current system Karikó's experience was bound to happen. Peter Higgs has said he would never be hired today and it's probably true. All of this will continue, or you just won't hear about certain advances because they will be shut down and never develop.
There's a kind of passing the buck phenomenon I think, for lack of a better way of putting it, combined with denial about the nature of research which is at its best by definition novel and risky. Basically no one wants to actually pay for anything, except for the federal government. The state or university doesn't say "we happily fund scientific advances", they expect it to be funded by the federal government. I always liken it to hiring a plumber, but with the expectation that they make money for you instead of fixing your plumbing, or that you hire them ostensibly for the latter but actually for the former. At some point there has to be service or product provision that is being paid for, and in our current society this is the federal government.
There are many complicating factors, like the fact that "funding" for all intents and purposes as far as a university is concerned means "federal government" (this isn't actually true but is mostly true), or that the evaluations of grants are based on current consensus about what is likely to produce significant findings, which deincentivizes novel research, or that projects rather than persons are funded, or that universities are administratively topheavy, or that the funding system also incentivizes pyramid schemes of graduate school, etc.
There are functional departments and universities where people can supportively function in the current zeitgeist, and some smart people can get funding for good grants. But the incentive structures are incredibly perverse now at most institutions, and basically boil down to how much money you bring in in the form of indirect funds on grants. I have been in conversations with colleagues at other universities, who were arguing about faculty who were bringing in large grant amounts, but from non-federal sources, with no indirect funds, and how this was unacceptable because it didn't benefit the university financially sufficiently even though it paid for grad students etc.
Yes universities have costs etc but in the current system Karikó's experience was bound to happen. Peter Higgs has said he would never be hired today and it's probably true. All of this will continue, or you just won't hear about certain advances because they will be shut down and never develop.
What is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I think it is in the next paragraph.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I completely agree.
Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants.
Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications.
So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse.
I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance.
As I said in other comments, a solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. However, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I completely agree.
Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants.
Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications.
So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse.
I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance.
As I said in other comments, a solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some. However, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.
I enjoyed this 2-Aug-2023 podcast interview covering some of this stuff: https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/
Everyone picks on Penn, but really the whole academic community made this mistake. Her research was public; any other university could have offered her a job as well. Nobody realized how important her research was at the time.
Penn sold the patent to an outside company? Maybe it should be standard in such cases (if it isn't already) to give the researchers the right of first refusal.
I wish we had a way to see whether someone was right or wrong in the past so we can judge their decision making abilities. This would help us pick good leaders.
If only there were a way to document disagreements publicly so they could be reviewed at a later date.
I had hopes that Internet discussion forums would be that, but the nukers destroyed that along with most training materials for LLMs.
If only there were a way to document disagreements publicly so they could be reviewed at a later date.
I had hopes that Internet discussion forums would be that, but the nukers destroyed that along with most training materials for LLMs.
In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.
As a woman who wonders how we solve this, I feel like the piece doesn't cast light on actionable means to make real progress. It implicitly seems to assume a thing the world calls sexism but offers no real solutions.
Presumably, Grady was a big factor here. Why was he such a problem? There's no real explanation for his behavior and we are unlikely to ever learn anything meaningful about what drove his decisions.
It airs dirty laundry, which is perhaps an essential first step in being able to analyze the problem space: First, we have to overcome the taboo against speaking of such things.
But then the initial attempts to speak of it tend to fall within some Overton Window of acceptable assumptions and this seems to do little or nothing to give women a viable path forward.
As a woman who wonders how we solve this, I feel like the piece doesn't cast light on actionable means to make real progress. It implicitly seems to assume a thing the world calls sexism but offers no real solutions.
Presumably, Grady was a big factor here. Why was he such a problem? There's no real explanation for his behavior and we are unlikely to ever learn anything meaningful about what drove his decisions.
It airs dirty laundry, which is perhaps an essential first step in being able to analyze the problem space: First, we have to overcome the taboo against speaking of such things.
But then the initial attempts to speak of it tend to fall within some Overton Window of acceptable assumptions and this seems to do little or nothing to give women a viable path forward.
The research and discoveries that are most deserving of a Nobel Prize are precisely the sort that are unexpected and unpredicted in advance. All this "Monday morning quarterbacking" by everyone who now suggest that this discovery should have been obvious 20+ years ago or that the talent of those who made the discovery should have been obvious is rather silly.
Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.
Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.
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".
UPenn is in the news again. Something tells me the fish stinks from the head.
Your comment made me curious to look up their leadership page. As of this post, Katalin Karikó is featured very prominently on the president's page, above even the president herself. That's a pretty big mea culpa.
https://president.upenn.edu/
https://president.upenn.edu/
The thing is, any human group, company, academia, etc...are influenced by politics, and those who do it well get the attention and the resources. It doesn't matter if they are technically brilliant or not.
There is no place where you don't need good communication and selling skills. That's a fact of life and it seem impossible to remove this from any of these institutions.
Kariko seems to be that very hardworking intelligent person that really needs an eloquent and self-marketer sidekick to thrive. She is a Steve Wozniak in need for a Steve Jobs.
There is no place where you don't need good communication and selling skills. That's a fact of life and it seem impossible to remove this from any of these institutions.
Kariko seems to be that very hardworking intelligent person that really needs an eloquent and self-marketer sidekick to thrive. She is a Steve Wozniak in need for a Steve Jobs.
It'd be worth taking publicly available citation network data and developing a metric based on long term (say 25y) significance vs short term. Anyone who understands how to 'play the game' can make an impact over a 5-10y period, but people who actually change the game will stand out, as would their collaborators to a lesser extent.
I'm glad to see this article calling out the people who threw stumbling blocks in her way. They deserve any career damage they get.
I'm glad to see this article calling out the people who threw stumbling blocks in her way. They deserve any career damage they get.
So what are the repercussions for the admins who misjudged or mistreated her? If there aren't sufficient changes then maybe groups should move their funding out of Penn.
This was my immediate thought too. We need perhaps a long lived website that captures misjudgement on the part of people in power and update their scores over a long period of time. A kind of public record, ledger. A kind of wikipedia, but simplified only to record +1s, -1s against their name, and the reason for it.
It was largely other biology professors, not admins. It's a bad look no doubt, and there are other issues with modern university admins - but this is a direct consequence of those in the field, not typical bureaucracy crap.
Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.
I knew there was trouble as soon as I saw "Nobel Prize [winner]" and "Adjunct professor" in the same sentence. What's it take to get tenure track these days? But she mentions the rate of publications. Kps noted that Peter Higgs said something similar as well. There's many others too! Turing prize winner Hinton had this to say about ML and I couldn't agree more
> One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas.
> Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.
Or from Bengio
> In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other hand, I am convinced that some of the most important advances have come through a slower process, with the time to think deeply, to step back, and to verify things carefully. Pressure has a negative effect on the quality of the science we generate. I would like us to think about Slow Science (check their manifesto!).
> Students sometimes come to me two months before a deadline asking if I have ideas of something which could be achieved in two months.
I'm sure you can find one from LeCun too (drop it if you have it) and we have the 3 godfathers of ML. But as someone finishing my PhD, I'm utterly convinced that the whole process is psychotic and anti-scientific. I have written many rants on HN about this so what's another? Here's how I see it, and what I've been coining as Goodhart's Hell because the idea is more abstract that ML publishing or even academic publishing. There's just a huge fucking irony that this happens in ML.
It is Goodhart's Hell because everything in our world has become about easy to use metrics and bending over backwards to meet those metrics. There is not just a lack of concern about if the metric aligns with our intended goals, but an active readiness to brush off any concerns. We as a modern world just fucking embraced metric hacking as the actual goal. In ML we see this, as Hinton mentions, with benchmarkism with just trying to get top scores. But you need several (fwiw, I've held a top spot for over a year now on a popular generative dataset but the work remains unpublished because I don't have enough compute to tune other datasets. Reviewers just ask for more but not justify the ask by how another dataset says more). This is an insane world, especially as we've been degrading our statistical principles. The last 5+ years no one uses a validation set for classification but rather tunes their fucking hyperparameters on test set results. Generative models frequently measure metrics against the train set and don't have a test set! A true, honest to god, hold out set essentially doesn't exist (we might call it "zero shot", which is inaccurate, or "OOD"...). ML work has simply become a matter of compute. Like Higgs said, you need to publish fast, but these days top companies are asking for 5+ papers at a top conference for a newly minted PhD. I'm sorry, good work takes time. All this on top of several consistency experiments that demonstrate that reviewers are simply reject first ask questions later. Which why shouldn't they be? No one checks a reject and doing so increases the odds your work gets in since it's a zero sum game.
And in honesty, I don't see how conferences and journals are anything but fraud. Not in the sense that works in there are untrue (though a lot are and a lot more are junk. Regardless of field), but in the economic operation. The government and universities (double dipping on that gov money) pay for these to exist. Universities pay researchers to produce work. Researchers send to venues (journals/conferences). Researchers review other works submitted to the venue for no pay (so Uni pays). 80% of work gets rejected, and goes through the process again. And after all that, the only meaningful thing accomplished is that the university has a signal that the work that their researchers did is "good." Because the venue gets copyright ownership over the paper, which the university must now pay for to access (the "official" version, "preprints" are free). I'm sorry, but citation count is a bad metric but far more meaningful than venue publication and it's fucking free. Why don't we just fucking publish to OpenReview? The point of publishing is to communicate our work, nothing more nothing less. OR gives you hosting like arxiv but also comments and threads (and links to github). Do we need anything else? I mean no review can actually determine if a paper is valid or good work. But we forget that the world isn't binary, it's tertiary: True, False, Indeterminate (thanks Godel, Turing, and Young). In reviewing we do not have access to the "True" side, just as we don't have access to that in science in general. We do not know where the "True" direction points, but we know how to move away from the "False" and "Indeterminate" directions. That's why there's that famous substack named that way or Isaac Asimov's famous Relativity of Wrong paper[2]. We're not a religion here...
There is at least a few ways I know how to fight back. 1) Actually fucking review a work and do your god damn job. Your job isn't to be a filter, it is to earnestly read the work and to work with the authors to make it the best work it can be. Remember you're on the same side. 2) Simply don't review if you can't do #1. You're almost never required to and academic service isn't worth much, so why do it? 3) Flip the system on its head. Instead of concentrating on reasons to reject a paper (fucking easy shit right there), focus on reasons to accept a paper. Simply ask yourself "is there something __someone__ in the community would find useful here?" If yes, accept. Novelty doesn't exist in a world where we have 20k+ papers a year and produce works every few months. It's okay to move fast, but it's less novel and impactful, it's just closer to open science. Stop concentrating on benchmarks since if it's useful someone is going to tune the shit out of it anyways, benchmarks don't mean shit. These days benchmarks are better at showing overfitting than good results anyways (yes, your test loss can continue to decrease while you overfit).
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
[1] https://yoshuabengio.org/2020/02/26/time-to-rethink-the-publ...
[2] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
> One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas.
> Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.
Or from Bengio
> In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other hand, I am convinced that some of the most important advances have come through a slower process, with the time to think deeply, to step back, and to verify things carefully. Pressure has a negative effect on the quality of the science we generate. I would like us to think about Slow Science (check their manifesto!).
> Students sometimes come to me two months before a deadline asking if I have ideas of something which could be achieved in two months.
I'm sure you can find one from LeCun too (drop it if you have it) and we have the 3 godfathers of ML. But as someone finishing my PhD, I'm utterly convinced that the whole process is psychotic and anti-scientific. I have written many rants on HN about this so what's another? Here's how I see it, and what I've been coining as Goodhart's Hell because the idea is more abstract that ML publishing or even academic publishing. There's just a huge fucking irony that this happens in ML.
It is Goodhart's Hell because everything in our world has become about easy to use metrics and bending over backwards to meet those metrics. There is not just a lack of concern about if the metric aligns with our intended goals, but an active readiness to brush off any concerns. We as a modern world just fucking embraced metric hacking as the actual goal. In ML we see this, as Hinton mentions, with benchmarkism with just trying to get top scores. But you need several (fwiw, I've held a top spot for over a year now on a popular generative dataset but the work remains unpublished because I don't have enough compute to tune other datasets. Reviewers just ask for more but not justify the ask by how another dataset says more). This is an insane world, especially as we've been degrading our statistical principles. The last 5+ years no one uses a validation set for classification but rather tunes their fucking hyperparameters on test set results. Generative models frequently measure metrics against the train set and don't have a test set! A true, honest to god, hold out set essentially doesn't exist (we might call it "zero shot", which is inaccurate, or "OOD"...). ML work has simply become a matter of compute. Like Higgs said, you need to publish fast, but these days top companies are asking for 5+ papers at a top conference for a newly minted PhD. I'm sorry, good work takes time. All this on top of several consistency experiments that demonstrate that reviewers are simply reject first ask questions later. Which why shouldn't they be? No one checks a reject and doing so increases the odds your work gets in since it's a zero sum game.
And in honesty, I don't see how conferences and journals are anything but fraud. Not in the sense that works in there are untrue (though a lot are and a lot more are junk. Regardless of field), but in the economic operation. The government and universities (double dipping on that gov money) pay for these to exist. Universities pay researchers to produce work. Researchers send to venues (journals/conferences). Researchers review other works submitted to the venue for no pay (so Uni pays). 80% of work gets rejected, and goes through the process again. And after all that, the only meaningful thing accomplished is that the university has a signal that the work that their researchers did is "good." Because the venue gets copyright ownership over the paper, which the university must now pay for to access (the "official" version, "preprints" are free). I'm sorry, but citation count is a bad metric but far more meaningful than venue publication and it's fucking free. Why don't we just fucking publish to OpenReview? The point of publishing is to communicate our work, nothing more nothing less. OR gives you hosting like arxiv but also comments and threads (and links to github). Do we need anything else? I mean no review can actually determine if a paper is valid or good work. But we forget that the world isn't binary, it's tertiary: True, False, Indeterminate (thanks Godel, Turing, and Young). In reviewing we do not have access to the "True" side, just as we don't have access to that in science in general. We do not know where the "True" direction points, but we know how to move away from the "False" and "Indeterminate" directions. That's why there's that famous substack named that way or Isaac Asimov's famous Relativity of Wrong paper[2]. We're not a religion here...
There is at least a few ways I know how to fight back. 1) Actually fucking review a work and do your god damn job. Your job isn't to be a filter, it is to earnestly read the work and to work with the authors to make it the best work it can be. Remember you're on the same side. 2) Simply don't review if you can't do #1. You're almost never required to and academic service isn't worth much, so why do it? 3) Flip the system on its head. Instead of concentrating on reasons to reject a paper (fucking easy shit right there), focus on reasons to accept a paper. Simply ask yourself "is there something __someone__ in the community would find useful here?" If yes, accept. Novelty doesn't exist in a world where we have 20k+ papers a year and produce works every few months. It's okay to move fast, but it's less novel and impactful, it's just closer to open science. Stop concentrating on benchmarks since if it's useful someone is going to tune the shit out of it anyways, benchmarks don't mean shit. These days benchmarks are better at showing overfitting than good results anyways (yes, your test loss can continue to decrease while you overfit).
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
[1] https://yoshuabengio.org/2020/02/26/time-to-rethink-the-publ...
[2] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
UPenn made the right decision for itself. If Kariko was the real deal, UPenn would still get credit for Nobel. If Kariko was a dud, they let go of a liability early.
There is absolutely no incentive for UPenn to keep a professor who isn’t bringing in money.
There is absolutely no incentive for UPenn to keep a professor who isn’t bringing in money.
The real problem here is that funding for sciences is way too low.
Grant agencies cannot always get it right. The more funding they have, the more they can give to researchers that they aren't 100% sure about.
Grant agencies cannot always get it right. The more funding they have, the more they can give to researchers that they aren't 100% sure about.
I really love how bad Penn looks on this now. It's hilarious.
This is a good outcome. Ideally, star researchers are expunged from academia where good ideas go to die and they're moved to industry where success depends on their work working.
Rolls eyes.
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If there wasn’t COVID pandemic, and mRNA vaccines did not become widely used for another decade, ms Kariko would never get the deserved recognition.
* Dr. Karikó
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.
Dude, PhDs give a fuck about PhDs. At least in the States. I would find it odd to be addresses this way. When I addressed my phd supervisor the first time with professor doctor XYZ, he just said, I am Bill. My name is Bill!
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.
How do you know if someone is a PhD? They'll tell you.
female version of the napoleon complex
Ms?
Academia seems like a wonderful place into which we, as a society, should send unlimited borrowed money.
A pretty obvious consequence of the American war on funding scientific research.
What about the psychology angle?
I get the feeling Katalin Karikó got a lot of that flak because she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by comparison).
- Your views on this?
I get the feeling Katalin Karikó got a lot of that flak because she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by comparison).
- Your views on this?
Cinderella)
Reminder that Penn is the 2nd worst school for free speech: https://rankings.thefire.org/rank/school/university-of-penns...
Unpopular opinion, but this was a reasonable outcome from the university.
If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress.
They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology.
It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.
If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress.
They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology.
It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.
You have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them.
Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need.
Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those.
It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?
Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need.
Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those.
It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?
The defense would be that this set of incentives worked. We have an amazing rna vaccine that saved millions of lives. This came about from public ally funded primary research and privately funded subsequent research.
It is easy to opine on the amazing value of the amazing technology or the vaccines should have been carried forward with perfect hindsight. This was not obvious to other academics or private markets at the time.
The only way to avoid this with certainty would be to tenure every academic, and publicly fund every project.
> It is widely recognized that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?
We do amazing things with wires and magnets. You know because the system worked, just like it did with mRNA vaccines.
Masses of very smart people do their best to assign government grants, and invest private money for returns. If someone can perfectly predict scientific winners and losers, there would be no problem.
Simply funding all "unprofitable" research is not a workable solution. If we did this, every university would have an alchemy department. Making something work is not just a matter of time an money.
I have defended the current incentives. Do you have a workable alternative that doesnt involve future knowledge?
It is easy to opine on the amazing value of the amazing technology or the vaccines should have been carried forward with perfect hindsight. This was not obvious to other academics or private markets at the time.
The only way to avoid this with certainty would be to tenure every academic, and publicly fund every project.
> It is widely recognized that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?
We do amazing things with wires and magnets. You know because the system worked, just like it did with mRNA vaccines.
Masses of very smart people do their best to assign government grants, and invest private money for returns. If someone can perfectly predict scientific winners and losers, there would be no problem.
Simply funding all "unprofitable" research is not a workable solution. If we did this, every university would have an alchemy department. Making something work is not just a matter of time an money.
I have defended the current incentives. Do you have a workable alternative that doesnt involve future knowledge?
Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institution stays strong, sometimes it buckles under the pressure.
The government funds a large amounts of unprofitable research because some of it may prove valuable. much of it does not prove valuable.
Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options.
One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded).
What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.
Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options.
One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded).
What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.
> Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society
This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.
This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.
Government investing money in private sector research is not communism. And there is no central planning going on here, it's quite distributed. At the top the people making the decisions on how much money to be allocated to research are democratically elected in free and fair elections. At the bottom, the people using the money are distributed across thousands of independent organizations, working on their own things.
"Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society."
There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.
There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.
Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. And there she made some groundbreaking discoveries that contributed to the COVID vaccine and she got a Nobel Prize, so she probably did get some people behind her.
University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.
University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.
> Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible.
People stay married to abusive partners for decades, too.
People stay married to abusive partners for decades, too.
I wish every disagreement was logged in a system so that, decades later, we could know who was right and who was wrong.
It would tell us who to listen to and who yo shun.
I had hopes that Internet forums would be that record, but the nukers destroyed that.
It would tell us who to listen to and who yo shun.
I had hopes that Internet forums would be that record, but the nukers destroyed that.
That sounds incredibly dystopian.
If you’re very sure of yourself and typically wrong, then yes. But to me the current situation is quite dystopian.
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.