[HN Gopher] Negative incentives in academic research ___________________________________________________________________ Negative incentives in academic research Author : ibobev Score : 113 points Date : 2022-07-21 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lemire.me) (TXT) w3m dump (lemire.me) | quantum_mcts wrote: | I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are | becoming less productive. (To me, the complaints that there are | no more grand fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining | that we are not discovering any new continents on Earth...) | | On the subject of incentives in academia - reflecting on my | academia run, I've noticed that I was the most creatively | productive when I had a longer planning horizon in front of me. | It was either at the beginning of a several-years position. Or at | the very end when I knew that I'm leaving and didn't care | anymore. The least productive was the sequence of one-year | postdocs - when I was constantly worrying about the next one. | commandlinefan wrote: | > the most creatively productive when I had a longer planning | horizon | | I feel the same way. I've never been in academia, but | everything he said matches the negative incentive structures | I've always seen in the corporate world. For the most part, the | incentive structures are designed to catch cheaters (or | "slackers"), but since actually discovering and creating | something is virtually indistinguishable from "slacking", it | just doesn't get done. | naikrovek wrote: | > To me, the complaints that there are no more grand | fundamental discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not | discovering any new continents on Earth... | | anyone of any era could claim this. and many did. yet here we | are, still discovering things, and not discovering new | continents. | | it is folly to assume that we have discovered everything, or | even a small fraction of everything. | | I think you will find that it is difficult to find someone who | has been vetted by a system who would be open to admitting that | said system is fundamentally flawed, especially when successful | passage through that system grants things that those who have | been through it want to have, such as academia does. | armchairhacker wrote: | I 100% agree that academia is flawed. But I think the reason | we're not making grand fundamental discoveries is that the | "low-hanging fruit" was already done. | | We definitely haven't discovered everything, and we're | actually making way more discoveries much faster than people | back then. But the things which are easy or even "not super | hard" to discover have already been discovered. Most of the | discoveries require background knowledge or are more "niche" | things, because discoveries which are really big and affect | everyone are easy to find and going to have everyone | searching for them. | | In fact we _could_ maybe discover a new continent. But it | would have to be tiny or underwater or camouflaged or | otherwise have some reason that despite having a map of the | whole Earth and satellites everywhere, we haven 't discovered | it yet. When Columbus "discovered" America there weren't | nearly as many ships floating around as there are | boats/planes/satellites today. | simonsarris wrote: | > I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are | becoming less productive. | | Do you believe the average academic research paper or project | written/done today is of the same quality or better as the | average in 1980, or 1950? | matthewdgreen wrote: | I can't speak to all science, but I am a CS (cryptography) | researcher and routinely read papers from the 1980s. The | level of rigor and quality of my field's papers has | _absolutely_ improved, by leaps and bounds. The formal | definitions in those early papers are often non-existent (and | sometimes wrong in retrospect) and the proposed constructions | are often much simpler (and sometimes subtly wrong in | retrospect.) And the number of papers has increased by at | least an order of magnitude. | | On the flip side, those early papers contain the most | fundamental discoveries in our field: you're only going to | invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. It's | possible all those researchers were much smarter than we are | now. (I grant this!) But there are a lot of absolutely | brilliant people I know today. Alternatively, the lower- | hanging fruit is all gone and the problems have become much | harder. | amelius wrote: | > Alternatively, the lower-hanging fruit is all gone and | the problems have become much harder. | | Reminds me of a patent officer who said in 1899 that | "everything that can be invented has been invented." | dekhn wrote: | What's amusing about my field is that while much of the | rigor was lost (computational biology in the 90s was very | CS-rigorous), what we've learned is that deep networks beat | any human features, none of the rigors of chomsky hierarchy | really matter to find interesting biology, and you don't | even need to know how to differentiate because that's | automatic now. | cmontella wrote: | > you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or | zero knowledge once. | | Well, maybe. Sometimes things that are discovered are lost | or go completely unnoticed, so progress is not always | monotonic. For example, for a long time it was believed | that John William Strutt first documented dynamic soaring | [1] in birds in the 1800s, but just recently (2018) it was | found that actually none other than Leonardo DaVinci | documented the phenomena in his notebooks centuries before | [2]. People just didn't notice or forgot, despite those | documents being some of the most poured over in history. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring | | [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.201 | 8.002... | mmsimanga wrote: | Sometimes people just aren't ready for new knowledge or | they don't know enough to understand it. I see this when | new person enters an industry, healthcare in my case. It | takes about a year to understand the nuances between | healthcare providers, funders and administrators. I am | guessing people read what Leonardo wrote but they just | didn't understand the significance. | virissimo wrote: | Good point. The same thing definitely happens in physics | too. For example, people attributed important advances in | mathematical physics (such as the mean speed theorem) to | Galileo despite them having been already developed | extensively in the middle ages. | jules wrote: | I can only talk about computer science. The research papers | in the past would probably not be able to get published in | prestigious journals today. They'd need to get expanded from | sketchy 8 page papers into very rigorous 25 page papers. I | think we've overshot though. With papers in the modern style | you need to wade through a lot of cruft to get to the key | idea. As for the quality of the ideas...the older papers do | win. I think that's because there was more low hanging fruit, | but some part of it may be due to an incentive structure that | rewards safe bets. | seydor wrote: | Technically - yes. But it 's just that, a paper. Back then , | people were chasing glory, not "the paper" because papers | didnt matter, that s why so many of them were too short, | unreferenced etc. Science was small and more personal. Now | it's an impersonal industry and science is a product. Science | gets a lot of underserved respect out of inertia, but it | really is a big industry sector now. | quantum_mcts wrote: | > quality | | What do you mean by that? Good writing? Good rigor? Good | research work? Have a fundamental discovery? There are not as | correlated as one expects. | bowsamic wrote: | In terms of writing and quality of research methodology, far | higher in my experience | BrandoElFollito wrote: | > the complaints that there are no more grand fundamental | discoveries is alike to complaining that we are not discovering | any new continents on Earth. | | And this is a very real issue, for instance in physics. It | means that if you go for research there, it is likely to be | meh. | | I did my PhD in physics, I was thankfully at a moment where | simulations and ML were just starting so I could have fun. | There was exactly zero interesting discoveries in | nuclear/atomic/particle during my time in academia. And the 40 | years before. | | Compare this with 1090-1950. These years were simply incredible | (especially the ones around 1900, to ~1920). You had almost | every day discoveries that were shaking the world, and everyone | was aware of that. | | This is not the fault of the scientists, this is just that the | world is like this. It is indeed like complaining that there | are no more continents, but then the reasonable thing to do it | to invest more in teaching, or applied science. | justinclift wrote: | > 1090 | | 1900 yeah? | psi75 wrote: | _I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are | becoming less productive._ | | This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words | published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be. | Ten papers won't even get you tenure. In terms of metrics, the | game is a lot more competitive. | | I would argue that the bigger problem is that academic science | is now _consumptive_. Think of all those tuitions dollars the | universities get because they run a protection racket over | (what 's left of) the middle class job market. Now consider how | terrible the academic job market has been for the past 30 | years, and that professors who want even a chance of getting | respect basically need to self-fund by getting grants. Lots of | money is going in, and how much is coming out? Something, for | sure, but is it worth it? Or is it like U.S. healthcare, where | we're paying 4x for a not terrible but merely acceptable | product? | | _I was the most creatively productive when I had a longer | planning horizon in front of me._ | | Right, and this kind of opportunity has gone extinct, due to | the hypercompetitive culture you get as our society disinvests | itself in research and as funding becomes harder to find and | more winner-take-all. If the neoliberals have their way, being | a professor will just be another next-quarter focused corporate | job within ten years. | wumpus wrote: | > If the neoliberals have their way, | | Not sure where that came from. The NSF provides a lot of 3 or | 5 year grants. The science org I work for is mostly funded by | 3-5 year grants. | elashri wrote: | My supervisor told me recently that it is very risky to focus | on breakthrough topics except when you are doing PhD or if your | are tenured. probably less true for PhD if you don't have | ambitious PI. The demand for publications and results that is | mainly the way to evaluate you starting from postdoc until | tenure promotion is very tense. People usually try to do many | things and stretch themselves. sometimes this even lead to | burnout and many people leave academia for that adding to the | very competitive and low gain opportunities available in most | academic field. | | To be honest, I really think that we have wrong metric. Most | importantly, if you try to ignore them even if you get some | local support within your group. Good luck getting any fund | because funding agencies evaluation have the same problems. | crikeyjoe wrote: | psi75 wrote: | Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for | political reasons I can't (in fact, I change my username | regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why | it exists, and why it probably won't get better barring a | complete overhaul of our socioeconomic system and the myriad | corrupt institutions that support it. | | We live in an age of institutional decline and it is severe. You | see this in (trade) publishing. Your publisher no longer builds | your reputation; the publisher has pushed that responsibility | unto the author. The ones who already have the personal resources | necessary to market their books get further validation and | credibility; the ones who don't will go unheard. Academia's the | same way: universities no longer provide funding for people of | excellence; rather, they have put the onus of funding on the | professors themselves--you'll get more funding (and published in | better places) on account of using their name, and for that they | take a cut. The relationship has inverted; rather than nurturing | emerging talent, these institutions _are nurtured by_ emerging | talent, and this vampirism is sustainable because those talented | people have no other choice insofar as all the other institutions | are failing at approximately the same right. | | Consequently, we have widespread duplicated effort, channel- | flooding due to metrics-gaming (gotta get that h-index into the | three digits before tenure time) and a corporatized, mediocre | culture in which agreeability (negatively correlated with | excellence and conscientiousness) matters far too much and | salesmen run the day. | | Historically, there were nations of priests and nations of | warriors and nations of farmers. We've become a nation of | sellers; but we no longer have much to sell but our own talk. | | I don't know, for sure, how to solve this. Anyone who pays | attention can see that capitalism (which invariably becomes | corporate capitalism) is a dead end at a 21st-century technology | level... but of course the eradication of capital is merely a | necessary, not a sufficient, condition for scientific excellence. | Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this, but alone | does not guarantee much--there are a lot of cultural changes that | probably need to happen before we can build healthy institutions | again. | fnovd wrote: | >Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this | | Of course, the lede is buried exactly where expected. How novel | an idea it is that the the system is separable from its | components and that utopia is indeed achievable if only the | rest of the world would wake up and learn to serve your idea of | a higher purpose. The inevitable counterpoint is that the | system is responding predictably and efficaciously to a change | to its environment: more undergraduate funding leads to more | students pursuing graduate degrees and a greater deal of | competition in the academic space. The "problem" is self- | correcting. It turns out science doesn't need happy scientists. | | The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like this | is because your possession of a name worth attaching would | preclude this comment from existing. | bowsamic wrote: | > The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like | this is because your possession of a name worth attaching | would preclude this comment from existing. | | Socialists are actually oppressed in many countries | psi75 wrote: | zackmorris wrote: | This comment is spot-on. We've traded actual productivity for | the appearance of productivity as thrift. | | Yes that's primarily due to capitalism, specifically | neoliberalism, crony capitalism and late-stage capitalism. | | Unfortunately socialism isn't enough to save us, because even | democratic socialism demands full employment, which is | increasingly at odds with automation and UBI. | | I don't believe that we have come up with a system yet that | incentivizes the kind of one-off revolutionary invention that | most of us got into programming for in the first place. The | kind of economy where a single invention frees millions of | people from forced labor. | | Sergey and Larry come up with PageRank and suddenly everyone | wants their search engine and they're set for life. Google wins | the internet lottery and keeps all of the trillions of dollars. | What about the rest of us? We invent something and our business | fails due to long-tail effects and we die broke. 90% of | businesses fail in their first year. So it's becoming | increasingly competitive as tech improves - the ultimate tragic | result. Which self-evidently trends toward a crisis of techno- | capitalism in the future: The Singularity. Probably the last | failure in human history. | | We're looking at a situation by the end of the decade where one | guy generates an entire movie from notes scribbled on a napkin | with some future variation of DALL-E 2 and makes a million | dollars. Meanwhile another guy who doesn't have the right | connections spends his life working in the service industry as | a wage slave. | | Meaning that the most likely indicator of someone's success is | a coin flip as we enter this era of neo-fuedalism. | | Meaning that civil unrest and violence are all but inevitable | now (just turn on the TV to see it everywhere). | | Now, I think a lot of people on HN and the world at large have | not tried working for themselves, so have no idea how hard | money is to come by. Sure, we can make a quarter million | dollars every year working 40+ hour weeks at a FAANG company. | But make that from a personal project? Highly unlikely. | | Writing this now, I have given up on a solution to this coming | from the top. People close to me, even the majority of people | on HN, don't seem to get it. They'll never get it. Something in | the idea of UBI irks them deep down inside, just like with | student loan forgiveness. So it's over. | | On a personal level, I'm looking towards solarpunk and local | cooperatives that create resource streams for people outside of | the financial incentive. I think it's possible to invent robot | kits that provide things like hydroponic produce for very low | cost. Once people have their basic needs met, it liberates them | from having to beg for grants or even a job. Which is why the | entire status quo is geared against this. Rents and basic | expenses will squeeze us even harder before the end. Expect | crushing regulations against off-grid living, just like how | rain barrels have been criminalized in the southwestern US. | idiot900 wrote: | I'm an assistant professor in a medical school in the US and | agree in general with the article. It takes an absurd amount of | time to write a grant application, time that could be spent doing | science - but we faculty don't have any choice if we want to | continue our careers. | ray__ wrote: | I am the first grad student of an assistant professor | (chemistry/biology). Seeing her writing workload has made me a | lot less enthusiastic about being a professor myself. I like | writing about science, but the constant treading water | mentality makes it difficult to 1) find the mental space to be | creative and 2) take the risks that are often necessary for | innovation, especially since the careers of your trainees are | on the line. The kicker is that most grant writing isn't even | about science. Good luck with your lab! | lurkervizzle wrote: | Same exact experience - I finished my CS PhD in 2005 and | thought I would go into academia, but decided not to given | how much of academia seemed to be just writing grant | proposals vs. actual research. | | FWIW, also decided not to go into academia because of how | much smarter I realized I needed to be to be a top tier | academic! | bachmeier wrote: | > if grant applications are valued enough (e.g., needed to get | promotion), scientists may be willing to spend even more time | than is rational to do so | | This isn't worded properly. It's clearly rational _for the | scientists_ to spend time on the pursuit of grants. Otherwise | they wouldn 't be doing it. | | $100 in grant money is not the same as $100 in university income. | In fact, the whole point of the grant is to cover the cost of | doing research, and in principle should leave the university's | net revenue unchanged. (In practice, overhead changes that, but | that's a different topic.) | | The problem is that the university's objective is to spend as | much on research as possible. Grant money is simply the fuel for | that process. All else equal, more expensive research is very | strongly preferred, because that increases research spending, and | that improves the standing of the university. | | That is a seriously distorted set of incentives. All perfectly | rational. Just insanely stupid. | BrandoElFollito wrote: | > It's clearly rational for the scientists to spend time on the | pursuit of grants. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. | | This is one of the reasons why I left academia. The insane run | for grants was just starting and i said that I do not have any | intent do do that. | | I was a _scientist_. Doing science. Not filling in papers and | going to belly dancing shows. | | When I was told that this is compulsory and nobody else is | going to do it, I sad good bye and left for the industry. I was | earning 10x more, had no worries about funding or copier paper. | Plenty of my friends did it and then academia was crying | because of the brains drain and how unfair it was. The salme | who said that grats are compulsory (they were sitting in the | various jurys to accept them, instead of doing science) | denton-scratch wrote: | > It's clearly rational for the scientists to spend time on the | pursuit of grants. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. | | Is _that_ worded properly? Are you really saying that nobody | would ever do something irrational? | | If that's not what you mean, then we have to look at what | "rational" means here. I think parent didn't mean "rational" in | the sense of "maximising personal gain", but "maximising output | of quality research". | ISL wrote: | I agree with point #1, but disagree with point #2. | | Academic research is not a place to go for extrinsic motivation. | If you're not primarily in it for love, you're going to have a | bad time. | | An example: Who has heard of the Wolf Prize in physics? It is in | the set of prizes known as "second prize to the Nobel Prize", yet | essentially nobody outside of the field will react with, "Whoa, | she won a Wolf Prize? She must be really good." | | Even in the well-resourced research groups, researchers will be | find much better extrinsic reward outside of academia. Advancing | the boundaries of our understanding is priceless intrinsic | motivation for those who can find a way to stay, but doing so | requires substantial sacrifice -- more than many of those in | academia realize. | BeetleB wrote: | Extrinsic here means "extrinsic to self", not "extrinsic to | academia". There's plenty of "extrinsic" motivation within | academia. | | When you go to top universities, you'll find plenty of | academics who are extrinsically motivated: | | * Number of research papers | | * Cumulative value of grants | | * Awards | | * Titles. This was insane. Apparently being a Fellow of the | IEEE wasn't enough, so they actively sought becoming Fellows in | adjacent societies. | zekrioca wrote: | > Extrinsic here means "extrinsic to self", not "extrinsic to | academia". There's plenty of "extrinsic" motivation within | academia. | | Yes, I've also understood it this way. | sycren wrote: | Earlier this year I was exploring a web3 industry 4.0 open | science solution rethinking how research is performed, by who (or | what), skills required, deliverables (no journals needed), a | semantic knowledge base of results good & bad, validated through | repetition, a framework for how experiments are managed. | | Here's my research on the 'Challenges facing Academic Research' - | https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOkNfljM=/?share_link_id=58427... | | Quotes that I found important: | | "It discourages rigorous research as it is difficult to obtain | enough results for a paper (and hence progress) in two to three | years. | | The constant stress drives otherwise talented and intelligent | people out of science also." | | - Anonymous | | "End the PhD or drastically change it. there is a high level of | depression among phd students. long hours, limited career | prospects, and low wages contribute to this emotion." | | - Don Gibson, Scientist at BioConsortia | | Funding "affects what we study, what we publish, the risks we | (frequently don't) take, it nudges us to emphasise safe, | predictable (read: fundable) science" | | - Gary Bennett - Neuroscientist at Duke University | | "We need to recognise academic journals for what they are: shop | windows for incomplete descriptions of research, that make semi- | arbitrary editorial [judgments] about what to publish and often | have harmful policies that restrict access to important post- | publication critical appraisal of published research." --Ben | Goldacre, The Datalab, epidemiology researcher, physician, and | author | | "An estimated $200 billion - or the equivalent of 85% of global | spending on research - is routinely wasted on poorly designed and | redundant studies." - | https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... | | "As much as 30% of the most influential original medical research | papers turn out to be wrong or exaggerated." - | https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201218#COM... | | "The BMJ found that one-third of university press releases | contained either exaggerated claims of causation (when the study | itself only suggested correlation), unwarranted implications | about animal studies for people, or unfounded health advice." - | https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/7372921/health-journalism-sci... | zekrioca wrote: | I agree, specially with the 2nd point. You can see this in | virtually every academic institution where researchers will find | all ways to simply "plot" good results, i.e., beat the data until | you find what you want. The intrinsic value of the research is | nearly 0, because all that matters is to get things published to | attract citations that will help them in getting promotions and | prizes. | mpweiher wrote: | It goes beyond grants and extrinsic motivation...well maybe the | latter category is pretty much all-encompassing. | | Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker talked about this at | length here: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA | | Some points: | | - Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to a | career in science | | - Actually creating systems doubly so | psi75 wrote: | > _Original (risky) research is detrimental and likely fatal to | a career in science_ | | Although it's trite to blame Boomers for complex problems, I | actually think the fall of academia is a case where one | generation can be blamed. They're the reason risky research | makes you unemployable. They're the reason you have to play it | safe and make nice with king-makers who control the journals | that decide your reputation (because no one's ever going to | actually read your work closely enough to understand it). | | The university had a social contract. Teaching was something | professors did that merited a middle-class salary; research was | also important, but impossible to evaluate, due to these | contributions having zero extractible economic value in the | median case. You taught so the future decision-makers would | consider you and your field relevant; you researched to advance | the field. You taught to justify your salary and to promote | your discipline's general relevance to society; you researched | to justify your access to the highly-paid, part-time teaching | gig. That was the deal. | | The Boomers were the generation to cop the attitude that | research was the only labor that actually mattered (the "male | work" of academia) and that teaching ("female work") was low- | value incidental labor they simply got stuck with. They started | giving their teaching the bare minimum. Society took notice of | the shift in their attitude. Universities increased class | sizes, and they started using low-paid adjuncts and graduate | students for the labor. It turned out that they didn't | professors (i.e. research experts) to teach Calc 2 after all. | No surprise here, the demand for professors dropped, and the | only ones who can get in now are those who can convince others | --before they have the freedom necessary to achieve much at all | in research--that _their research alone_ merits a (low) six- | figure income. | | In 2022, evaluating original research is harder than ever, due | to hyperspecialization. For a typical Ph.D. thesis, there are | less than five people in the world qualified to evaluate | whether it's worthy of a tenure-track position. Consequently, | actualities matter less; the gaming of publication metrics and | salesmanship matter a lot more. | | This one actually can be blamed on the Boomers (although the | Xers and Millennials have failed thus far to fix it). They did | this. Teaching is what kept them relevant and respected... and | when they started blowing it off, society began to question as | well whether their research was really worth the investment | either. It didn't take long before state legislators (poorly | educated by professors who'd devalued teaching) and turncoat | administrators turned the professorial job market into what it | is today. | pfortuny wrote: | Please: do not assign the cause of something toa group of | anonymous and unverifiable people. This always end badly. | Always. | | And there are more non-graduate boomers than graduate ones. | psi75 wrote: | I thought it was clear that I was not blaming an entire | generation but, specifically, the much smaller set of Baby | Boomers who held positions of power either inside academia | or in sectors that have influence over it. | | As people, I don't think those born between 1943 and 1964 | ("Boomers") are any worse or better than anyone else; | historical forces explain a lot more than putative | generational character. Alas, the Boomers' middle age | corresponded in time with some really terrible people | rising into positions of leadership, to such an extent that | their generation's name has become synonymous with | dysfunctions in which the vast majority of people born | during that time, in fact, played no part. | gspr wrote: | > In 2022, evaluating original research is harder than ever, | due to hyperspecialization. For a typical Ph.D. thesis, there | are less than five people in the world qualified to evaluate | whether it's worthy of a tenure-track position. | | That's simply not true for a _typical_ PhD thesis at all. It | certainly doesn 't jive with my own experience, so I'd like | to cough up a few examples please. | | (Do hyperspecialized PhD theses like the one you describe | exist? Certainly! But I refute the idea that such these are | _typical_.) | Tostino wrote: | What timestamp on that talk if you don't mind? | jrumbut wrote: | I'm far from convinced that science is less productive as a whole | than it was in 1900, though I'm sure the average scientist today | isn't as productive as Max Planck (but of course he was above | average in his own day as well). | | Something I think would help the incentive situation is providing | more incentives for teaching and service. My grandfather was a | professor emeritus and I can't find any record of him authoring a | research paper (or a PhD thesis for that matter) but even 30+ | years since he last taught I still run into people who rave about | the formative experiences they had in his classes. He's a minor | celebrity among local engineers of a certain age. | | Such a person could still provide a lot of value, but it's harder | to measure. | mmmmpancakes wrote: | That's a nice story, but teaching =/= research and I fail to | see how this is related to research productivity. If anything | the relation is inverse because, as you said, he doesn't have a | publication record, so from the perspective of research he was | basically useless. | | If we are trying to improve research productivity, then | removing or dramatically reducing teaching responsibilities for | researchers sounds a lot more sensible. Besides, modern | pedagogy is getting increasingly complicated and having | teaching specialists can be much more beneficial to your | average 1-2 year undergrad. | | Not to diminish his teaching career, it sounds very valuable, | but not in a way that's directly relevant to the OP. | jrumbut wrote: | It's simple! Grant applications are so hard because they are | so competitive. They are so competitive because a lot of | people want to be professors. Currently, to succeed as a | professor you need a research grant. | | If, instead, we made it easier to advance your career as | exactly the kind of pedagogy specialist you described (as | well as through leadership in professional organizations, | work in the community, and all the other kinds of service), I | believe you would get fewer applications to those research | grants. It might result in better post-secondary education as | well. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-21 23:00 UTC)