[HN Gopher] 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katali...
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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Kariko
Author : happy-go-lucky
Score : 345 points
Date : 2023-10-27 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedp.com)
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > "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 Kariko,"
| 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.
| wavemode wrote:
| woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta
| "scientist"? or "brilliant"?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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.
| przemub wrote:
| Ah yeah, the allowed kind of racism. My favourite.
| kaashif wrote:
| 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.
| skulk wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...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?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| raincom wrote:
| This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe,
| time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| 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.
| raincom wrote:
| 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.
| waterheater wrote:
| Yes, and from a purely economic standpoint, we're betting
| that the handful that do stay are worth the investment of
| capital and resources.
| m_a_g wrote:
| This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries
| are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| 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.
| Const-me wrote:
| 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.
| rewmie wrote:
| > 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.
| finnh wrote:
| That was GP's point - that things are much better for
| engineers than people in academia (and perhaps science).
| rewmie wrote:
| I guess my point is that engineering and academia are not
| independent and mutually exclusive sets.
| robocat wrote:
| > 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.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| waterheater wrote:
| 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).
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| omginternets wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| omginternets wrote:
| >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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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".
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| omginternets wrote:
| 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.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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.
| tverbeure wrote:
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 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
| noobermin wrote:
| Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back
| the IP and give it to another company?
| ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
| 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.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| 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.
| wolf550e wrote:
| There is a patent, the formula is not secret. Someone
| needs to pay for the work to get it approved by the FDA.
| tverbeure wrote:
| 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.)
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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"?
| tverbeure wrote:
| 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.
| waterheater wrote:
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| A complementary story to the one about Kariko 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 -- Kariko'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.
| strangattractor wrote:
| 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.
| waterheater wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| rewmie wrote:
| > 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.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| smath wrote:
| 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.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| UPenn is in the news again. Something tells me the fish stinks
| from the head.
| kogus wrote:
| Your comment made me curious to look up their leadership page.
| As of this post, Katalin Kariko 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/
| frostburg wrote:
| That's just taking undue credit.
| bell-cot wrote:
| It's not a mea culpa if there is no sign at all of them
| admitting that they f*cked up.
| ahoka wrote:
| Pharisees.
| drno123 wrote:
| 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.
| edent wrote:
| _Ms_?
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| * Dr. Kariko
| Almondsetat wrote:
| are we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use
| your honorific every time you are mentioned
| Invictus0 wrote:
| female version of the napoleon complex
| bitzun wrote:
| 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.
| Beijinger wrote:
| 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!
| neuronerdgirl wrote:
| 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.
| Eumenes wrote:
| How do you know if someone is a PhD? They'll tell you.
| gustavus wrote:
| 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?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Was he a good teacher?
| staunton wrote:
| Maybe that should play a role for getting university
| "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a
| role for Einstein.
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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"
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > unable to secure a teaching position *prior* to publishing
| 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Well...yes. Treating the actual high-value workers like sh*t has
| been American Academia's SOP for how many years now?
| wrycoder wrote:
| I read yesterday that there are now more administrators than
| students at Harvard, but 'only' one third as many teachers as
| students.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yep. And Harvard is _anything_ but alone in that respect.
| vkou wrote:
| 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).
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| queuebert wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| queuebert wrote:
| The overhead rate for R1s is closer to 70%.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| Djle wrote:
| 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.
| test77777 wrote:
| 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.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| 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.
| ccooffee wrote:
| > 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!")
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| 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.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| queuebert wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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).
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| 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.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| That sounds incredibly dystopian.
| bjornsing wrote:
| If you're very sure of yourself and typically wrong, then
| yes. But to me the current situation is quite dystopian.
| kps wrote:
| 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-...
| RecycledEle wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Rolls eyes.
| thelittlenag wrote:
| My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads
| her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the
| ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the
| university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this
| doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the
| professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant
| process means having published "interesting" research along
| avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often
| times this means building on existing lines of research over
| pursuing new paths.
|
| The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who
| they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers,
| collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of
| hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is
| effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after
| thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.
|
| The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total
| mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was
| never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had
| she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately
| somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers
| game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great
| discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful
| grant applications.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Any source of funding will spawn an industry designed
| around extracting every dollar from it.
| godelski wrote:
| 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 -\\_(tsu)_/-).
| raincom wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| rmah wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| This behavior is known to all parties. It's openly
| advertised and discussed by the admin office people.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.
|
| _cue the audience laughter_
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants
| work to understand what's going on.
| HansHamster wrote:
| 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.
| johnvaluk wrote:
| 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.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh I see what you mean, thanks for explaining.
| burnished wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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.
| mattkrause wrote:
| 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).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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... .
| kps wrote:
| I've heard the same about the DEC PDP branding -- a
| "Programmable Data Processor" could slip through where a
| "computer" couldn't.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| "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".
| mattkrause wrote:
| 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.
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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.)
| godelski wrote:
| > 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?
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is really painful to read.
|
| That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not
| thelittlenag.
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| 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
| ".
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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?
| ilya_m wrote:
| > 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.
| godelski wrote:
| > 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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."
| cvwright wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| araes wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| fritzo wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| golem14 wrote:
| 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.
| seanr88 wrote:
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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.
| fsh wrote:
| I think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important
| inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life
| showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs
| were far more influential.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Sorry I did get it backwards.
| seanr88 wrote:
| 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.
| seanr88 wrote:
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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. Kariko 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).
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| shrubble wrote:
| 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...
| 5kg wrote:
| 3) Stephen Cook was denied tenure position at UCB:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook
| robd003 wrote:
| Reminder that Penn is the 2nd worst school for free speech:
| https://rankings.thefire.org/rank/school/university-of-penns...
| mightyham wrote:
| 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?
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| 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 Kariko
| 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?
| waterheater wrote:
| 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.
| zamalek wrote:
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Tangential quote I heard once, "Harvard is a hedge fund with a
| university attached".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 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?
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| johnp271 wrote:
| "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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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?
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| d--b wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| godelski wrote:
| 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
| aborsy wrote:
| The US academic system is focused on money, and operates like a
| for-profit business.
|
| Does EU produce better science, I wonder?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 Kariko, 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, Kariko'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."
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Cinderella)
| mlsu wrote:
| 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
| Kariko.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Today they make companies. Kariko went private to great
| success.
| waterheater wrote:
| 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/
| ubermonkey wrote:
| U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from
| the jump as a right-wing institution.
| etrautmann wrote:
| 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.
| dbmikus wrote:
| 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.
| johnp271 wrote:
| 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.
| senkora wrote:
| > Unless something changes, this isn't going to go well," Grady
| told Kariko, 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, Kariko 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.
| very_good_man wrote:
| Academia seems like a wonderful place into which we, as a
| society, should send unlimited borrowed money.
| dakial1 wrote:
| 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.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| 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.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| 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.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I really love how bad Penn looks on this now. It's hilarious.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| What about the psychology angle?
|
| I get the feeling Katalin Kariko got a lot of that flak because
| she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by
| comparison).
|
| - Your views on this?
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