Apparently this isn't an evergreen topic.
Maybe everyone here who would have been passionately engaged on this topic in 2008 has either succeeded to some extent in the job market, or given up completely.
We could talk generally about the limits of the belief-form that one institution/organization should be managed like another institution/organization, and why that belief-form appeals to stupid people.
I admit that I am thinking of Republicans who periodically argue that public schools should be run in accordance with the management tenets of some military branch or other.
The basic research enterprise is a microcosm of this. I have it from a reliable source that, despite knowing that the NIH budget doubling was a temporary one time measure, people in the financial office blithely took the years of the greatest growth during the doubling and extrapolated forward as though that trend would continue indefinitely. Those were the "projected increases in grant revenue" numbers that were presented to the dean. Run like a business indeed...maybe if the business in Enron.
Meanwhile, while labs are shutting down all over for like of funds, yet another new research building is going up next door.
I didn't post right away because I think the article is practically 100% correct. I used to sit on our institution's budget committee and was regularly appalled at how poorly business people could analyze and interpret data.
3: What budget doubled? The stimulus funding was nice, but it certainly was not an across the board doubling.
I didn't post right away because I think the article is practically 100% correct.
Yes.
5: See here. As the graph indicates, the doubling completely reversed itself within a few years. There's an updated version that looks even worse, as it shows that we're now well below the projected trend based on inflation.
When you said "one-time measure" I thought you were talking about the stimulus bump. This is something from before the recession. My memory doesn't go back that far.
That is, my NIH-specific memory doesn't go back that far. I can remember a variety of things from 2008, but was still relatively new here.
8: Here is the more depressing version that shows the stimulus bump and subsequent crash.
I used to sit on our institution's budget committee and was regularly appalled at how poorly business people could analyze and interpret data.
It's not just in academia... two days ago I spent the morning figuring out how best to explain compounding. (Real question: "But if we just pay this in year 5, [instead of year 3 and year 5,] why is our increase higher [than year 3 percentage and year 5 percentage added together]?)
This from people who control literally billions of dollars.
This from people who control literally billions of dollars.
Argh!
11: That cheers me up a bit. My entire NIH-related career has been on the downward slope.
The NIH graph surprised me, because what I've heard anecdotally from Senior people (a biophysicist--maybe he got NSF funding in the past too?) is that the funding is the worst that it's been in his life time (40 years, I guess, post Ph.d. and conscientious objector work). Sitting on committees, he used to be able to fund about 30% of the grants, and 1/3 were great, 1/3 were crap and there were good ones in the middle. Now he struggles to figure out which of the great ones is better than the others.
The 80's and 90's were great for him. Partly, I suppose, that that's because everyone loved fMRIs then.
15 to 7. I haven't looked at the link in 11.
It's certainly harder to get grants. More people are chasing them.
We haven't had a new research building put up in ten years or more. Just dorms and sports facilities.
I guess the school of public health got an addition put on.
Oh, huh, I had assumed that giant new building (Nordenberg Hall) was offices, but it's a dorm.
18, there's a new bigger children's hospital in a new neighborhood. A lot of research there.
As for the NIH I am one of many recent PhDs who has always seen applying for grants as a lottery. Like BG says, the top 30% are all worth funding, you can't specify more than that, so then a randomly selected 1/3 or 1/4 of those actually get funded and everyone else is told "Um, not trendy enough. Or too trendy. Or something. Really, just rearrange a bunch of the sentences and reapply, you might get lucky."
The idea of having a job that depends on sending in 8 grant applications a year in order to have a good chance at funding seems ridiculous. Each of these applications is a proposal to fund 2 or 3 people to work for 4 or 5 years. Who has that many ideas? Where does the preliminary data come from? But, I've also seen no clear mechanism through which I could get a faculty job anyway.
Maybe 20 or 30 years ago I wouldn't have gotten a PhD. So many more people are doing it now, a lot of us must be among the mediocre types who were just pulled into graduate programs by the increased number of graduate programs.
I've always thought somebody should do a study randomly assigning freshmen to the dorms on the flat part of campus or the dorms clear up the hill and see who gains more weight.
21: I was just there yesterday. It's mostly clinical. I went to see if I was eligible to participate in a study. The research space was just the staff conference or break room.
The terrible NSF/NIH funding climate was a factor in IF's decision to take the position she did. Given macroeconomic comparisons, it's certainly counterintuitive that things could be better in Europe, but that's how it seemed.
But this isn't really talking about "higher education". A "professor" whose job is to apply for grants and maybe give 12 lectures a year is something different.
My perception of how colleges act is certainly not this "perpetual crisis" idea. That is how they're seen by the members of a different labor force, the disaffected people who teach lots of classes and get paid barely anything. The "crisis" is an excuse for not paying money to the people who teach the classes, because we just can't afford it anymore... but students and people with other relationships to universities aren't subjected to this crisis talk. To most of us it looks like they keep building new buildings, and increasing their endowments, and the future looks bright unless you're a mediocre liberal arts college within 200 miles of several other mediocre liberal arts colleges.
Sometimes, I think nostalgically about the cold war (and then I shudder, because it was awful). But here's what was so appealing: scientists and linguists could have reasonably satisfying, secure jobs pretty much for life.
The father of a friend of mine got his Ph.D. in Physics in 1973. He's been back in academia since 1996 and done quite well, but he spent 20 years (1976-1996) at Bell Labs where he never had to worry about a grant, and he got bought out for early retirement when he left them. If he'd been 15 years older, he could have spent his entire career at Bell Labs.
I think the linked essay is great, but there is one area of legitimate (and unpredictable) crisis, namely the sudden defunding of state universities by insane state legislatures. My friends in Louisiana tell me that their governor is demanding that the university system cut its budget by a sum greater than the combined operating expenses of all the community colleges and technical colleges put together. There's no planning for something like that.
24: things are so much better in Europe it's ridiculous.
It's funny that just as California finally got tired of destroying it's state university system, various places like Wisconsin and Louisiana have jumped at the chance to destroy theirs.
Maryland is at least reasonably secure in that, despite the overwhelming stupidity of electing a republican governor, the legislature is solidly democratic and so will reign in the worst of the craziness.
Is it just Wisconsin and Louisiana? I guess that's just a new manifestation of the "Destroy the lives of government employees" tactic for delighting Republican primary voters.
How's Ohio on that front? I see my friend's Dad left California for Ohio in the early oughts.
24: things are so much better in Europe it's ridiculous.
Which is pretty strange, given the ongoing crisis. I suppose it's one upside of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of EU institutions, which I normally deplore; the ERC is more cushioned from populist attacks than the NSF.
27 - While she was on the market, Rft got a not-terribly-appealing job offer from a state university in Louisiana that has, as far as I can tell, come two steps short of being burned to the ground and the earth salted. Who needs higher education anyway?
36, SCSU seems to be a unique scenario. Margaret Soltan has been pointing to stories about corruption and criminal mismanagement there since at least 2010. Of course, being a HBCU means they get less than zero benefit of the doubt from the South Carolina government.
39: I figured it was worse than usual mismanagement, but "scatter an HBCU to the four winds" still seems beyond sketchy to me.
as California finally got tired of destroying it's state university system
Make no mistake, the destruction of the UC system is ongoing. And things are much, much worse for the CSUs.
Illinois also just jumped on the gut the universities bandwagon. State legislatures really have gone nuts: huge cuts, combined with tuition freezes and caps on out-of-state students, plus micromanaging at a silly level of detail. It'll be interesting to see whether any states buck the trend and decide to keep their universities good.
37, 24: Things are indeed much better in Europe, as long as you exclude the UK, whose higher education and research infrastructure has been captured by the MBA wanker class just as it has in the US. We used to get less than 10% of our grants in the UK, but since we moved our show to Berlin it's more like half.
I suppose it's one upside of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of EU institutions, which I normally deplore; the ERC is more cushioned from populist attacks than the NSF.
I don't think this is it. Populist witchhunts against unis/egghead academics are largely an American thing. I cannot ever recall seeing anything like that on the continent, at least, though I haven't been here terribly long...
My impression is that the situation in the UK is not just as bad as here, but actually significantly worse.
44: They seem to be hell bent on leaving Europe right now. They want to out-American the Americans.
Yes, in the UK they base a lot of funding on bizarre metrics for "measuring" productivity of the sort that you associate with charter elementary schools or provincial Chinese colleges, such that the only way to get money is to follow the transparently obvious mechanisms for gaming the metrics. This also means lack of secure funding for established faculty is followed by lack of job security.
Yes, in the UK they base a lot of funding on bizarre metrics for "measuring" productivity
Christ, yes. Around the time I left in 2011 they were actually starting to make staff (including senior scientists) fill out spreadsheets quantifying how they spent their day.
This is making me really sad. Please talk about something else. Maybe actual evergreens.
46,47: It's been my impression that the attitude of the UK towards its research enterprise in recent years has been marked by a degree of gleeful malice that's shocking even by US standards.
49: It's just the same contempt management has always had for labour. All that's new this time is it's being translated out of the private sector into higher education/research.
48 - They're not using evergreens, but you might enjoy this article on manmade micro-forests.
26: My dad rode that wave for his long comfortable career. He always referred to defense spending as "white-collar welfare".
Looking at the pictures in 53, maybe they should have tried a bit of diversity when picking the trees to plant.
Being the very lowest kind of commenter I have not read the link but my thought on university management this morning is: I have an internet sorta-friend who is in administration at Berkeley in some very vague sounding job that requires him to spend a lot of time in meetings about Leadership and I think he makes six figures (just barely, admittedly) and I sometimes think "um so you're the problem, right?"
here is one area of legitimate (and unpredictable) crisis, namely the sudden defunding of state universities by insane state legislatures
Very true.
56: Ask him to quantify his contribution in units of leadering.
I wouldn't think administrators in the barely-six-figure range would be the ones going up against the wall when the revolution comes.
They can use the side of the giant sports facilities.
Some high profile high ranked administrators seem to have gone into university administration already thinking the university has failed and see their roles as anticipating and welcoming the cuts from all sources. They're not blindsided by the crisis; they're agents of it.
To be clear, I'm thinking of only a few people, like the administrators quoted during peak mooc craze who responded to questions about retention and learning outcomes by saying, basically: "Look at our current graduation rates. It's not like we can do worse, amirite?"
63: If I'm remembering correctly, the worst offender in this regard, the guy at San Jose State University, was receiving a big payout from the MOOC company in question as a "consultant". This apparently isn't considered corruption.
60 No, they get sent to work camps. In central Nevada.
So far, "run it like a business" means I make 75% of what my counterpart at our counterpart institution in the state makes (so this isn't "cost of living is just cheaper here in Zion than NYC", but just completely maddening), while being told to be inspiring so that students graduate within six years. Yeah, me being inspiring is going to solve their bad life choices.
65: Is there work that needs to be done in central Nevada? Veterinary care for the vultures circling that one dead mule?
Speaking of Nevada, I have an old textbook from 1906 with maps of everything. On the map of the Western US there are about 30 towns identified in Nevada, and Las Vegas isn't one of them. This is a map that has Needles, CA on it. This was shocking.
I hate everything. But I especially hate university administrators.
I have a friend who is a high-level university administrator. She has a Ph.D. in a Humanities Subject with low job prospects. As administrators go, I think she's probably pretty good, because she certainly values scholarship and continues to teach during the summer as well as engage in research. In fact, she quietly recruited one of the top scholars in the department in which she got her Ph.D.
I think that her job would be necessary; it's been around a long time. Somebody has to smooth out the egos.
Somebody has to smooth out the egos.
If only!
72: She tries. Think how much worse Larry Summers could have been or some of the members of the Corporation.
I hate everything. But I especially hate university administrators.
Together, we should lead the revolution, comrade! Or maybe we should just stay home and watch TV instead.
Or maybe we should just stay home and watch TV instead.
I've been trying that method. It doesn't seem to be working.
I've got tenure, but I'm an associate rather than full professor. So when the revolution comes, I guess the order in which people will be guillotined is administrators > Von Wafer > me > tenure track assistant professors. At that point will the adjuncts just start guillotining each other?
Not before they've dug so holes in central Nevada and filled them back up again.
76: It depends on whether essear or nosflow is in charge.
75: How's your leg, now that you mention it? I've lost track as to whether you're post-surgery yet.
77: why would the adjuncts have to do that? Surely the adjuncts should be rewarded with the expropriated goods of the administrators.
The administrators keep their goods buried in central Nevada and the adjuncts are conscientious about leaving as little trace as possible.
79 Long past surgery, a week away from getting the cast off starting to put weight on it.
Excellent. Walking's a good thing.
80 Hey, they've decided which side they want to be on.
83 And carrying stuff. I was in court Tuesday, and others had to carry my crap, the wife had to drive me & carry my suit to the hotel room, etc. etc. If this is what 90 ends up being like, no thank you.
84: the side of … educating people? Are you basically just opposed to universities tout court?
I'm an egalitarian. I believe everybody should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
But then who will be left to shoot us all?
But then who will be left to shoot us all?
That's what the drones are for.
88: Academics have already done theoretical research into this problem.
I agree with the article 100% too. I worry about the state of research as universities begin to gradually get destroyed, and then I think that it is going to be a race between our future robot overlords and the incompetence of the bureaucratic and political classes.
Re: the rise of an administrative-managerial class at the expense of college faculty, one problem is that the contemporary university is only somewhat (only incidentally? only marginally?) about teaching students anymore.
Nowadays, it's all about strategic planning, alumni development, fundraising, and still more fundraising, and property management. The Dean of Parking (I'm just making this title up, btw, but it probably exists, or there's some title/position that comes close to its meaning, somewhere) is more important than, and has more power than, the Distinguished Chair of (insert research specialty here), because the number of available parking spaces on a college campus is a measurable problem that must be solved, or at least "managed."
It's not clear to me that teaching and research faculty, who already have their hands full pursuing research and teaching classes, have the time, the inclination, or even the relevant skill set, to take up property management, to manage the number of available parking spaces. Which is how/why the administrative-managerial class has arisen at the expense of faculty in the first place, of course. Not that this administrative-managerial class has been doing a good job, far from it, but they've been doing a job that faculty will not, or perhaps cannot, do.
Aren't most university administrators academics though? Like yeah the people doing the scut work in HR or Finance or whatever have MBAs but the guys making the big calls all look like academics to me - the VC, pro-VC, deans - they all seem to be current or former academics with that training and not actually products of management training.
Or Governor of Arizona through the Dept of Homeland Security.
Yeah that's kind of weird - but she's the first not to have been an academic in 20-odd years, I think.
I think there's like, one Russell Group university that doesn't have a former or current active academic as the Vice Chancellor (and the guy at Leeds who isn't is a medical administrator and former CE of the NHS, degree in biology.) Similar for the US, as well.
Harder to tell for the former polys, but Abertay (for instance) has a senior management team that's VC - academic, two DVCs - civil servant, academic, and a Registrar who's an archaeologist that used to work at the British Museum. Anglia Ruskin is two academics (VC & DVC) and Bath Spa has a senior management team that's 4:3 academics:non-academics, as far as I can tell at a glance.
It's harder to tell for deans and PVCs and such like because it's a bigger group and not as prominent, but I think it's similar there. And yes there's boards and the COOs and Registrars and other heads of "service" departments tend to be more likely to come from non-research positions (although lots are, and lots of the ones who aren't come from positions within the university not from outside) but those roles tend not to be the strategic leadership ones.
I dunno I just don't think that the senior leadership at Commonwealth/American universities is generally coming from people with a background in management in the sense of a generic skill, it's coming from people who were almost all trained as academics, have worked in universities or other aspects of higher education most of their working lives, and are basically just academics.