[HN Gopher] Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate
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Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate
Author : gautamcgoel
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-04-21 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chronicle.com)
| every wrote:
| Hey, when you've got a political base to whip up and make crazy,
| consequences don't matter...
| squokko wrote:
| Going to be tough for UT, which regularly hires people who are
| among the best in the world, and was essentially at the
| Berkeley/UCLA/UMich level of public university. They will still
| be able to hire, of course, but they won't be able to get Nobel
| Prize-level people without offering tenure.
| csa wrote:
| > but they won't be able to get Nobel Prize-level people
| without offering tenure
|
| I'm fairly certain that most Nobel Prize-level people are not
| worried about tenure. They will be gainfully employed as long
| as they want to be.
|
| If they are looking for a delayed retirement, they can just
| move to a tenured spot when they reach a certain age.
| squokko wrote:
| I'm talking about the people who seem like they could win a
| Nobel Prize someday when they're just finishing their PhD,
| not the people who already have one.
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| If there are trying to reduce entitlement spending, maybe they
| should start with their own state pension system. Maybe start
| with state representatives and move from a guarantee benefits
| system to a 401k or similar system where benefits aren't
| guaranteed.
| [deleted]
| yawnxyz wrote:
| as far as I know, Australia doesn't have tenure either. But with
| the contract system they do have, it feels like a combination of
| "you'll be taken care of" and "...but you still have
| responsibilities".
|
| That said, it seems stressful for new professors though
| Willish42 wrote:
| Getting stronger academics in Texas universities has been an
| uphill battle for quite awhile. I don't think this will make
| things any better, and I struggle to see any genuine argument for
| why this isn't the politically-motivated intent.
| Gabriel54 wrote:
| As a TA at a certain public institution in Texas, the level of
| some students' incompetence by the time they reach their final
| year in undergraduate studies is shocking and saddening. And yet,
| almost no one fails, because there is pressure to pass everyone.
| One would literally have to do nothing in order to fail. Few
| professors have the time or energy to deal with these issues, so
| standards get lower and more students pass without knowing their
| subject. The only thing protecting professors from retaliation
| (not acquiescing to pressure from administrators / deans to pass
| students) is tenure. We can see clearly what will be the effect
| of this legislation.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Scott Aaronson who has tenure in Texas describes the effect as
| this:
|
| > [...] it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading
| research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate
| end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly
| slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options
| moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty
| hiring. Particularly in STEM fields like computer science, those
| who become professors typically forgo vastly higher salaries in
| industry, not to mention equity in startup companies and so on.
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7243
| linuxftw wrote:
| This comment presumes that public universities are the proper
| venues for this type of research. They're not.
|
| The only reason people are foregoing higher salaries to work at
| universities is because universities have pushed private
| research almost completely off the map.
|
| And even if public research is necessary, it doesn't need to be
| part of the university system. Ever heard of the NSA? They do
| research, yet somehow they're able to exist without being a
| university.
|
| (Not saying OP is disagreeing or agreeing with the statement
| from the article).
| larkost wrote:
| How do you suppose that universities have pushed industry out
| of research? The reality is that industry has bay-and-large
| decided it only wants to do the development part of R&D, and
| leave the research to someone else. Universities have stepped
| in to fill that gap.
|
| Of course this is messy, for example industry is very
| involved in the research in AI, but in places like medical
| technologies near 100% of the early development of everything
| from drugs to most devices is done out of Universities, and
| there is nothing stopping industry from trying to step in
| there.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > This comment presumes that public universities are the
| proper venues for this type of research. They're not.
|
| Why aren't they? It reads to me like you are making the same
| presumption, just in the other direction, without the support
| you see as lacking in the original quote. Please forgive me
| if I've missed something vital.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability
| to recruit competitively,
|
| I wonder. For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher
| salaries. Who knows, maybe these universities will get more
| bang for their bucks that way. After all, there are industrial
| research labs that play in the same league as the top research
| universities.
|
| And there are other forces that make people want to pursue
| academic careers. Academics are very ego-driven, they measure
| their success in prizes, grants, publications, so if these
| universities give them the means to do that, they'll still
| attract top talent.
| romwell wrote:
| > For one thing, tenure can be replaced by higher salaries.
|
| Do you imply the universities will magically get more money
| somehow?
|
| >Who knows, maybe these universities will get more bang for
| their bucks that way.
|
| Scott Aarsonson knows. _They won 't_.
|
| Also, everyone in the field does. There's a reason tenure
| exists.
|
| >After all, there are industrial research labs that play in
| the same league as the top research universities.
|
| Same league, a microscopic fraction of the scope. The bottom
| line is always there, and it guides which research gets
| funded.
|
| >And there are other forces that make people want to pursue
| academic careers.
|
| ...most of which are given by tenure.
|
| >Academics are very ego-driven, they measure their success in
| prizes, grants, publications, so if these universities give
| them the means to do that, they'll still attract top talent.
|
| As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not.
|
| All that aside, great research takes time and persistence,
| and culture, and environment, and working groups. All that
| disappears once your core is transient.
| caddemon wrote:
| > As someone with a PhD in mathematics: absolutely not.
|
| I'm blown away by this statement. Maybe math is an amazing
| haven of curiosity, and if so that is good to know. But
| academic credit is half the damn currency of science, and
| it is 100% the main reason that many profs are willing to
| take a pay cut. This is something openly joked about by
| people at all levels in my department (biology), and of
| what I know from some physicists I am close to it is not
| great there either. Though this could also have some
| subfield dependence.
|
| In biology tenure is hardly a direct benefit anyway because
| there's nothing much you can do without grants, and no one
| wants to stop being thought of as productive/smart. People
| chill a little after getting tenure, but only because 50%
| of them are basically fired at that decision point. Tenured
| faculty absolutely still play the grantsmanship game hard
| in biosciences.
|
| I suppose in mathematics there is not as much impact that
| university status can have, because way less upfront money
| is needed.
| caddemon wrote:
| I don't agree with this as a state policy, but I don't know if
| it is as disastrous for UT as Aaronson makes it out to be.
|
| The academic job market is an absolute fucking bloodbath.
| Plenty of very qualified up and coming researchers struggle to
| get TT positions at major research universities. If they stay
| in academia, many postdoc for an absurdly long time or settle
| for career stagnating instructor positions (even though their
| focus had been research), or maybe just become a researcher
| within someone else's lab. An actual professorship at UT even
| if it were not possible to be tenured would surely be
| preferable to those options I'd think.
|
| I guess it comes down to how badly you think the current system
| is performing at selection. But the competitiveness is
| absolutely insane, that part is objective.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > An actual professorship at UT even if it were not possible
| to be tenured would surely be preferable to those options I'd
| think.
|
| And also it includes a gamble that texas will reinstate
| tenure.
| nappy-doo wrote:
| Do you think the legislature cares?
|
| The answer is no. They are virtue signaling, and the GOP
| governors are in a race to out-Trump Trump so they can run for
| president.
|
| The US is becoming bimodal. There are those that want to
| regress society and cause harm just to cause harm, and there is
| everyone else standing around going, "surely they will stop
| soon." But, it will not stop. Less than half the US listens to
| media moguls who just this week settled for repeated and
| systematic lying.
|
| It is surprising how cheap it's been to ruin what was once the
| "City upon a Hill".
| drewcoo wrote:
| "City upon a hill" [1] is a Christian sentiment.
|
| Given TX also wants to post "the ten commandments" (no note
| of which ten) [2], given the rather impressive dominionist
| [3] domination of the US courts at various levels [4], I
| don't see anything contrary to the "city upon a hill" at all.
| Unless we want to ague over sectarian differences, that is.
| The people in power today tend not to be Puritans.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill
|
| [2] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3963001-texas-
| state...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology
|
| [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-
| abo...
| marcusverus wrote:
| > There are those that want to regress society and cause harm
| just to cause harm...
|
| Nope. It's true that the US has split into two camps with
| competing worldviews, but the belief that your worldview is
| the one, true worldview, and the other worldview not only
| wrong but _malicious_ is just dogmatic nonsense.
|
| Out of an abundance of caution, I would advise against
| drinking the refreshments at your cult meetings.
| bjt wrote:
| While I think he's right, I wonder if that might still be a
| tradeoff worth making. Or at least, a sane person could argue
| that it is. Competition between universities for rankings skews
| a lot of what happens in higher ed. The state of Texas could
| rationally think "we want to spend our tax dollars subsidizing
| the education of Texans, but we're not super interested in
| spending those dollars to fund the academic rat race."
|
| The people who want to win that rat race will go somewhere
| else. UT will be greatly impacted but I don't think the overall
| scientific output of the USA will.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I struggle to see how this benefits _Texas_ , though.
| Education is an investment in the future; encouraging the
| best professors to go elsewhere is like saying you want the
| future to happen elsewhere. Maybe that's what Texas wants,
| but universities usually bring startups and high-tech jobs
| along with them.
|
| It kinda reminds me of how Texas wanted to get in on the
| blockchain hype, so they passed legislation making it
| extremely friendly to _Bitcoin mining_ , which happens to be
| the most competitive, low-margin, environmentally damaging
| part of the crypto ecosystem. Meanwhile most of the high-
| margin profit centers (exchanges, DeFi protocols, new
| blockchain technologies) remained in the Bay Area. It's like
| Texas is awfully fond of setting up selection filters and
| then selects for the mediocre.
| screye wrote:
| How does Texas's research output affect its ability to pull
| in top professionals from elsewhere ?
|
| The mid-west has amazing public STEM schools in UMich,
| Wisc, UIUC, Purdue....and yet their economic centers are in
| free fall. On the other hand, none of Texas's top cities
| had a top public school (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) and
| they got by just fine. Austin's rise fairly recent. If
| anything, the sad state of local economies near massive
| flagship universities like UMass, Penn State, UFl, TA&MU
| shows that top-graduates clearly do not care about
| "sticking around" near their university, and instead just
| work at whatever the actual economic center is.
|
| Waterloo is one of the top tech schools of the world thanks
| to a well run co-op program, and their professors have
| little to do with it. Top universities are amazing thanks
| to getting the best students and amazing undergrad
| teachers, who often tend to be PhD students or lecturers.
| Neither have tenure, so I'm not too worried about their
| ability to keep the momentum going.
|
| Hell, I'm not even sure that the research output itself
| will drop. It's not like the total funding for universities
| went down. We might even see $$ go towards more competitive
| areas, and a further increase in productive output.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Austin is Texas's fastest growing city (and in the USA),
| and the metro is known as one of its richest. UTA has
| some role in fostering a tech scene that isn't as nice in
| Dallas or Houston (and doesn't really exist yet in San
| Antonio).
|
| Seattle definitely benefits a lot from UW and its
| computer science department, but there is some cycle
| going on (Intel and Microsoft were heavy backers of UW
| CSE in the earlier years, and also took many of its
| graduates).
|
| People do care about sticking around if they can. If the
| school is somewhere nice; e.g. in the Bay Area, Seattle,
| or Austin.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| It's almost as though the state leadership is utterly
| incompetent :)
| mbreese wrote:
| The point of hiring faculty isn't to have a collection of
| impressive faculty doing cutting edge work. Otherwise, you'd
| get the same effect by funding corporate R&D research. I
| mean, yes, they can collect more federal grant resources, but
| that's not why a state government wants to fund it. Prestige
| is one factor, but it's not the only factor... because you're
| right, funding the rat race isn't the point.
|
| The point is to hire faculty doing cutting edge work is that
| they _train_ students. They teach others in a field. Then you
| get to grow the local knowledge base about a particular
| method or field. Hopefully, you 're training citizens of the
| state, who then will stay locally instead of going to a
| different state (avoiding a brain drain). Or just as likely,
| you're trying to draw in students from out of state or
| internationally. And then (hopefully) those people will want
| to stay within the state, either for more research, or to
| start/join local companies.
|
| It's not the primary effect of the faculty that you want...
| that's nice, but it's the second order network effects that a
| state _really_ wants to encourage.
| sterlind wrote:
| you hire faculty to 1) train students 2) to do cutting edge
| work 3) on fundamental/basic research and unprofitable but
| important topics. academia's not just an internship.
| caddemon wrote:
| The smartest people in a field are not necessarily the best
| at training, especially if they care more about their own
| research end goals than trainee outcomes and/or have never
| gotten proper guidance on how to effectively mentor.
|
| Whether someone would be/is a good graduate student mentor
| is a total side dish when it comes to hiring and tenure
| decisions too. Grants, publications, professional
| connections, research topic/vision, are all more frequently
| discussed.
| 0xBDB wrote:
| As a practical matter I doubt UT and A&M will be affected at
| all. They're two of the richest universities in the United
| States thanks in large part to the Permanent University Fund
| (i.e., oil money). They'll 1) raise pay substantially and 2)
| tap their big-money donors to create professorial sinecures
| that amount to unofficial tenure.
|
| If you get fired because of the legislature's antics, but
| still get your salary and have access to quasi-university
| resources (grad assistants and labs), were you really fired?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? I think part of the problem with modern
| college education is the lack of industry experience and the
| another part of the problem is that professors are more
| interested in research than teaching
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Clarifying a bad headline: it's not that tenure can't be offered
| (only) to new faculty. It's that henceforth nobody would be given
| tenure, even if they were already employees. Existing employees
| who are already tenured would be grandfathered.
|
| And obviously only for public institutions.
| malshe wrote:
| That's my understanding too. I was surprised to see the
| headline because we have a couple of assistant profs in my
| department going up for tenure next year and I was told that if
| this law passes they won't be able to do that anymore.
|
| Edit: Looks like it applies only to new hires.
| https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/20/texas-senate-tenure-...
| medler wrote:
| > It's that henceforth nobody would be given tenure, even if
| they were already employees.
|
| If I'm understanding you correctly, I think this is not true?
| "The legislation would apply only to faculty members hired by
| Texas colleges after January 1, 2024. Professors who have
| tenure, have applied for tenure, or are on the tenure track
| would not be affected."
| stainablesteel wrote:
| tenure was supposed to allow professors to be able to speak their
| mind without fear of being fired
|
| but apparently modern bureaucracy has evolved to get around this
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Texas has been rapid firing bills and actions that destroy local
| communities ability to self-govern as well as actions like these
| to try and spite what they view as the opposition. It's not going
| to end well for Texas (and is the reason why I left the state in
| the first place), but none of the ghouls in charge care because
| they'll be dead and / or get their payday before the problems
| come to roost. Much like Ken Paxton being a criminal that hasn't
| been put behind bars yet.
| telotortium wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ECOij - the page wasn't loading for me for
| some reason.
| ajford wrote:
| So as a Texan I'm on the fence here.
|
| I wasn't directly involved (as a student and TA), but spent a
| fair while in academia, and was rather close personal friends
| with a number of adjunct professors, tenure-track profs, post-
| docs, and grad students. I was looking at staying in academics so
| I had many long discussions about the state of things (at least
| at the time, about a decade ago).
|
| There was a lot of concern in the field about how tenure was an
| incentive and a solid goal to strive for, but it left much for
| the administration to abuse. Between the politics and bureaucracy
| and constant jockeying for tenure track, it made it hard to focus
| on the students. Since you had to "play the game" or get cut or
| tossed out, that forced non-tenure profs to spend time outside of
| teaching. Then you had the shitty profs that just wanted that
| tenure protection so they could avoid teaching and just do their
| own personal research. And since it was so easy to cut adjuncts,
| they had little to no bargaining position and were often given
| shitty pay. So I'm all for ditching Tenure or otherwise reworking
| that pile of garbage.
|
| But on the other hand, I don't trust anything coming out of the
| TX lege right now. Especially if it's got Dan Patrick excited.
| They're trying their hardest to create an authoritarian theocracy
| using the same playbook as DeSantis, and this seems like another
| step in controlling education in Texas to paint the narrative
| they want.
| runnerup wrote:
| I also feel like if achieving Tenure then allowed profs to stop
| "playing the game" and start "focusing on the students"...that
| getting rid of tenure means no one can ever stop "playing the
| game" and will never be able to "focus on the students".
|
| Personally I feel there are two different jobs in academia that
| need to be split up: Teaching students, and doing research. I
| feel that professors should be able to apple for jobs
| specifying a 60/40, 50/50, 75/25, 100/0, 0/100 split between
| those two roles. Don't make people research who just want to
| teach. And dont force students to suffer professors who don't
| want to teach them.
| thechao wrote:
| There's a lot of conversation going on, but I _am_ familiar
| with a number of the parties pushing this legislation. The
| entire point is so that the lege can force TX universities to
| get rid of "undesirable" faculty. Full stop: it's a means to
| stifle divergent opinions. I'm under the impression that
| there's _already_ a list.
| screye wrote:
| While the intentions of this change are admittedly malicious, I
| support the move away from the traditional concept of tenure.
|
| Tenure is about exploiting researchers through their 20s as
| PhDs/post-docs and 30s as assistant-professors, with tenure being
| a possibility at 40. In the best case scenario, these researchers
| hit 40, and enjoy what is really an early retirement. Reality is,
| many will find that nothing is good enough to get tenure at an R1
| institute.
|
| With the industry moving as fast as it is, professors become
| obsolete rather quickly. Just look at the huge number of new
| professors in crypto and NLP, whose entire labs have become
| obsolete overnight. Honestly, the over-production of PhDs is a
| big problem today. Hopefully these changes will be the much-
| needed slap in the face needed for a whole generation of new PhDs
| to look elsewhere for employment. Tenure is a winner take all
| system, where the small number who succeed, do it at the expense
| of the far-too-late disillusionment of the majority.
|
| There are broadly 2 different types of academics. The
| economically productive ones and the money sinks. The money sink
| academics (Non-stem, non-business) are doomed to a life in
| academia, irrespective of tenure. They aren't employable in their
| profession elsewhere, effectively captives of the system. The
| economically productive ones will be given great 'deals' by the
| university anyway. These people are important, and universities
| will raise wages, give work-life balance deals, allow them to
| have their own practice and give them long contracts. Tenure is a
| flaky lever used liberally today, but forcing universities into
| offering more concrete deals is probably better for the employees
| overall. College basketball doesn't need to offer tenure to
| $$hire$$ the very best coaches .
|
| Tenure's main benefits were that professors were unfireable. In
| 2023, we see professors being practically bullied into submission
| by students. We see professors lose creative control over their
| departments with administrative takeover. Professors are slaves
| to their funding sources, in a manner that is no different than
| working in industry. The only appeal of tenure is thus idea of
| 'early academic retirement'. But that too is a lie, because the
| system will have squeezed every bit out of you. You might as well
| be a 65-yr-old in a 40 yr old's body by the time you get tenure.
|
| Tenure won't just go away. It will be replaced by more flexible
| deals. I for one, am looking forward to a change in academia,
| that adjusts to the death of honor based systems and the
| realities of a completely messed up supply-demand equation
| between universities and candidates.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I think at SOME institutions this is needed. Professors who have
| stopped teaching and just waiting for retirement weigh down
| universities. Students learn from professors who have a vested
| interest in their learning. What incentivizes tenured profs?
| quantified wrote:
| Not the law yet, but as Scott Aaronson (I'm positive along with
| others) has pointed out, this would make their universities
| vastly less attractive to various incoming faculty.
|
| Whether that would be as impactful in STEM as in the humanities
| or human-interest areas like law remains to be seen.
| notch898c wrote:
| I would think a top performer would like least the tenure
| system, as they're in demand but their job outlook stunted by
| (perhaps numerical minority) crusty elements that can't be
| supplanted.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Really? The whole grind in academia for new hires is to get a
| job on the tenure track.
| tedivm wrote:
| The few people I know with tenure are just happy to be out of
| the academic grind, as it's absolutely brutal. Being tenured
| also doesn't lock you into a specific university- one of my
| professors had tenure but took a job elsewhere on a tenure
| track.
| [deleted]
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I would disagree but only, specifically, academia's already
| broken system. Tenure takes the heat off an academic such
| that they can deeply, deeply study a system. Academia's still
| stuck in lines-of-code style measuring sticks of performance
| so the rush to tenure is often pumping out salami slices
| worth of papers to secure future funds.
| 542458 wrote:
| The thing that I don't understand is that:
|
| * Academics say publish or perish is terrible and produces
| warped incentives.
|
| * Academics say they need tenure to protect senior
| researchers from the publish or perish system.
|
| * But academics seem to be the ones building grant and
| advancement systems that enforce "publish or perish".
|
| I don't get it - it certainly sounds like tenure mostly
| protects senior academics from systems they built
| themselves. If publish or perish is so bad why don't senior
| members of departments build advancement opportunities that
| don't rely on impact factor? Cynically, it almost feels
| like tenure is enforcing publish or perish, because those
| with tenure set the rules and the current system protects
| those who are tenured.
|
| Furthermore, I don't see why the sort of "deep study"
| research that the idealized tenured researcher does would
| need special protection. If the researcher has a track
| record of success surely the department would tolerate a
| brief lull in publications while they work on their Magnum
| Opus? Private industry frequently does multi-year deep
| research projects without the need for tenure systems.
| DrSAR wrote:
| I think your incorrect assumption is that tenured faculty
| are running and shaping the universities. Much has been
| written about the rise of different class in the academy:
| administrators. For a somewhat extreme position look here
| [1]. And even tenured faculty are subjected to the
| performance assessments that can seriously hinder their
| research agenda. As the saying goes: Tenure has never
| protected those who really needed it.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/05/10
| /kill-a...
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Ahmen!
| fmajid wrote:
| And even tenured UT or A&M professors will seek to move out to
| tenured positions elsewhere because no one wants to go down
| with a sinking ship. This is a singularly bad idea as Texas had
| successfully transitioned from being a resource extraction
| economy to a technology and medical one.
| whitemary wrote:
| > _this would make their universities vastly less attractive to
| various incoming faculty_
|
| ...but given the flood state of the academic labor market,
| still rather attractive.
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I doubt they will have much problem finding people who are
| qualified to teach.
|
| But it's going to make it more difficult to continue hiring
| people who are seen as some of the best in the world in in-
| demand areas.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| But will it affect their football recruiting?
| Beldin wrote:
| > I doubt they will have much problem finding people who
| are _qualified to_ teach.
|
| There's some ambiguity there.
|
| In my experience, it's not necessarily hard to find someone
| whose credentials match job requirements wrt. teaching.
| Finding a good teacher for an academic position can be
| quite hard though.
| nextos wrote:
| IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in many
| areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.
|
| Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark
| comes to mind, and this scared tons of great faculty.
| haweemwho wrote:
| > IMHO, right now, tenure is the only edge Academia has in
| many areas of STEM compared to industrial labs.
|
| This.
|
| Even with tenure in place, I'd never go to academia. So much
| politics, worry about grants, immobility in what to do
| research in, low compensation compared to industry jobs, so
| much frustration, frustrated and bitter colleagues... It's
| terrible. I love working with colleagues that all have the
| best interest of the workplace in mind. I find that in
| industry a lot. In academia it's really rare.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Other countries have suppressed tenure in the past, Denmark
| comes to mind
|
| I could be wrong but I don't think it's correct
|
| https://employment.ku.dk/tenure-track/tenure-track-at-ucph/
|
| any links on that?
| alsodumb wrote:
| In Engineering (especially robotics and ML/AI), it's
| definitely not the tenure that's making people apply for
| assistant professor roles. Almost everyone I met did it only
| because they want the freedom to pick the research direction
| and work on challenging problems. A few genuinely like
| teaching, but that's about it.
| caddemon wrote:
| The main edge is freedom in research topic (at least to the
| extent of what granting agencies are willing to fund), and
| freedom in publishing your ideas and results as you see fit.
|
| Tenure is a ridiculous gamble right now. Getting a tenure
| track position at a major research university in most fields
| if you do everything right is something like a 10% chance
| after multiple years of dreadfully paid and generally poorly
| treated postdoc. Then it's only 50/50 or so whether you get
| fired after ~5 years. You don't know if you will be tenured
| until you're pushing 40, and in bio you'd be lucky to know by
| then.
|
| The EV of going for tenure these days is fucking awful.
| Besides, almost anyone capable of getting tenure in a STEM
| department at UT is super employable in the corresponding
| industry and definitely does not need tenure to protect their
| job like a random grade school teacher. The only place it's
| helpful is if you start really questioning people or pushing
| buttons, but that just goes back to intellectual freedom
| being the real perk, not the job security.
|
| Might be different in something like ML where DeepMind and
| OpenAI can systematically take talent, but seriously the job
| market to get tenure track professorship currently is
| brutally competitive, to the point it is straining the whole
| academic system.
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| Even with tenure, you would need to be extremely passionate
| about education or research to go into academia in fields
| like software or mech/chem/EE. The opportunity cost is easily
| 6 figures/yr, for your entire career.
|
| The hours are long, the pay is laughable, the kids are not
| alright, you must publish or perish...maybe these
| universities are intentionally selecting for professors who
| will have a high tolerance for abuse.
| kpw94 wrote:
| Since Texas is the topic: university salaries are public
| and used to be published in a Texas Tribune. A visiting
| professor at a Texas university, with probably no intention
| of tenure based on his career, was paid $340k/y back in the
| 2010s:
|
| https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-creator-of-C++-Bjarne-
| Stro...
|
| Of course he's not a nobody, but if Texas universities pay
| that kind of money to superstar professors, for small
| stints, this could attract people from industry that in the
| end are much more up to date on the industry's state of the
| art (vs the research state of the art).
|
| The top 5 other professors (but probably many tenured) were
| making in the ~$200k range at that time too. In that part
| of the country, it's huge.
|
| Ultimately tenure has a price. if there's no tenure, higher
| salaries would be offered.
|
| Now the impact on student's tuition could be interesting,
| but if most of it goes to administrative staff anyways, who
| knows?
| uberman wrote:
| You might be able to cherry pick some outliers for sure.
| Just like at any company or institute. I can tell you
| from personal experience though that the going rate for a
| new hire full STEM professor with tenure at a prior
| institution was 95k at UT Austin in that time period.
| nostrademons wrote:
| ~$200K is about starting comp for fresh graduates at a
| FAANG. When a fresh college grad can make more than a
| tenured professor, it's awfully hard to convince people
| to take that first rung into academia, where you're
| getting paid _a lot_ less than $200K.
| nextos wrote:
| Note some good US universities pay entry-level FAANG
| salaries to assistant professors.
|
| If you can negotiate a low teaching load, it might be OK in
| some cases.
|
| Nonetheless, I agree with what you say. I'd add there is a
| ton of nasty politics, bullying, etc. which might be hard
| to avoid while you are on tenure track chasing tenure.
| ls612 wrote:
| Assistant professors (tenure track) in decent public
| business schools start at $300k salary. And this is in
| the Midwest. And I know that the top private business
| schools pay more, just that it isn't public information
| like it is at the public universities. Now obviously
| those people would likely be paid higher salaries in the
| private sector (even CoL adjusted) but the economics of
| it ensures that pay for professors of fields in demand in
| the private sector will be at least somewhat decent.
| anvuong wrote:
| What are those universities? In Pacific Northwest it's
| only 100-150k for Assistant Prof from what I've seen.
| [deleted]
| uberman wrote:
| Let's say that was true and I am calling BS on it as I
| happen to consult in higher ED at an Ivy. Would it be a
| problem if it was true that someone with a phd and 3 or 4
| years of additional research experience were to make the
| same salary as a newb undergrad?
|
| Note, where I consult, new 4 year grads get offers that
| often exceed the salary of their tenured professors.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| The opportunity cost is still likely 100k/yr for the rest
| of your life, even with the FAANG salary to assistant
| professors.
|
| consider this: You can be a new grad, get hired at Apple,
| and earn an entry-level salary[0]. Let's say we won't
| include the bonus and you get 130k/yr. You colleague is a
| new grad and goes to a PhD program at Duke University[1]
| where they earn 33k/yr.
|
| In your first year, your PhD program colleague earns 97k
| less than you.
|
| From years 1-3, your average base pay will be 138k, and
| your PhD colleague earns the same wage. They now earn
| 105k less than you for each of those years. Your
| colleague is in the hole over 400k opportunity wise.
|
| In your 4th and 5th year, you can expect to earn 141k on
| average. Your colleague, still making 33k/yr, is now
| making 108k/yr less than you. At the end of 5 years, your
| colleague has completed their PhD and is in the hole over
| 600k in opportunity cost.
|
| Now your colleague gets an associate professorship
| position. This assumes your colleague is extremely lucky
| and does not go into a post-doc. They earn 115k [2] base
| at NYU. In your 6th year at apple you're still making
| that 141k. You're still out-earning them by 26k. Your
| colleague is on the tenure track, which can take 6 or 7
| years. [3]. All that time you're getting more and more
| YoE, while their pay band stays relatively the same
| during this time. Let's say the opportunity cost is 26k
| over 6 years, so an additional 156k to their over 600k.
|
| At full professorship at NYU, your colleague is earning
| 162k [4] after 5 years PhD + 6 years tenure track. You,
| an Apple engineer (probably senior at this point), with
| 11 YoE are earning 165k/yr [5] at this point. Your
| colleague has cost themselves 750k in opportunity cost,
| and you're still earning a bit more than them! _A full
| professor may never catch up to the opportunity cost of
| academic track, salary wise._
|
| tl;dr: EVEN IF you get paid 160k base as a full
| professor, your years of phd + tenure track associate
| professor salary will mean you will likely never, _ever_
| catch up with someone who new-graded at a FAANG and never
| left that circle.
|
| 0. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Software-
| Engineer-New... 1. https://gradschool.duke.edu/financial-
| support/tuition-fees-a... 2.
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NYU-New-York-University-
| Ass... 3. https://www.beyondphdcoaching.com/academic-
| career/how-long-d... 4.
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/NYU-New-York-University-
| Pro... 5. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Senior-
| Software-Engin...
| verall wrote:
| I get your using glassdoor and citing sources, but it's
| even worse, because someone competent enough to go
| straight into an associate prof position after PhD would
| guaranteed be making more than $200k at 6 years tenure at
| Apple, probably closing in on $300k.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Great analysis and arguably much too conservative. But
| the assumption is that positions in industry are equally
| stable. In the world of startups not so much. And Google
| and Facebook making even FAANG look volatile.
| haweemwho wrote:
| That academia job is less stable. Bring in grants or go
| home. Compete with others to climb a pyramid that gets
| more and more narrow at the top.
|
| Even if you are laid off at Google or Facebook, with
| those on your resume, anybody will take you, unless you
| are some weird incompetent fluke. If you didn't get a new
| grant, you'll have a hard time in academia. Good luck
| switching institutions once you are unsuccessful in the
| grant game.
| anvuong wrote:
| If you have a PhD in CS and you get tenured track
| position immediately right after finishing grad school
| without doing any postdocs, then I guarantee you can make
| at least 200k/year in your first year at any decently big
| tech company.
|
| I have seen people with 2-3 NIPS papers and a bunch more
| from other conferences failed to obtain assistant
| professorship, it's ridiculous right now.
| beambot wrote:
| Please give an example of such a university?
| [deleted]
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I doubt that. What does UCLA pay entering STEM AI
| faculty?
|
| FAANG salaries for MS in CS at or above $300k. Starting
| salary in genomics, stats, ML and AI in a very well
| funded medical college with PhD and 4-year postdoc is
| less than half that.
| themitigating wrote:
| This is the republicans punishing groups of people they don't
| like.
| wyager wrote:
| We've been in a Schmittian friend/enemy political environment
| for decades now. We've long since abandoned politics-as-
| societal-optimization-mechanism; it's now just competition for
| resources. The republicans were just slow to get with the
| program and are now playing catch-up.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Specifically people who can say what they want because they
| have no fear of losing their jobs.
|
| Pretty rich coming from the party of "free speech".
| drstewart wrote:
| >Specifically people who can say what they want because they
| have no fear of losing their jobs.
|
| Ah, like the Supreme Court. Good thing we don't see anyone
| suddenly wanting to do away with lifetime appointments there,
| otherwise there might be some hypocrisy floating around.
| [deleted]
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Indeed, the state shouldn't be able to silence free-speech
| regardless of how one feels for the content [1, 2]. One should
| use reason and logic to counter arguments instead of force [3].
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/desantis-f...
|
| [2] https://time.com/6258304/florida-bill-ban-dei-crt-
| universiti...
|
| [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
| politic...
| xmddmx wrote:
| Tenure is to Academia as Venture Capital is to Entreprenureship.
| You give resources (money, which buys time, office space,
| equipment, support staff...) to a bunch of promising individuals,
| hoping that some of them will do amazing things, but knowing most
| of them will not.
| satysin wrote:
| So the Texas Senate just passed a bill that makes it more likely
| that Texas faculty hires will be from a smaller and no doubt
| lower quality pool of candidates?
|
| Why take a job without the possibility of tenure vs anywhere else
| in the US that has the option available to you?
| mkl95 wrote:
| If you don't plan on staying in academia forever, tenure vs no
| tenure shouldn't really matter.
| bsder wrote:
| Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching American history
| and have a bunch of people who want you fired because you had
| the temerity to talk about slavery.
|
| Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching English
| literature and have a bunch of people who want you fired
| because you have the temerity to point out that Chaucer's
| characters have the symptoms of syphilis.
|
| Tenure matters if you happen to be teaching biology and have
| a bunch of people who want you fired because you had the
| temerity to teach about DNA and evolution.
|
| Shall I continue?
|
| Yes, there is enough oversupply of PhDs that Texas will still
| fill the roles. They'll just have to fill them over and over
| as people will leave the first chance they get.
| drstewart wrote:
| [flagged]
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| I'm tired of responding to folks caught up on the wrong
| shit, so here's what I should have said in the first place:
|
| In my personal experience I've seen or heard of more
| professors espousing their personal views as fact than most
| online and academic discourse would have otherwise led me
| to believe possible.
|
| I think removing tenure is a net loss for research because
| professors now have to worry about politically motivated
| reprisal for their research, whereas I believe it to be a
| net gain for student education since professors can then be
| held accountable for failing their basic responsibility of
| teaching factual information to the best of their knowledge
| based on the available research in their field of study.
| dctoedt wrote:
| How often do your scenarios occur in real life?
| drstewart wrote:
| Oops, you meant to reply to the parent comment. It's a
| mistake on your part, you may want to clarify.
| dctoedt wrote:
| No, I was responding to a comment that now starts out,
| "I'm tired ...."
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| thebooktocome wrote:
| In the real world of academia, CRT is a legal theory, not
| a biological one.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| thebooktocome wrote:
| The false positive rate for students reporting "my
| professor is teaching critical race theory!!!" is
| outlandishly high.
|
| CRT is also not "political pop science propaganda" so I'm
| not convinced you can recognize it either. It's a legal
| theory. About law.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| > I don't care what CRT is academically
|
| Wut? Aren't you explicitly talking about an academic
| context? Wouldn't that matter a heck of a lot what class
| your brother was getting taught? Like, hypothetically I
| can disagree with feminism but I'm just being stupid if I
| go to a feminism 101 class and get mad the professor is
| teaching feminist theories.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I think using an example of {x} where x is an academic
| subject matter, and the complaint was that it was used in
| an academic setting, and is used as an example of a bad
| behavior involving academic institutions, it's worth
| inquiring if that example is valid! If I presented a
| mathematical proof in a math paper in a math journal, my
| proof being incorrect is kind of a big deal.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Why bother removing it? You're not under the impression
| that misrepresenting your brother's anecdote matters.
|
| I'm happy we drilled down and got to what really
| happened, which as far as I can tell was something along
| the lines of, "my professor said something about race
| once and it hurt my feelings." In Florida (and probably
| in Texas, too, or soon enough I imagine), I think that's
| a felony now!
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| I removed it because I'm tired of responding about the
| individual anecdotes without anyone actually
| acknowledging the root argument. I don't want to write a
| three page essay on how I verify information that affects
| my general outlook of the world, and then dismiss and
| forget the details surrounding the verification of
| information as immaterial to the view I now hold.
|
| I'm not an academic, I'm just a regular guy who happens
| to have had bad experiences with professors abusing their
| positions of authority. I don't have sources to cite, and
| this belief holds such a small peripheral place in my
| world view that I don't have the level of detail
| available to deal with this level of... whatever the hell
| this was.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The replacement for tenure track faculty is teaching only
| faculty, which is already happening across the world.
|
| Teaching only faculty have even less incentive and time
| to stay on top of research progress. 10 years out of
| their PhD, the teaching only faculty is hopelessly out of
| touch of the state of the art in any super active field.
| tombert wrote:
| > actively retaliate against students who try to stand up
| for their faith.
|
| Outside of chain emails and the movie "God's Not Dead",
| has this really happened? Anecdata, but when I took an
| intro to philosophy course my professor was pretty open
| to religious people talking about their justification for
| stuff. For that matter, I took a "religious ethics"
| class, which spent a not-insignificant time talking about
| Christian ethics (in addition to a lot of other popular
| religions). It was actually a pretty interesting class.
|
| This was at a public school, evidently.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| drstewart wrote:
| >Outside of chain emails and the movie "God's Not Dead",
| has this really happened?
|
| As often as the OPs scenarios have happened, which you
| were strangely quiet on questioning the validity of. Just
| an oversight, I'm sure.
| tombert wrote:
| Ok, so are you saying that "never" is the answer to both?
| drstewart wrote:
| Yes
| petsfed wrote:
| >Tenure hurts if you happen to be teaching biology and
| have a bunch of people who want you fired because you
| teach politically motivated Critical Race theory.
|
| Considering that CRT is a legal and historical theory,
| not a biology theory, I think that's a fair concern.
| Similarly, tenured European history professors should be
| called on the carpet for requiring reading and homework
| on perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics.
|
| Your first point is not really coherent. Do you mean to
| say that some professor should be fired for
| overemphasizing slavery's role in American history? Or
| underemphasizing?
|
| An actual example that's come up: tenure hurts if a law
| professor is critical of a dominant industry in your
| state, and you want to fire her for saying so in a
| professional capacity[0].
|
| I can't speak to the impact on STEM, but this will 100%
| hurt Texas' ability to operate law schools, and it will
| likely also impact its ability to provide basic general-
| studies curriculum as is generally considered necessary
| for a bachelor's degree.
|
| 0. https://www.hcn.org/issues/173/5582
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| [deleted]
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| From what I understand the tenure system was already in decline
| and it was already understood that getting tenure was
| effectively out of reach for the younger generations of
| professors.
| tombert wrote:
| Not college, but my wife is wrapping up her teaching
| certification soon. We have both considered moving to Florida
| (we both have family that live there), but there is no chance
| in hell that we are moving to Florida and teaching; the
| infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill is so broad and idiotic (and she
| would be teaching _biology_ ), that Florida is a complete non-
| starter for us since neither of us really have any desire to be
| sued because some parent feels she might be teaching some
| "woke" agenda. I have no idea if my wife would be a good
| teacher, but I do know that if I were a teacher and I had
| options to teach elsewhere, I would not teach in Florida.
|
| Similarly, professors are kind of absurdly underpaid, at least
| in STEM. Generally if you're qualified to be a professor in
| STEM, you're qualified for a nice yuppie job paying twice as
| much; one of the very few appealing things that professorships
| have is tenure.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| you should definitely move to a state that suits your
| political background, its fair to say you might not like
| florida. but that "don't say gay bill" is really just a
| "don't teach sex ed til 4th grade" bill. i'm understanding of
| people who don't like it nonetheless but there's other place
| for you to go, there's plenty of blue states and big cities
| that support left-wing agendas over right-wing ones, just go
| there instead, no?
| frob wrote:
| It's not just through 3rd grade anymore. It's all the way
| through the end of high school.
|
| https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-board-
| ap...
| tombert wrote:
| I think this is a pretty stupid argument; I think this is
| an idiotic law, and I would even if I did agree with the
| bizarre LGBT grooming conspiracies.
|
| It's poorly worded, likely to be abused, and also not just
| K-3 anymore like people keep incorrectly asserting. Even if
| I did think that there was some grooming conspiracy, I
| wouldn't want to teach in Florida because I don't want to
| be sued by some parent who has a relatively risk-free way
| to get free money by claiming I mentioned some LGBT agenda.
|
| Also, you understand that "move to a blue city" only gets
| you so far right? This will (and to some extent already
| has) lead to a shortage of decent teachers in Florida,
| because a lot of teachers who _can_ move to a more
| hospitable state have (or will).
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Can you help me understand what aspect of teaching biology in
| _grades k through 3_ would be against the provisions of the
| law in Florida? I studied biology to age 16 in England
| ("o-levels") and don't recall anything even up to _that_ age
| that would be covered under this law?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Parental_Rights_in_E.
| ..
| currymj wrote:
| a lot of the fear is not so much not what the law says, but
| how a local school administration or local judge decides to
| interpret it after arbitrary complaints by parents. even if
| you're eventually ruled to comply with the law it could
| make your life pretty miserable.
| vkou wrote:
| It's K-12 now. But, of course, when they started going down
| that road, we were all assured, on this very forum, that
| it's not going to get to this point.
| tombert wrote:
| Because it's not just grades K through 3 anymore [1].
|
| The law is pretty broad and moreover the legal costs
| default to the defendant. Even if my wife didn't do
| something that was officially illegal, we'd be stuck
| counter-suing to reclaim legal costs.
|
| [1] https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-education-
| board-ap...
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Thanks for the info - but this implies that following the
| state curriculum would be a pretty easy defence, wouldn't
| it? So if a teacher wanted to teach about "sexual
| orientation and gender identity", even outside of the
| "existing state standards", they could _still_ do so as
| part of "reproductive health instruction that students
| can choose not to take" [1] [2].
|
| The closest reference I can find for the legal stuff is
| here: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/Bil
| lText/er/...
|
| Everything in that text talks about the parent taking
| legal action against the _school district_ , not the
| teacher [3] - same as when citizens sue "the cops", they
| are usually suing the city that runs that police
| department, not the individual police officer. So if a
| teacher is following the rules laid down by their
| employer (which one assumes would be in accordance with
| state law), they would presumably be provided counsel by
| their employer in order to ensure that the employer can
| actually mount a legal defense? So it sounds no different
| to being a state employee in a lot of places. Or am I
| still missing something?
|
| [1] "The rule change would ban lessons on sexual
| orientation and gender identity through 12th grade unless
| required by existing state standards or as part of
| reproductive health instruction that students can choose
| not to take"
|
| [2] "Educators have said they don't expect a major change
| in lesson plans given that teachers adhere to state
| education curriculums"
|
| [3] "If a concern is not resolved by the school district,
| a 129 parent may: ... (I) [elided] (II) Bring an action
| against the school district to obtain a declaratory
| judgment that the school district procedure or practice
| violates this paragraph and seek injunctive relief. A
| court may award damages and shall award reasonable
| attorney fees and court costs to a parent who receives
| declaratory or injunctive relief. "
| rayiner wrote:
| > they could still do so as part of "reproductive health
| instruction that students can choose not to take"
|
| Wait, so it's okay to teach about sexuality in the class
| where it's most likely to be a relevant topic of
| discussion?
| tombert wrote:
| Sure, but when there's zero repercussions to a frivolous
| lawsuit, there's likely to be a frivolous lawsuit. If a
| parent can easily _lie_ and try and extort money, it can
| still be an awful, expensive, exhausting process for my
| wife. Even if it doesn't cost us any money directly
| (which to be completely honest I don't buy), there's
| still the exhausting and awful process of having to
| defend herself in court.
|
| Edit:
|
| I would also like to point out that even if you were
| right on the technicalities, you understand why this
| would be an _immensely_ unappealing thing for a
| prospective teacher. It would be much easier to simply
| move to a state that doesn't have a vague, poorly
| defined, conspiratorial law that is likely to make our
| lives unpleasant.
| nme01 wrote:
| I'm not from US but I'm curious what is the situation in
| other states? Are there situations like that occurring
| elsewhere (even if the bias is in the opposite political
| direction e.g. in California or somewhere) or is Florida a
| "lonely island" here with regard to free speech limitations
| on universities?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| It's getting pretty common in conservative states. Just
| this year there were (in various states) hundreds of laws
| passed against public expressions of LGBTQ+ identities,
| including some that affect public sector employees (e.g.,
| state university professors).
| csa wrote:
| 1. Imho, Florida is just leading the way for other states
| (many of which are actually more conservative than
| Florida). One reason Florida might be taking the lead is
| because the current governor is making a run for president
| in 2024, and this is establishing his bona fides. Florida
| is definitely not a "lonely island".
|
| 2. Liberal states seem to be going extreme in other
| directions. Some examples are how "equity" policies (in
| general, not a bad idea) are implemented. Gifted programs,
| ap programs, accelerated programs and the like are being
| cut because the participants don't have the proper racial
| ratios (Asians and Whites tend to be statistically over-
| represented). Equity is not an unreasonable policy to
| pursue, but doing it by holding back others is regressive,
| imho. Holding back high achievers also addresses the
| problem at the wrong level -- that is, the origins of
| academic inequality typically happen at a much earlier age.
|
| Interestingly, in most states (blue, red, or purple),
| teachers are almost forced to teach to the bottom 25-30% of
| each class, since schools are evaluated by how many people
| meet the minimum standards rather than by overall or high
| level achievement.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Creating becomes an issue they can always pay more to
| compensate for the lack of possible tenure.
| edrxty wrote:
| Getting rid of tenure is fine but they'll need to pay much more
| to stay competitive.
|
| The calculous is fairly simple. Tenure track and then have an
| easy work life but less money, or go to industry and make lots
| of money but work more. Nothing wrong with either but if you
| get rid of the upsides to academia expect to replace them with
| something. That's just how market economies work.
|
| The issue isn't stem so much as the stuff where there isn't a
| highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go out
| of state for the same QOL as there will be no other competition
| to increase pay.
| tombert wrote:
| I find the likelihood of paying professors appropriately to
| be very unlikely; it's not like non-tenure-track
| professorships are making bank.
|
| I mean, it's not apples to apples, but I do part-time adjunct
| stuff in NYC, and the extra income is nice enough but even if
| I extrapolated it to full time, I'd barely have enough to pay
| my mortgage.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Adjuncts get treated like dirt everywhere, afaik
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, they treat me fine I think; everyone has been
| polite to me, I'm just a lecturer.
|
| It just doesn't pay well enough to survive. I mostly
| enjoy teaching, but honestly I don't think that I will be
| doing it again next semester.
|
| It's tough to say if I'm a "good" lecturer obviously,
| especially I think it's borderline impossible to fail a
| teaching evaluation here, but I do know that it's trivial
| for me to find work that pays more than twice as much in
| the private sector, without a ton of extra work.
| malshe wrote:
| I think @kevinmchugh meant that the adjuncts are
| exploited everywhere.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> Tenure track and then have an easy work life_
|
| That doesn't match the experience of anyone I know in
| academia , when you want an easy work life you quit and move
| to the private sector
| Beldin wrote:
| This.
|
| A friend remarked one benefit of moving to industry (aside
| higher pay and more job security(1)) was the reduced hours
| - no longer always continuing to work after leaving the
| office.
|
| (1) job security after tenure isn't magical compared to
| industry around here; before tenure, job security is more
| or less a guaranteed "haha nope."
|
| So on average, industry has _far_ better job security.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > Tenure track and then have an easy work life
|
| Most faculty works much longer hours than the private sector.
| It's not easy by any means.
|
| People become professors for exactly the same reason why some
| people become doctors and others real estate agents - they
| enjoy it or their personality matches the profession.
|
| Money is not everything.
| dgacmu wrote:
| One of my colleagues, Randy Pausch, used to quip that
| "academia is the best. You can work any 70 hours per week
| you want!"
|
| There's truth in that, for better or worse.
| romwell wrote:
| >The calculous[sic] is fairly simple. Tenure track and then
| have an easy work life but less money, or go to industry and
| make lots of money but work more.
|
| You have no clue what you are talking about.
|
| Going from academia into industry, the work is much less
| stressful, and the pay is much higher.
|
| "Easy work life" and being a research professor are mutually
| exclusive. _Your work never ends_.
|
| >The issue isn't stem so much as the stuff where there isn't
| a highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go
| out of state f
|
| Again, you have no idea how this market works. The absolute,
| vast majority of PhD holders and grad students come out of
| state to begin with.
|
| They will simply _avoid Texas_ , which is simpler than _going
| out of state_.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| I made more two years into my industry job than any of the
| tenured professors at my Tier 2 mathematics department
| (comparable to A&M).
|
| There's no way Texas state govt can stomach paying
| competitive salaries for non-tenured professors. They can't
| even stomach investing in critical infrastructure.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| [flagged]
| aborsy wrote:
| Honestly, it may not be a bad thing. Tenure was meant to protect
| the academic freedom, and pursuit of the long-term scientific
| research. Today, most academics chase money, grants, trends,
| citations and status.
|
| It's a job like any other, and doesn't need protection, at cost
| to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a very small
| subset).
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Even assuming you're right, that's only true until the next
| step the Texas legislature takes, because any benefit will be
| contrary to their goals, which is to hurt higher education.
| tristor wrote:
| The change in academia is largely correlated with the fall-off
| of tenured positions in favor of adjunct faculty and the
| explosion of administration. I don't think it indicates that
| there is no need for tenure, but rather that tenure provided a
| bulwark against the very outcomes we now are seeing.
| aborsy wrote:
| In some sense, everyone is adjunct. People who work in
| industry have fixed-term renewable contracts. If job security
| is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as
| French do (with their CDI contracts).
|
| The main point is, professors don't need life-time protection
| in many fields where research is increasingly focused on
| obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven.
| The gap between the type of research in academia and industry
| is not that much in many areas.
|
| Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a
| performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job
| security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of
| the industry. The duration could depend on the field.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > If job security is to be offered, extend it to other
| professions as well, as French do (with their CDI
| contracts).
|
| A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be
| fired for low performance, or for economical reasons.
| You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of
| months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.
| zoolily wrote:
| Most industry positions are much better than adjunct
| positions. Adjunct faculty are temporary part-time workers
| who teach one or two classes per term. They are paid
| $1000-4000 per class without benefits, which is less than
| minimum wage when you count time to prepare for class,
| grade, and interact with students outside of class. A
| quarter of adjuncts depend on public assistance programs
| like food stamps to survive.
| all2 wrote:
| What if we started an institution that automated most of the
| admin, hired and based admissions on pure
| skill/ability/talent? It seems to me that something so simple
| couldn't possibly work...
| majormajor wrote:
| "hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent?"
|
| Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just
| asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that
| already happens for admissions.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly
| work...
|
| Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university
| internals?
|
| Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university
| admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard
| to understand what all the admin do.
|
| In my experience, when I start to explain that a university
| is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact
| the people who run the town and implement the services, it
| becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The
| library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and
| associated services? The sports complex and associated
| services? The transportation system?
|
| And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a
| university, because a university is just a school, and it
| shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One,
| you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get
| rid of these services, often times the local town cannot
| replace them. So how are they to manage?
|
| So if you're having trouble understanding why a university
| can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it
| could be because you don't have a clear understanding of
| their role and why they are crucial. Universities require
| bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size
| of the student population.
| kjksf wrote:
| Here's the problem with your "admins are so absolutely
| necessary" argument.
|
| Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-
| show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased
| 75% across universities.
|
| Per https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-
| on-the-... over the last 20 years, the number of
| managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has
| risen three times faster than the undergraduate student
| body.
|
| So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level
| of admin service or was the level of service just fine
| and they got bloated because they could, not because they
| needed to?
| stametseater wrote:
| Bureaucracies bloat because they gradually fill up with
| the sort of bureaucrats who seek foremost to expand their
| own dominion. From the individual perspective of such a
| bureaucrat, the more people they have working under them,
| the more important they are. From this individual selfish
| incentive, bureaucratic bloat becomes an emergent
| phenomenon.
|
| Or put another way:
|
| > _Pournelle 's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in
| any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of
| people":_
|
| > _First, there will be those who are devoted to the
| goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated
| classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of
| the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at
| NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in
| the former Soviet Union collective farming
| administration._
|
| > _Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the
| organization itself. Examples are many of the
| administrators in the education system, many professors
| of education, many teachers union officials, much of the
| NASA headquarters staff, etc._
|
| > _The Iron Law states that in every case the second
| group will gain and keep control of the organization. It
| will write the rules, and control promotions within the
| organization._
| Kevin_S wrote:
| OK but you also have to measure the services the
| university provides to students through the increase in
| administration. Things listed already in this thread
| articulate that students desire these services.
|
| I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the
| level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it
| explains the vast majority of the bloat.
|
| Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately
| they demand greater services.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| > pure skill/ability/talent
|
| First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously
| define and measure those qualities.
| wyager wrote:
| > hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent
|
| This would be great, but I will present without comment the
| fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting
| rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far
| the best way that we know how to do ability-based
| admissions.
|
| You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to
| understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally
| feasible to have merit-based admission.
| all2 wrote:
| > You must understand the dynamics behind that decision
| to understand why it isn't currently
| legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based
| admission.
|
| Is this for any institution of higher learning? Or just
| public institutions (ie, institutions that receive
| public/federal money)?
| ModernMech wrote:
| The new trend now is not adjunct faculty, but well-paid
| lecturers with 5-year contracts instead of tenure.
| cal5k wrote:
| Heavy government involvement in student loans created a
| perverse incentive to bloat costs (administration) and
| increase tuitions.
|
| Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the
| seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are
| disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans,
| the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase
| its own budget, staff, and therefore power.
|
| It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with
| tuitions.
|
| Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with
| it.
| zoolily wrote:
| Heavy government involvement with public universities in
| the form of subsidies once made public education free in
| some states and low tuition everywhere. As government
| subsidies have decreased, tuition costs have risen to
| compensate. The state paid 75% of the costs to educate a
| student in the closest university to me in 2005, but paid
| less than 25% of those costs in 2020.
|
| Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to
| reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of
| administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from
| donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government
| mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the
| expansion of the administration and increasing education
| costs.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Doesn't matter really, what it does is make Texas public
| schools second rate. They will fail to attract top qualified
| candidates, and that's all there is to it. They are cutting off
| their noses to spite their faces.
| romwell wrote:
| >Tenure was meant to protect the academic freedom, and pursuit
| of the long-term scientific research. Today, most academics
| chase money, grants, trends, citations and status.
|
| These two statements are written as if there's an implication;
| there isn't one.
|
| >It's a job like any other, and doesn't need protection, at
| cost to those outside the ivory tower (unless perhaps for a
| very small subset).
|
| Bold claim! Let's see if it's more than just, like, your
| opinion.
|
| (Again, it isn't).
| cal5k wrote:
| It also only applies to public universities - private
| institutions can still do whatever they want.
| curt15 wrote:
| > Today, most academics chase money, grants, trends, citations
| and status.
|
| Grants, trends, citations, and status...but money really? I
| come from mathematics and the notion of getting rich in
| academia is laughable. Maybe that's why so many math and
| physics people go to finance.
| burkaman wrote:
| Are you suggesting that making the job less secure will make
| academics less interested in money, grands, trends, citations,
| and status? They'll be more content to just focus on the
| science and ignore money and fame, knowing that they can't get
| tenure and can be fired at any time?
| majormajor wrote:
| What's somewhat interesting is that this is a move being made
| by people who simultaneously claim to want _more_ freedom of
| expression in general.
|
| It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly
| results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a
| controversial twitter post.
|
| So what's the thinking here? Seems like it could be...
|
| * pure political theater, without really focusing on long-term
| affects
|
| * the result of deciding to not even fight a battle for control
| of administration for public universities in the state (except
| in that case... if you think the administrators won't share
| your views, making it easier for them to fire professors seems
| foolish)
|
| * similar to the above, but maybe a more outright battle on
| public education in general; possibly the first of many moves
| in the hope that right-wing private universities will emerge as
| replacements?)
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think nearly everyone who says "I want more freedom of
| expression" leaves out the quiet part, which is "...for
| people who think like I do."
|
| There are many, many examples of supposed "free speech
| advocates" trying to silence dissenting voices or criticism.
|
| Under that assumption, it makes perfect sense that Texas
| conservatives, believing colleges are liberal bastions that
| spread ideas they disagree with, would see anything that
| reduces the power of college faculty as a win.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't disagree, but it's still a bit puzzling beyond the
| just "political theater"/"retributional politics" approach:
|
| * if they don't control the administration of the schools,
| this only serves to make it harder to hire _anybody_ and
| easier to fire _those who the administration doesn 't agree
| with_. Presumably conservatives. That's a net loss.
|
| * if they _do_ control the administration (or have a path
| to getting that control) then why not just hire people who
| think like they do _and then enjoy the results of having
| those folks have tenure_?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Yeah tenure probably protects conservative faculty more
| than liberal faculty at most institutions.
| vkou wrote:
| > * if they don't control the administration of the
| schools,
|
| _They control the purse strings._
| majormajor wrote:
| Sure, but if that's very leveragable control, isn't "hire
| conservative faculty members who are protected from
| future changes in the political winds by tenure" better
| than "make all faculty easier to fire"?
| vkou wrote:
| No, it's not.
|
| You have vastly more power in society by being able to
| remove your political enemies, than by being able to
| appoint your friends.
|
| There's a lot of ways in which the latter can screw up -
| your friends might turn out to be less pliable than you
| wanted, someone might have been appointed who turned out
| to be a trojan horse, someone might have been appointed
| who was palatable to your goals a decade ago, but is now
| causing trouble, someone might have been appointed under
| your opponent's watch, etc, etc.
|
| When you instead hang a sword of Damocles over their
| collective necks, they have no choice but to toe the
| party line.
| majormajor wrote:
| "Hold onto power at all costs" is a strategy, sure, but
| the gotcha here seems to be that they won't be able to
| remove existing enemies.
|
| It's only new hires who will be affected.
|
| So "hire your political friends" is still important,
| since they can do some damage before you have a chance to
| fire them, even given you having additional leverage (and
| you can imagine a certain kind of academic who could ride
| that publicity to a lucrative position).
|
| I guess the difference between my thinking here and the
| Texas GOP's is that I'm saying "make sure your friend are
| around even when you're not in power anymore" and they're
| thinking "we will be in power forever."
| rayiner wrote:
| I don't think "nearly everyone" is a correct assessment.
| The current conservative coalition includes a lot of Gen X
| and Millennials. In 2022, the D advantage among voters
| 30-44 in 2022 was down to 4 points:
| https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/.... These are folks who grew up in
| the 1990s in a much more permissive free speech culture.
| These are not necessarily the same folks as the ones in the
| Texas Senate.
| majormajor wrote:
| Most of the types of speech the current conservative
| movement dislikes did _not_ have a lot of people
| prominently voicing that speech in the 90s. They did have
| a lot of speech _against_ them in the 90s.
|
| It's easy to spot that backlash complaint - "I used to be
| able to say this in the 90s" - but from what I'm seeing,
| it's a mistake to think the motivation is "more speech
| for everyone" and not "this should still be allowed, but
| _that_ needs to go back in the closet. "
| sonofaplum wrote:
| It's all three, but did want to point out that your claim
| that
|
| > It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-
| friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a
| controversial twitter post.
|
| contains within it the idea that not being fired for a
| controversial twitter post or even free speech generally are
| either concepts that help Republicans or concepts that
| Republicans believe in, neither of which are true. Not for
| present day Republicans, historical Republicans, idealized
| conservatives or any shade of right wing thought except for a
| tiny insignificant rump of libertarians.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| More generally we need better protections for faculty with
| controversial views who can still teach and research to not get
| "cancelled"; better labor protections and more jobs so that
| faculty can advocate for themselves and receive less work (vs.
| getting disciplined or fired) when they are too old to
| effectively teach and research; better grants and more jobs so
| that faculty have better pay; better grants and more jobs so
| that faculty can _only_ research (these types of faculty suck
| at teaching), or _only_ teach and not be considered "lesser";
| etc. With all these tenure isn't necessary.
|
| But this is Texas, with US labor protection and a culture which
| openly hates education and dissent, so in this specific case
| it's definitively bad.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| >"a culture which openly hates education and dissent, so in
| this specific case it's definitively bad."
|
| This is a completely untrue and biased stereotype. No one in
| Texas "openly hates education".
|
| As for the dissent aspect, I don't even know where to begin
| with that one.
| endtime wrote:
| > faculty can advocate for themselves and receive less work
| (vs. getting disciplined or fired) when they are too old to
| effectively teach and research
|
| Why is this desirable (to anyone other than elderly faculty)?
| ModernMech wrote:
| One of the promises for highly educated people (PhDs) who
| devote their most lucrative years to unprofitable research,
| is that they will able to do the job when they are very
| old. Otherwise, the retirement plan is insufficient. I can
| make several times what I do on the market, so if I'm going
| to be replaced as soon as it's convenient for the
| university, then we're going to have a very different
| relationship that's more about money.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I definitely agree. The state __shouldn't__ under any
| circumstances have the power to police the content taught at
| universities. What sort of bastion of knowledge and free
| speech can universities be if they live in fear of getting
| angering a governor?
| nequo wrote:
| Eliminating tenure only increases the pressure to chase grants.
|
| Tenure is what affords academics the time to pursue research
| that pays off in 10 years instead of 2.
| tejtm wrote:
| Tenure effectively migrated to administration which being even
| further from the students makes it less "school" more value
| extraction corporation.
| ericmay wrote:
| On the other hand costs may rise because you may not be able to
| attract good professors if there isn't tenure to offset lower
| than industry wages. Or you may just get lots of turnover or
| low-quality professors.
| Kevin_S wrote:
| But removing tenure will only increase the incentives of
| chasing those things.
|
| And I don't understand how others in this thread are saying
| academic freedom isn't necessary anymore/doesn't matter. The
| entire purpose of the republican party attacking tenure is so
| they can explicitly attack academic freedom.
| VLM wrote:
| What is academic freedom in 2023?
| uberman wrote:
| Are you aware that most non tenured positions require you to
| reapply every year for your job? Every 3 years if you are
| lucky. This in not a simple annual review like a normal job,
| this is you are fired at the end of your 1 year contract and
| now let's talk about the possibility of a new one year
| contract.
|
| This in my opinion is really what tenure is about, getting out
| of the yearly firing that adjuncts and lecturers face.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ECOij
| dwighttk wrote:
| how many tenure track positions are hiring these days? I have the
| impression that they are pretty rare anyway.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| It's not just about tenure though. It's the fact that the
| people who have the power to control everything about the
| public universities in Texas have shown that they will damage
| them, specifically by targeting faculty.
|
| Even if I'm a non-tenure track faculty member I would probably
| require a Texas university to offer a significant premium over
| a competing offer from a CA university, for example, before I
| decide to establish my career there.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Our CS department has been hiring for TT roles continuously
| since at least when I joined in 2010.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Substantially more than "zero".
| some-guy wrote:
| My wife just got one straight out of her PhD, but it's not
| super common unless you're 1) very cutthroat competitive and 2)
| willing to move far (in our case, 5 hours from the Bay Area).
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Public-college boards would be able to create "an alternate
| system of tiered employment status for faculty members" that's
| not tenure, the legislation states. But that system would require
| faculty members to go through an annual performance evaluation.
|
| That sounds closer to how most jobs work.
|
| Honestly, I've never understood the purpose of tenure; it seems
| like an archaic tradition. If it's to give professors freedom to
| do research without fear of reprisal, it's not working, at least
| not optimally: there are plenty of ways to punish tenured
| researchers.
|
| The professors I know personally have no expectation of ever
| getting tenure. Imagine that: Ph.D. in your field, work 30 years,
| never even seriously entertain the possibility of getting the
| brass ring. Something's broken there.
|
| The best professor I had at university was in his sixties when I
| took his courses, and he never got tenure despite being really
| good at his job. The people who get tenure seem to be people who
| bring a lot of attention or a lot of money to the university.
| Both of those are only a professor's "job" if you look at
| universities as cynical money-making machines (a disenchantment I
| have slowly come around to).
|
| I guess what I'm saying is, I have no problems with Texas
| throwing a grenade into this situation. I am somewhat skeptical
| of the likelihood of them replacing it with a better system in
| practice, though.
|
| Still, some better solution must be found if we expect higher
| education to continue as an institution into the future. If this
| bill passes, I wish them good luck, and will be looking at this
| as an interesting experiment.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The problem is, as others have said, this severely degrades
| Texas's desirability as a career destination for academics as
| long as only Texas is doing this and other states are not.
|
| Put another way, these are the people Texas doesn't want in the
| state:
|
| - LGBT+ - women - academics
|
| Are they trying to have a student population composed of just
| cis crypto bros and assorted incels? Because this is how you
| get there.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Given that universities already select which professors get
| tenure, how would removing tenure help or hurt any groups,
| relative to the present system?
| orange_joe wrote:
| I'm skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many
| teachers that just didn't much care for their work and probably
| would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the
| arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to
| recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I'm
| not sure they hold.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Tenured researchers shouldn't be teaching, IMO. They can be
| doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care
| to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to
| become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of
| software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT
| want to do research. Give me a Master's in CS with some sort of
| "teaching extension" on it and I'll go teach and the
| researchers can go do important work researching!
|
| Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly
| should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on
| that point!
| haweemwho wrote:
| Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher
| _ed...
| usrusr wrote:
| I believe that this is yet another case of middle ground
| being the best: leave the bulk of teaching to specialists,
| but keep the research professors doing courses close to their
| actual field. Don't underestimate how educative teaching can
| be for the teacher. But this is certainly no big insight. Or
| are there places that do not, at least to some amount, do it
| like this?
| noisenotsignal wrote:
| My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters
| in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).
|
| However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having
| researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience
| in research brings an additional dimension that can be
| appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory
| level.
|
| There are also tenured professors who are good at both
| research and teaching!
| moab wrote:
| You don't know what you're talking about. Research and
| teaching at the upper-division level can and should be two
| sides of the same coin.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I agree with your point that upper division courses need
| researcher involvement, but please try to be less rude
| about how you say things. This is a comment thread, so
| there's no need to act like that, you could make your
| actual point in a nicer way and I would have seen it like
| the commenter above you and agreed that I overlooked this
| case. have a great weekend.
| y-curious wrote:
| Much like the lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges,
| tenured professorship is a great idea that gets warped in
| practice.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Prof jobs might be researched-focused, teaching-focused, or a
| mix of both.
|
| Some universities really pushed research, in order to go for
| grants and donations. It also helps attract grad students.
| They usually make less enjoyable undergrad experiences.
|
| Then again, having profs that only teach, not research, can
| become very disconnected after a while. You may as well have
| a grad student repeat from the book.
|
| I know a few tenured profs (and my partner is one). I think
| most of awesome ones are those not pressured to run after
| grants constantly, and those that brag about them are red
| flags.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Agree. One major difference is between:
|
| 1. Technical TRAINING to do job X (rote-style)
|
| 2. Conceptual LEARNING to think creatively about solving
| problems and asking and answering novel questions--big or
| small.
|
| Many of us on Hacker News understands the huge difference
| between this teo modes that has been so elegantly captured
| in Richard W Hammings "The Art of Doing Science and
| Engineering: Learning to Learn".
|
| If you want to be TRAINED then sure, go to an institution
| that does no research.
|
| If you want to LEARN then go to an institution that does
| some research, better yet, a great deal of research.
|
| I was an undegrad at UCSC in the 1970s---no grades and
| great faculty who loved both teaching and research. I
| learned to learn and I still live to learn.
|
| Now I am expected to TRAIN first year med students human
| genetics that will allow them to pass their boards. The
| boards demand insufferably ancient genetics--a cut-off date
| of 2001 would be fine-wonderful. But there has been a bit
| of progress in genetics in the last two decades. I tried to
| teach them a hybrid of the "classics" but with 50% of time
| devoted to cutting-edge modern genetics. I hate TRAINING to
| the test.
|
| You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at fault?
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _You can imagine my reviews as a professor. Who is at
| fault?_
|
| It's the system that's at fault. Remember the
| noncanonical version of the Monty Python Dead Bishops
| skit? The murderer admits the crime to the police (in
| fact the Church Police), saying "It was me, but the
| system is at fault." The police proceed to question
| everyone else: "Excuse me, are you part of the system?" -
| "Yes." - "Come with me then!"
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I'm not sure if the core duty of a professor at a research
| institution should even be teaching vs research...
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| You can't believe how stale an introductory course can get
| when the teaching staff is left to its own devices and
| research staff looks the other way. And that's at a name
| brand top-10 university.
|
| Man, I wouldn't hire out of here.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > I'm skeptical that tenure is good for students,
|
| I'm more skeptical of the motives that animate these decision
| makers. After all, these are the same people who ban books,
| insist on revisionist history in Texas school textbooks, and
| engage in all manner of opposition to free inquiry. Perhaps by
| some stroke of luck, it will be a net positive for students in
| Texas institutions of higher learning, but of all the ways of
| promoting the academic and economic well-being of students this
| would be among the most tangential.
| professorthread wrote:
| Right. I'm surprised at the comments here that seem to be
| missing the bigger picture. If ultra-conservative proto-
| Gilead Texas is going after tenure, then that must mean the
| values we associate with a progressive good society are being
| incubated in academia, protected by tenure. Hence, tenure is
| good.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Here is how I look at it.
|
| Major universities have two functions: (1) teaching and (2)
| research. Teaching is further split between (1a) undergrad
| (basic) and (1b) graduate (advanced).
|
| You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or
| carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.
|
| (1b) and (2) currently rely on the existence of tenure.
| Teaching advanced courses (1b) requires research experience.
| Finding people willing to spend their lives in research (2)
| requires some kind of incentive, especially in STEM fields.
|
| As others have mentioned, to eliminate tenure, you need to
| provide an equivalent incentive. If you don't, you'll end up
| with a race to the bottom and a very probable exodus of
| academics to either other states or - even worse - other
| countries.
| romwell wrote:
| >You could definitely sustain (1a) without the incentive (or
| carrot) of tenure. This is how most community colleges work.
|
| Spoiler: this is how most _universities_ work.
|
| They have teaching jobs that are either filled with adjuncts,
| or are contract-based; or pay such small salaries that tenure
| is the only thing that would attract anyone to work them.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| You're missing my point. Universities that also do research
| cannot be _sustained completely_ by adjuncts and teaching
| professors.
|
| Also, a portion of adjunct and contract-based positions are
| filled by those seeking a tenure track position. Removing
| tenure will affect this side as well.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| If tenure goes away, then you have to pay more to compensate.
| If you're getting rid of tenure while keeping wages low, you'll
| still have bad teachers but for that reason instead.
|
| A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No
| tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too: No
| tenure AND low wages. It won't work out.
|
| Sure you can. That's what the current system of adjuncts is
| like.
|
| The problem is that you lose the people who are the most
| competent. Those who know what they are doing, have valuable
| skills, etc.
| romwell wrote:
| >> A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too:
| No tenure AND low wages. It won't work out. Sure you can.
| That's what the current system of adjuncts is like.
|
| >The problem is that you lose the people who are the most
| competent. Those who know what they are doing, have
| valuable skills, etc.
|
| So, you _can_ have your cake and eat it too... provided
| that the cake is half-off because it 's not competitive.
|
| Which is what Scott Aaronson said.
| uberman wrote:
| Adjuncts and lecturers dont do research nor do they
| typically do service. If one wanted to be educated by
| lecturers then they could attend a community college. That
| is of course a viable option but no tenure will be the kiss
| of death to any institution who thought they were going to
| do research at the R1 level.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "If one wanted to be educated by lecturers then they
| could attend a community college."
|
| I'd argue that the vast majority of classes at a state
| school (what this rule affects) are already taught by
| non-research personnel.
| gammarator wrote:
| Correct. But universities want researchers because they
| bring in research grants (which provide the university
| 50%+ in overhead: slush funds).
| giantg2 wrote:
| It seems the state schools don't have _as much_ incentive
| for that. The university president decided to build a
| conference center while I was at school. They didn 't
| have all the money secured, so the state jumped in to pay
| a lot and tuition. Went up substantially. They're already
| cheap so the have no competition pressure and they know
| the state will bail them out.
| gammarator wrote:
| My own hypothesis is that many adjuncts work under such
| poor conditions due to an irrational belief that it will
| lead to a tenure track position some day. Without that
| carrot the whole market destabilizes.
|
| Tenure is the key incentive in the academic tournament
| model. Other fields that do "out or up" (consulting, Big
| Law) offer major $$$ to the winners.
| palijer wrote:
| How important is teacher performance for students though?
|
| What are we even measuring when something is good/bad for
| students? Obviously anything akin to directly abusing students
| would be bad for students, but I imagine we're talking about
| the quality of the education they get based on the quality of
| their professor's teaching ability.
|
| If we are just talking about learning qualities, isn't the
| selection of students in higher level academic programs already
| heavily curated and biased towards students who have proven
| they are good at learning? Shouldn't this cohort of proven
| learners be resistant to any fluctuations in the teaching
| quality of professors?
|
| Forgive me if my question shows a higher level
| misunderstanding, but I stumbled into my career in tech without
| any post-secondary education - so I don't have firsthand
| experience with any real academic settings.
| professorthread wrote:
| The heuristic often repeated by folks in the profession is
| that you've got a top 5% of students who match your
| description of students who've proven they're good at
| learning, a bottom 5% who is entirely unprepared for
| university life and who knows how they got admitted, and the
| rest whose understanding of the subject matter is influenced
| by the performance of the teacher.
|
| Post-COVID, lots of us (and you can find articles about this
| by conducting a simple search) have noticed that the top 5%
| hasn't changed, but the bottom 5% seems to have gotten
| significantly larger--10%, sometimes 15% of students in
| introductory level courses seem unprepared for university.
| I've seen functional illiteracy in some of my students at my
| good R1, for the first time ever. Our university is also on a
| huge enrollment drive, and are constantly hinting that
| faculty need to grade more easily to keep students happy.
| tgv wrote:
| If you want to become a good researcher, go to university to
| learn from good researchers. If you want to become good in some
| other task, go to a school.
| subpixel wrote:
| I was accepted to a UT Austin graduate program. After being
| accepted, I flew on my own dime to meet with the director and
| associate director, and several professors, because I couldn't
| imagine dedicating several years of my life and career path
| based on some paperwork alone.
|
| The director was unfamiliar with my published work, which had
| gotten some acclaim and been featured _alongside his own_ at
| two industry events that summer. At one of them, I had
| introduced myself! It was a tense, 'look kid, why are you
| here?' meeting, that made it clear he had no idea who was
| coming to study in his tiny department and didn't care.
|
| The associate director didn't show up to her office for our
| meeting, she was out of town. This was before the era of
| calendar-RSVPs, but she had confirmed via email a little more
| than a week prior.
|
| That department may have been more of a mess than others, I
| never spent time in academia after all. But both of those folks
| had tenure, and I think it contributed to the zero shits they
| had to give.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| At the university level, good teaching is a value only some
| institutions hold. They'll all say they care, but research
| schools are paying way more attention to grants, publications,
| parents, etc than to student evals. There are universities that
| prioritize teaching over research and, unsurprisingly, they
| tend to have better teaching professors. I went to a school
| that didn't emphasize research and never had a TA teach a
| class, for instance
| bluGill wrote:
| How much research do we need? Sure there are advances to make
| in physics, but do we really need another paper explaining
| why Richard III wasn't completely evil, or whatever similar
| activity English professors research? How much more research
| into the real nature of the Greeks do we need? Don't get me
| wrong, both are interesting subjects, and the thinking that
| goes into those papers is worth teaching/knowing. However the
| real reason to support most college programs is teaching to
| think (a topic hard to define!), not having the professors do
| research.
|
| If you are a medical researcher there is a lot of useful
| research to do. Most subjects are of questionable value. It
| is unknown if knowing more about how quarks work will ever be
| useful.
| eslaught wrote:
| How much do you know about research funding?
|
| For example, the fields you mention (sciences/engineering,
| medicine) pull in vastly more money that humanities.
| Because they have more money, they hire more faculty, and
| they also train and graduate more PhD students.
|
| I knew a few humanities PhD students while I was in grad
| school, and none of them were funded by research grants. If
| they were lucky, they got fellowships. That's a stark
| contrast to engineering where both grant and fellowship
| funding was relatively plentiful (though I've got a few
| horror stories there too).
|
| On top of it, humanities jobs are really hard to find (even
| more difficult than fields like physics that are already
| known for multiple postdocs, etc.), making it a bad deal
| all around for PhD students in those fields.
|
| Overall, I think things are already allocated more or less
| the way you expect, and I don't think we need to piss on
| humanities for this. They already have it hard enough.
| zimzam wrote:
| In my experience Humanities professors cared way more about
| the classes they taught. It was the Engineering / "Hard
| Science" professors cared way more about the research and
| treated teaching undergraduates as a chore and/or an
| afterthought. (Though there were a couple of exceptions)
| threeseed wrote:
| Well thankfully people like you are in the minority and can
| be safely ignored.
|
| Because learning more about our history and the world we
| live in furthers humanity in immeasurable ways often only
| appreciated years and decades in the future.
| scoofy wrote:
| This is a pretty myopic view of how scientific discoveries
| happen. This is a good time to remind people that truth-
| tables were first created by Wittgenstein, who wrote some
| pretty obscure and borderline indecipherable books on
| natural language, placed _well_ inside the walls of the
| humanities departments.
|
| Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most
| making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it
| is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in
| the development of the of the universal Turing machine.
| haweemwho wrote:
| > but it is one of the fields that was necessary and
| instrumental in the development of the of the universal
| Turing machine.
|
| You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry
| regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is
| of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the
| iPhone or Javascript.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Even in physics or most of the hard sciences, how much
| important research is even being produced outside of the
| top (and may even second) tier, given the increasing
| laboratory costs?
| jsiva wrote:
| That's part of the issue in research though, you don't know
| what will have value. The actual problems that
| particle/nuclear physicists attempt to solve might not be
| valuable but the engineering required for the experimental
| apparatus could be revolutionary.
| stametseater wrote:
| Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers trying
| to pay off college debt, I think it's a good idea for the
| government to focus more on improving the quality of
| teaching, even if that comes at the cost of diminished
| research output. As it stands, the system saddles undergrads
| with tons of debt and not much to show for it, with socially
| disastrous results.
|
| If a university wants to focus on research and doesn't care
| about undergrad teaching quality, let them drop the pretense
| of offering undergrad education at all.
| Alupis wrote:
| You found the symptom, but prescribed the wrong treatment.
|
| > Considering the number of near-poverty retail workers
| trying to pay off college debt
|
| > As it stands, the system saddles undergrads with tons of
| debt and not much to show for it, with socially disastrous
| results.
|
| If you have a degree, and are working retail, and are near-
| poverty, then you screwed up somewhere. Your degree is
| objectively useless if this is the only prospects available
| after graduation - so why did you get that degree? Why
| didn't you continue into postgrad or change degree paths?
|
| Perhaps we should stop offering student loans for useless
| degrees. Still offer them, but no loans allowed. That would
| go a _long_ ways towards solving the diagnosed problem.
|
| We've spent decades telling everyone they _must_ get a
| degree to live a successful life - then we puppy-mill them
| into garbage /completely-useless degree programs, and are
| surprised when they go back to the same job they held in
| highschool. Now, we're going to forgive all those poor
| choices, because we think we did everyone wrong, but we're
| going to change not one thing to prevent it from happening
| again. Brilliant.
| petsfed wrote:
| I worked retail for 2 years after completing a master's
| in condensed matter and transistor physics. It just
| happened to be during a time (~2014) when that degree
| alone was insufficient in getting me a job, even an
| entry-level one.
|
| I think barring student loans is part of the strategy.
| Also, focusing on financial literacy prior to high school
| graduation. If we must have student loans, then colleges
| need to publish data about graduation rates, job
| placement rates, etc for a given program, and let lenders
| determine if loans for that program are a good idea. The
| whole situation is maddening because there are so many
| loud voices blaming the literal children who signed for
| the loans in the first place but (as you say) nobody
| making any meaningful change to prevent it happening
| again.
|
| I really wish I could go back in time to slap 18-year-old
| me before I signed on for student loans, but by the time
| I understood what I was in for, my options were "take on
| more loans to pay to finish school and get a high-paying
| job, or take on jobs that will never pay well enough to
| pay off this debt". The sunk-cost fallacy is supposed to
| be a fallacy but perversely, as it pertains to student
| loans, its the inventive to keep going.
| Alupis wrote:
| Speaking to your situation - I've come to think that
| degree programs that only "pay off" after a certain level
| is obtained (masters, phd, credential, license, etc) -
| then there should not be an option to get out of the
| program until it's completed.
|
| By that I mean eliminating the intermediary and largely
| useless degrees. You would instead enter into the
| Condensed Matter Program, which at the end awards a phd,
| and nothing in between.
|
| This sort of program could still offer
| minors/concentrations and elective/exploratory classes,
| but the main degree program would only result in the
| final destination.
|
| I could be persuaded this is a terrible idea - but the
| idea here is to eliminate the ability for someone to
| footgun themselves after dedicating 6-8 years to a degree
| that ends up being worthless.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm not sure increasing the quality of teaching will do
| much for outcomes. A little, probably, but likely not much.
| AFAIK the vast majority of jobs that expect applicants to
| have a degree, or favor those who do, don't do it because
| they _need_ their workers to have a good college education.
|
| I think if we increased the quality of education, say, 20%
| (let's just assume there's some useful measure of quality
| here, and that expressing it in percentages makes sense)
| across the entire country, it'd have only a small effect on
| employment for grads, all else being equal (i.e. those
| changes don't also reduce the number of grads per year)
|
| From what I can tell, most people attending US colleges and
| universities are mainly paying a fee to participate in a
| scheme that keeps the unemployment rate down by warehousing
| capable workers in dorms, keeping them out of the "seeking
| work" category, and those students-but-potentially-workers
| are doing so because (they believe that) participating in
| that program gives them advantage in the employment market,
| some years later... but not exactly to _learn_ anything,
| which is a secondary concern at best, for a majority of
| those attending.
|
| I'm dunno how much of it was intended to work that way, but
| it seems like the main _actual_ thing the whole system is
| doing now, whatever anyone 's intentions were or are. Only
| semi-reasonable way I can think of to break the cycle would
| be to decrease the unemployment rate and keep it low for a
| long time, which ought to get employers to start "out-
| bidding" the alternative of "go to college, delay career"
| for recent high school grads, and to stop worrying so much
| about whether applicants have a degree.
|
| In fact, now that I lay it all out like that, I'm pretty
| sure one of the core problems with higher ed is that labor
| is too weak, which has led to some _really weird_ outcomes
| as far as how higher ed is treated.
|
| [EDIT] Put another way, that seems perhaps less at-odds
| with itself than the above contention that increased
| university attendance acts to keep unemployment rates down,
| while I also think decreasing the unemployment rate might
| be a way to _reduce_ university attendance--so many people
| are going to college, because companies aren 't desperate
| enough for workers to offer many "mere" high school grads
| real money--they can afford to hold out for college grads,
| even if they don't really _need_ them.
| threeseed wrote:
| US government should focus on making higher education more
| affordable.
|
| In Australia for example college debt is managed through
| the taxation system allowing people to invest in the
| careers in the early days and then pay off their debt when
| their taxable income reaches a high enough threshold.
| stametseater wrote:
| America has affordable higher education; state schools
| and community colleges are generally very affordable. The
| problem is when naive highschool students get lured into
| taking on huge amounts of debt by expensive private
| schools that have no intention of teaching undergrads
| well, but _nevertheless_ assert that pretense to lure in
| more suckers.
| giantg2 wrote:
| And when they want to live away from home.
|
| The living arrangements are getting more expensive. My
| college tore down their old, low cost dorms. They
| replaced them with suites that cost twice as much.
| Alupis wrote:
| There's an awful lot of students that held no job during
| college, and instead relied 100% on student loans to buy
| Taco Bell, pay rent, and put gas in the car.
|
| The huge numbers you see tossed around almost always
| include living expenses. "$120k for a state school!" sort
| of thing.
|
| The failure in reporting is those living expenses would
| have been incurred regardless if the person attended
| university or not.
|
| As a society, I think we need to encourage people to work
| at least part time, if not full time during university -
| and take a slower path toward their degree. The result
| will be more experienced, mature graduates that have had
| time to evaluate their future.
| giantg2 wrote:
| While I agree that the high numbers are often because
| people are ill informed or even irresponsible about the
| loan, I don't think dragging out schooling is the best
| answer either, especially if you have higher earning
| power once you get a degree.
|
| Also keep in mind the current system incentives - aid is
| inversely correlated with income and balances are
| forgiven in some cases. Why work harder if it means
| getting a worse deal? If one really wants it for "free"
| then there's always the military route.
| Alupis wrote:
| In my experience, most recent college graduates are
| effectively useless anyway. I say that as a once-recent
| graduate.
|
| It's often thought, incorrectly, that university teaches
| you how to do a certain job. People go to university to
| learn how to become an X.
|
| University isn't supposed to teach you how to do a job...
| it's supposed to teach you how to think critically. Along
| the way you learn, in varying depth, knowledge about
| specific fields of study, but that's not the same as
| learning a job.
|
| Recent graduates are often immature (barely 21, who can
| blame them), limited in both depth and breadth of
| knowledge, and inexperienced. Most new hires have to be
| trained within industry for at least several months if
| not longer before they become productive for any
| business/organization.
|
| Having students work part time, or preferably full time
| jobs while attending university would be a net gain for
| all of the above.
|
| Working a job teaches teamwork and responsibility.
| Employees gain life experience, learn skills (learning a
| skill is the point, not what the skill is), discipline,
| and how to interact with others professionally and
| maturely. Basically everything university is not capable
| of teaching.
|
| Working a job is complementary to an education, under
| this idea. The notion that university should be completed
| in four years needs to change - maybe it should take 6-8
| years after all. The quality of an average graduate would
| be immense, and future earning abilities would be equally
| increased.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Same here. I didn't have any TA taught classes because none
| of the professors I had were researchers.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Skepticism re teaching is fine, but tenure at this point is not
| given or denied based mainly on teaching but rather on
| research. Yes, UT Austin and TAM teach a lot, but tenure is
| driven very strongly by research performance and promise.
| [deleted]
| e40 wrote:
| Agreed. It was a path to teaching 1 or 2 classes a year and
| doing whatever they wanted. I was at UC Berkeley in the 80's,
| if it matters.
| svc0 wrote:
| The major benefit of tenure is as a protection for pursuing the
| truth when researching controversial academic subjects. It
| protects the behavioral genetics research which takes place at
| UT Austin from left wing attacks and the positions some
| professors have taken on Texas A&M's annual drag show from
| right wing attacks.
|
| As a student in the Texas system, I've raised questions which
| my professors refused to talk about fearing political backlash.
| Tenure is an important institution. I think you can only go so
| far to incentivize good teaching through termination.
| usrusr wrote:
| Has that claim ever been made? Tenure is done not because of
| good average outcomes, it's done because of an assumption that
| it occasionally results in some positive outlier with enormous
| upside that would not have happened without.
| professorthread wrote:
| Some tenured professors slack on teaching, or were never that
| great at teaching to begin with. But tenure as an institution
| improves teaching quality. What professors teach is subject no
| less to academic freedom and the protections tenure provides
| than what professors research. Faculty subject to short-term
| contracts tend to have their contract renewal dependent on
| student evaluation scores, which study after study show are
| poorly correlated (and often anti-correlated) with student
| learning outcomes. Good teachers aren't necessarily popular;
| easy graders are popular. Conveying difficult subject matter
| that may be controversial or technically difficult to grok is
| crucial to learning outcomes. This is exactly what gets cut out
| when you lose academic freedom, become a cog of administrators
| who are out to maximize enrollments not learning outcomes, and
| have your job performance hinge upon student evaluations.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Some are arguing that the tenure system is broken. Maybe. If this
| change was done in good faith to make the system stronger, it is
| worth considering. But there is little evidence that that is what
| is going on. Conservatives have been beating the drum for decades
| that colleges brainwash their kids into being liberals, and so
| they want control to fire any academic that doesn't confirm to
| their views.
|
| edit: I'm speaking as a 19 year resident of Austin, Texas who has
| watched countless other power grabs, including Governor Perry
| installing biblical literalists to oversee Texas school books
| that deny evolution and rewriting history -- too much Jefferson
| and not a mention of Phyllis Schlafley (not joking). The same
| legislature has pushed a law requiring every K-12 schoolroom to
| display the Ten Commandments.
| currymj wrote:
| in the humanities there is a glut of excellent scholars who would
| be happy to have a non-tenured professorship which is
| nevertheless a real job with decent pay, benefits, and working
| conditions.
|
| in applied technical fields it will be really hard to hire people
| as tenure and academic freedom are the only reason people deal
| with the BS of academia over industry.
|
| so this will probably have the opposite effect of what the
| legislature wants, the pool of left-leaning humanities professors
| won't change much, while STEM will be hugely weakened.
| bdcravens wrote:
| In terms of bills that are coming out of the Texas legislature
| these days, this is pretty mild.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| I'd like to be open-minded and optimistic about this, but Texas
| is a noted enemy of education.
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