The tweets say that pure math is an important part of the ecosystem of scholarship at a university (slight paraphrase) and I agree with that. I don't really have any concern about axing medieval literature though.
I am a pure math guy who absolutely loves the Canterbury Tales.
The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about.
(Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
Sorry I don't know this Uni in particular, and I agree with your comment. But why is this such a big issue? I mean, a lot of universities do not have a pure-math faculty because they are dedicated to other faculties. I guess it depends on what the Uni wants to be. My Uni didn't have a physics department, or a medical one, or arts, or music... All of these faculties were however available in other Unis.
They want to sack the math department to create a machine learning department. But they still need people to teach the math classes for machine learning etc, and without the math professors they'd need machine learning professors or so who aren't as good at maths.
ML uses almost entirely applied math and stochastics: optimization, numerics and statistics.
Besides that, just because they won't have faculty researching pure math, doesn't mean they cannot have applied math guys teaching pure math classes.
Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
> I assume the pure math department is not doing much.
Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.
I also love the Canterbury Tales and still have the intro memorized thanks to a professor I had in college. That said, if students aren't taking the classes I can't see how the school is going to be hurt by losing the faculty. All kinds of things tie into math, not so much into medieval literature.
(That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
The Administrators make their power play: declaring faculty redundant. They no longer want pesky faculty thinking about things that don't earn money, so the math faculty has to go. The end goal is clear: a University is a business, being sold to students and Alumni, for the purpose of profit.
I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).
This might not be 100% bad as a model, as long as it is properly implemented. One important thing would be the role of teachers in doing exercises and Q&A instead of plain lecture recitation from the books.
Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see.
Long story short, most researcher and professors are evaluated on the basis of the output of their research (number of publications, journals, h-index and that kind of stuff).
Teaching is really an overhead, and a lot of researchers/professors game the system by making things as standard as possible in their own interest (and whatever about the students).
I had seen this myself during a surprisingly short exam (circuit theory): taken in the morning, the professor had corrected ALL of the exams before 3:30 pm. The trick was in using simple numbers (the computations were not the hard part of the exam), skimming briefly the piece of paper and then checking if the numbers in the solution matched his own numbers in his already-solved exam. Duh. I had to go there, ask to have the exam evaluated in front of me, and for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.
You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper. (I had learned from the book instead of his lessons because I had a full-time job -- and thus he hadn't recognized the procedure)
Anyway, I had to keep my temper and explain. He agreed and assigned me the points.
To come back to the original point: somebody might think he's just an asshole (and btw they wouldn't be wrong) but if you know about the back-office dynamics you'd understand that he was/is just minimizing the overhead. In a wrong way, but still, that's what he was/is doing.
> for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.
> You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper.
I can't speak to this specific case. And awarding no points at all does sound quite unusual. But, speaking as a professor, it's disturbing to see how often and how badly students overestimate the intelligibility of their work.
Important qualification: I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions. The situation may be very different in circuit theory and other areas in which answers to exam questions often aren't in prose.
> I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions.
Dude/Dudette, circuit theory can't be further than it already is from prose essays and and open-answer questions.
As I mentioned, part of the strategy was to use simple numbers (think of stuff like 1, 2,-1, pi, stuff like that) because the hard part of the exam was not in numbers and/or raw computation.
So basically if you can read numbers, you can see what's been done there.
And I expect an engineering professor to be able to read numbers.
Right now their endowment is looking perilously low. Is that normal for a UK university? If the university goes bankrupt, can they expect government bailout?
A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty. It can be good or bad, it depends on the goals of the university and which faculties it wants to specialize on.
> A lot of universities do not have a pure math faculty.
If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well.
Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
The article is about pure math, which is the foundation of mathematics using sets, topology, etc. It has separate classes, textbooks and professors from applied mathematics, and often a very low courseload because of the difficulty (like 24 hours per week.)
From a simplistic standpoint, pure math is not focused on equations or numeric solutions, unlike applied mathematics. (You don't need a calculator for most pure math classes.)
In the UK many of the equivalent to community colleges and technical schools (polytechnics) have been reclassified as universities to attract more funding and prestige
> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts.
The UK university model doesn’t follow the liberal arts model. That’s not what we’re aiming to do over here. Especially at a very low-tier university like Leicester. Our degrees are more highly specialised than yours.
"Your model" in this case means the model used by not only the US, but the rest of the Anglosphere, Europe, most of Asia, and generally the rest of the world - as well as the UK until less than 30 years ago.
I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.
No, only if we go back as far as the medieval ages, so not in practice, which is what I said.
Wikipedia explains
> Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe.
> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts.
This is utterly impossible to understand as anything other than a reference the specific medieval seven liberal arts which do historically and practically underpin the definition of the unversity as distinct from other forms of tertiary education, not the "modern" concept of a liberal arts education.
Given that America has a literal 'Hamburger University' I'm not sure you can complain that a British university not having a pure maths department is some kind of dilution of the term.
It'd be illegal to call it 'Hamburger University' in the UK for comparison, as 'university' is a protected designation here and it wouldn't meet the standards for a university, while it does in the US.
(McDonald's does have the same training facility in the UK, but it doesn't claim to be a 'university' here or award 'degrees' like it does in the US.)
If you're suggesting that the University of Leicester sans math department is at least as legitimate a university as Hamburger University, I will agree.
What would make this more clear cut is a summary of what situation the university finds itself in. What's happened with the finances, why these departments, which admin staff are going?
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics.
I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees.
Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books.
> regular events on the currently hot social justice topics.
This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
Students wanting to get their money’s worth is exactly the root cause of this. Trust me, British Universities are bending over backwards to give students what they want. If you’ve been anywhere near a British University you’d know how ridiculous it is to suggest that the staff are somehow secretly organizing BLM protests (??) as part of a plan to stop students noticing how much money they’re spending (??)
The universities should cut their losses then, and tell students to go somewhere else. Part of the issue is placating every whim of students, focusing on the fluff and not on the teaching.
I fully agree. It turns out that there are long-term costs to giving 18 year olds everything they think that they want for your short-term financial gain.
I noticed the general bending over backwards and I think the various political activities are a part of that. But you do not have to secretly organize X to benefit from it. You can just let the river flow and float on it. It is safe, non-controversial and does not require much effort.
Universities have been centers of protest for a long time, and extracurricular stuff has always been a major component of what attracts students. I don’t really see much connection between this and the closing of the maths department at the University of Leicester. Students these days are very career focused, and research is funded based on “impact”. These are the driving forces. The image of the student who cares more about radical politics than learning anything or finding a job is from the 1960s, not the 2020s.
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.
Having studied both in Prague and the UK I can attest that British students are getting their money's worth of leisure and luxury. An interesting side effect is that the same facilities enjoyed by the largely native undergraduate students attract foreign nationals who made up 54% of the postgraduate and 49% of the doctoral student population in 2018/2019, and on whom Britain depends for staying competitive in this local optimum of an education system.
Not sure how things are in the UK, but in the US, this is pretty much spot on. You'll see all sorts of curriculum pop up from grade school through universities to "teach" the SJW topic du jour. If Europe hasn't gone in this direction, well, that's probably why Europeans are so much better educated than Americans.
It's gone so far that the SF school board is more worried about names of their schools named after American greats than they are re-opening schools (which have been closed in California since March).
Isn’t this just a generic rant about so-called SJWs etc. etc.? I can assure you that US universities aren’t defunding or closing their math departments in order to add more humanities courses about hot social issues. You may not like what some professors choose to teach, but a quick glance at the numbers will show you that, if anything, everyone else is being sacrificed on the altar of STEM, not vice versa.
Your second paragraph is about schools, not universities, and I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to this discussion.
Some people will only be happy when anything resembling a left-wing point of view is removed from education and the media.
Some of the "ism" culture war teaching in academia is indeed trite and silly.
But it's far less silly than Fox News and the entire right-wing media machinery - which most recently somehow managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that a valid election was stolen, that Covid is a hoax, and attacking your own political representatives is a valid expression of democracy.
Honestly, compared to that having to pay attention to pronouns or learn something about black history is a complete non-issue.
Unfortunately, it contains a kernel of truth. I personally met staffers at my alma mater that worked there after failing to advance in their academic career but being too well connected to not have a safety net.
I always considered that part of a much needed safety net for a professional where stagnation in the hierarchy is no option, but there are less positions at the top than at the bottom. So yes, a kernel of truth, but not necessarily a bad thing.
It is a problem. Those that are capable and drop out of the insane career filter that is academia get good jobs elsewhere. Others end up in the University. And there, they don't even teach.
I disagree that it contains a kernel of truth, though I would agree that it truthfully identifies a malign surface growth that occasionally metastizes and, left unchecked, destroys the kernel.
I certainly agree that there are people who teach because they can't do, but I don't think that teaching because you can't do is even part of the kernel of teaching.
As for admins... this is a huge problem right now. They are threatening to destroy the host. But a healthy host does have a trim, effective, and dedicated group of admins.
It's a play on "those who can, teach" which was a marketing campaign in the UK, which somewhat backfired within the UK and became the saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach".
Clearly there are lots of people who genuinely choose to enter teaching, but in certain subjects, for some people, it is the de-facto profession if you cannot use your degree to do something else. See Avenue Q's "What can you do, with a BA in English?".
This is more about high school than university-level though.
[Note - I was mistaken - please see the clarification in post below!]
> It's a play on "those who can, teach" which was a marketing campaign in the UK, which somewhat backfired within the UK and became the saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach".
Lol I think you’ve got that backwards!
The marketing slogan was a play on the common criticism of teachers which is a quote of Shaw from around 1900.
Yeah. Especially since a great number of faculty chose to turn down jobs that pay 3-4x what they receive from universities. My friends from grad school who ended up in R1 positions were the most consistently brilliant of my cohort.
Oh, you must mean rubber duck debugging, where a programmer pretends to teach a rubber duck about a bug for the purpose of doing the job of revealing the fix for it in the process.
I absolutely love rubber duck debugging, too!
Do you tend to start a bug fix with it, or do you reserve it for times when you get stuck? I feel like I should use it way more often, or at least way earlier than I tend to. That would probably eliminate a lot of headaches.
Anyway, great to see a fellow rubber duck debugger here on HN! You know I bet if we tried teaching each other about rubber duck debugging we'd reveal even more techniques to become more efficient at doing our work.
I don’t know if this attitude is a cause or an effect of the failures in the American education system. In many other countries, especially in Asia, teachers are respected if not outright revered. Their status is often comparable to medical doctors and other professional classes. So people who choose to teach are not seen as unfit to engage in other endeavors. But in America there’s this undercurrent of contempt for those who would choose to teach. It just seems like a rather self-defeating attitude for a society to have, especially in a world where knowledge is the ultimate competitive advantage. It seems like our current anti-science, pro-ignorance culture is more or less an inevitable outcome of such an attitude.
Doctors in the US make 2 to 3x what doctors in Asia make so thats not a good comparison. American schools are some of the best funded in the world so I'm not sure where the stereotype that teachers aren't appreciated enough comes from
Doctors in the US are unnecessarily overpaid and supply is artificially constrained. Their station in the US should not be considered a litmus test compared to other nations and their healthcare systems.
I'm not sure which part of Asia you're in. Respected, perhaps. Not nearly on the same level as a doctor /lawyer /engineer, social status wise, but not horrible. Revered? I don't think I've seen this where I am.
Do note that I'm fitting this to pre university, though the constraints are relaxed a bit once you bring in the higher statused tenured profs.
It's part of the MBAization of universities combined with typical company politics (the more people under you => the more important you are => the more you get paid). It's a recipe for a lavishly paid executive class running universities who try to run them like a business.
I'll just throw this out here to put some numbers on this so people understand it's more than just a political narrative.
At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc).
The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000.
Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. Facilities and Plant, Campus police, not to even speak of the big ones like DoIT. (DoIT is all the IT people. Network support, web developers, DBAs etc.) I get that. At the same time, that's almost a 10 to 1 ratio. Keep in mind, the University of Wisconsin is one of the more frugal universities out there in this regard.
Again, I don't question that some of this is necessary, how much? I don't know. But having the numbers and the positions these people are employed in does put us in a better position to, at a minimum, have an informed discussion of the subject.
I know that if the University of Wisconsin shut down the math department because the web developers and DBAs at DoIT had to be paid, I would definitely be someone who would assume that to be an unwise decision. Just putting myself in the shoes of the people who care about the subject university.
I don’t know anything about this group of professors, but I would assume a good department head could defend and prevent this type of issue. If your superiors continually think you and all your peers are dead weight that’s as much your fault as theirs.
The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg."
The flip side of this is that if have excess capacity for medical treatment, that can be incredibly helpful in the case of a rare event such as a terrorist attack or a pandemic.
2019: all these empty hospitals with too much staff and no patients?! Let's close them down, save some money!
2020: why is our medical system running at 90% capacity in normal times?! Why don't we have some idle capacity for emergencies (natural disaster, pandemic, war)?
This may apply to equipment and even buildings to a certain extent, but qualified nurses are not something you can just purchase off the shelf like a new rack of servers when demand is high. This applies doubly so for intensive care, which even regular (i.e. non-ICU) nurses are not qualified for without prior training. Where are those people going to come from when demand peaks?
> This may apply to equipment and even buildings to a certain extent, but qualified nurses are not something you can just purchase off the shelf like a new rack of servers when demand is high.
Professional training is not the same as hiring people to idle. See how emergency response services mobilize in case of any emergency scenario, and how that does not involve hiring armies of firemen and police officers to idle by.
I managed two weeks in university IT as a developer before I just had to leave and never come back. If it is anything like UBC IT, it is not worth losing math over.
I think the key word is “hot”. Focusing only on shallow hot topic issues like who uses which bathroom feels good, but universities should be exploring the depths of social justice issues from a more holistic place. I went to university and never had to take a women’s studies class or an African American history class, so I didn’t take one. In fact no courses on diversity were required, I believe that has been to my detriment, and I’d be a much more thoughtful well rounded individual had I taken those courses.
I think the current mindset of american universities is commodification of the concept of higher education.
Teaching, scholastic tradition and enlightment values are sidelined by values like customer satisfaction, marketing, and money making optimization.
In this case, just let me purchase the fucking credentials without having to follow curriculum at their speed or pay for any of the things that won't benefit me anymore
This mindset is ultimately what many universities are optimizing for. The credential is pretty meaningless if it can simply be purchased, people will catch on quickly enough.
The ideal business is then one that actively inflates the credential's value while lowering the difficulty of achieving it. The best way to do this is to increase selectivity/restrict supply, raise prices, lower difficulty (grade inflation), and increase the time required to get the credential, while providing alternate activities for those who are inclined to do something other than receiving an education.
Heck you can get degree credit by virtue of living in a foreign country via a study abroad program.
The other activities a university may participate in like research, or educating only matter to the extent they enhance the "prestige" of the credential or to benefit the minority of students who value academic rigor more so than the credential.
> The best way to do this is to increase selectivity/restrict supply, raise prices, lower difficulty (grade inflation), and increase the time required to get the credential, while providing alternate activities for those who are inclined to do something other than receiving an education.
A mission that the Ivies are well on their way with. The average grade at Harvard is a 3.67 (as of a 2013 source) and the prices have never been higher (though that's an individual thing, what with scholarships). They only need to make it a 5 year program with a MA/MS tagged in to get really going; degree-inflation hopped onto grade-inflation and dollar-inflation.
Somehow, you then have to work Ultimate Frisbee or chess in there too, an athletics-inflation and club-inflation (?), so to speak. Kinda like Laurie Laughlin's daughter did with the varsity-blues scandal for admissions. I'd guess that's already happened then.
What do you end up with besides an empty savings account? A 22 years old with a very good resume and a very bad taste in beer and jazz.
Modern universities are a mix of two contradictory ideas. It's a place for "higher learning"; trying to fit the same role as institutions from hundreds of years ago where academic learning was much rarer and was fitted for the aristocracy. While simultaneously being something that you need for a job to make money. Oh, and also the people doing the teaching are more interested in their research than actually teaching. Forget teachers putting in 100% of their effort into teaching and making sure people really get the material (here's some slides the T.A. made, deal with it), you're lucky if a professor is a half-way decent orator.
There are so many better ways to get different kinds of education, particularly for humanities. There are books, online videos, etc. that provide a better education on writing, philosophy, etc. than what a single professor charging thousands of dollars can provide.
From what I understand, a top-notch professor of philosophy at a first-tier university will teach 1-2 classes per semester to 300ish students per class for which they will earn no more than 300k per year ( although typically 3-6x less ).
This works out to roughly $250 per student per semester. It's difficult to price the work of T.As as they are often students themselves, but assuming each student requires an average of 2 hours per week of dedicated grading/tutoring time, then at $20/hr the total cost of providing a first tier class should be $730 dollars.
This number is roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 the cost of a class at a community college, 1/6th of the effective cost per class for UMass Amherst, and roughly 1/10th the effective price per class of MIT.
I can assure you that the lecturer at your community college is not making 300k either. But this calculation does show that most of the tuition costs do not end up in the hands of the teaching staff, and that providing a first rate education could be done for an order of magnitude lower cost than current first tier universities charge.
Or hell, offer professors 1 million per year and still charge 1/3rd the price of MIT.
I started tutoring halfway through grad school to supplement my income. It was such easy money that it prompted me to do a similar calculation, based on my own observed income and the public salaries of professors at the university. This was at UCLA, a highly ranked school for math PhD’s, but for which very few profs were making anywhere close to 300k.
This epiphany acted as a catalyst for me to leave academia.
The other part is that a degree means you can stick with some 'thing' for 4 years. A quality employers value. I tried to focus on learning with my time, grades be damned.
While I disagree with your framing (only slightly), it has historically been the case that university is where the upper class spends their early 20s with the content of the education not really having a bearing on the direction of the students’ lives. I think we’ve done a pretty good job duplicating this model for the masses! Even down to the alternate justice model inside most universities. Perpetrate a drug or sexual crime? No big deal, just switch schools and start over!
Takes a lot of admins to recreate the upper class bubble for the poors.
I can’t really blame people for wanting this security for their children. Ultimately I don't think it will change until (at least in the US) we address things like universal healthcare, justice system reform and maybe even a UBI.
Yeah, it's actually funny that the GP's characterization is more aligned with the historical/ancient function of colleges and universities than the current one. For many decades at a time, you could characterize the student body of legendary schools like Oxford as "Bands of bored and inebriated wealthy teenagers."
For the best example, look no further than the St. Scholastica Day Riots, which started with a drunk angry scholar and escalated into a mob riot with nearly 100 casualties. [0] When not rioting against the villagers, Oxford scholars in the 13th and 14th century were prone to riot amongst themselves.
Similar disagreements in the past culminated in lynchings and led to the founding of the University of Cambridge (to avoid more bloodshed from angry villagers, but also in part to avoid accountability for other kerfuffles). So yeah, wealthy teenager daycare with education on the side is nothing new.
Edit: fixed a few historical inaccuracies, I mixed a few events in my head.
>The seed of the riot was an altercation in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford [ when two students became angry at being served poor quality drink ]
I wonder if this is the etymological origin of the word 'swindle?'
The online etymological dictionary indicates that the term was of German origin, brought to England by German Jews, meaning a giddy or untrustworthy person, based on an older word meaning to languish or decline but that seems incognate with its current meaning.
I was trying to be factual with a little sarcastic flair. My personal belief is that there shouldn’t be an alternate justice system within the university.
> provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics.
It's already happening. I went to a Canadian university. The marketing material says the school wanted to give the students a "great student experience". What's great student experience? The glossy pamphlets shows varsity sports facilities, bright lecture halls and students hanging out in residences.
> events on the currently hot social justice topics.
Namespace collision detected:
1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior"
Definition #1 isn't an edge case-- most universities are chock full of such events and seminars. Shit like this: a linguist who was tasked with helping a Northern California tribe fill in the blanks in the documentation of their dead language so they could revive it. If your curiosity isn't peaked by that concept and it's associated practical challenges and sets of choices, I'm not sure what you're doing on HN.
Definition #2 is like HN's version of cheating celebrity stories in the Enquirer. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life enumerating each case, you certainly wouldn't run out of bona fide material. But if all you talk about 99% of the time is that-- to the extent that you forget definition #1 even exists-- you have to admit at least part of your outrage is due not to your own free will but due to people clicking upvote buttons as if nudging trays of junk food close to where you're sitting.
> a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
"Newly discovered primary documents" something makes me doubt that this is what the professors are looking into...
Quick digression followed by rank speculation, but I think it will be useful--
What draws the largest general audience at colleges are sports.
It would be reasonable if many HN posters wanted to critique college sports fans for diverting funds and energy from more important scholarly pursuits. It would be reasonable, if a bit odd, for them to do this by sarcastically nicknaming college sports fans, "Einsteins."
It would be understandable if HN posters extended the sarcastic nickname "Einstein" to other domains to target people who ruin that domain by spamming it with superficial, loud-mouthed, low-effort pursuits.
It would not be reasonable, understandable nor healthy if a critical mass of HN posters did this without knowing a) who Einstein is, b) the obvious fact that the nickname is being used sarcastically, and c) an entire department in every major college is concerned with an intellectual pursuit of extending the work that Einstein started. After all, hackers are supposed to understand the systems they hack!
Anyway, if this were the case then anyone with even a passing interest in impugning the reputation of Einstein himself could then leverage that ignorance to do so.
It's my rank speculation that "social justice" to a critical mass of HN'ers has become something of a backformation from "social justice warrior." E.g., an ignorant lurker reads a snippet about some historical figure from a social justice movement (or just a topic tangentially related to a social justice movement from the past), feels outrage over the superficiality and arrogance of SJW's, and unconsciously applies those same feels to whatever the conversation happens to be about.
This happens all the time with memes-- e.g., Tim and Eric make a convincing "Free Real Estate" infomercial parody, parody becomes a meme, Tim shows up in a film, and Redditors mock him: "Hey, it's that Free Real Estate huckster guy!"
The selective schools can sell their signaling services and support massive bloated administrative groups. People will pay for the validation.
Non-selective schools (like Leicester, which admits 80%!of applicants, of which only 20% choose to attend) won’t be able to pull this off. The signaling value is too weak. They can’t get you an interview at a top company. If they can’t prepare you for it, how many parents will pay for a 4 year vacation?
IMO, the main problem with university finances is the easy loans and the fact they survive bankruptcy - the only loans I'm aware of with this status. Without this easy money, colleges and universities could not have raised tuition like they have, because most people couldn't pay it.
But with the loans, colleges and universities are flush with cash, so they build extravagant dorms, hire way too many administrators, VP's, etc.
My idea to fix this is to make the universities provide the loans. Then they have an incentive to make sure students graduate and have a career path that makes sense (and money!)
We have allowed and encouraged an entire generation to screw themselves with these outrageous loans.
"Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice", which founded the study is motivated to magnify "bloat" in establishment institutions. The article preempts this criticism but does not refute it. A more honest study would try to break down what the administrative roles actually do.
The part about synergy between faculties is accurate. Having strong pure math academics helps out the various applied math departments in indirect ways that I've seen.
This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.
He's on about 500k/year. It's not enough. That's a not uncommon total package for a reasonably experienced SV engineer, it's not fitting for one of the foremost pure mathematicians of our generation. It's because most of his output is positive externality, his employer capturing little of his value creation except for the prestige & teaching output, which must be less than 10% of his current value proposition to society.
Just looking at UCLA employees sorted by gross pay is interesting; Tao ends up around #192 on the list. Mostly due to the medical school, plus some people with titles like "INTERCOL ATH HEAD COACH EX" and "INTERCOL ATH COACH AST EX".
Super hot take here but I genuinely find it disgusting how many money American Universities spend on sporting events and sports, while also somehow not paying their student athletes.
And their support of the NFL which leaves their students with CTE. We could say it's their voluntary choice to participate but when they're being offered such a juicy carrot to trade off against their health, some people are going to favor the former. It all makes sense when we consider the University is foremost a business.
I do not know the details of this case, but universities are opening new departments, centers and programs all the time. There needs to be some mechanism for reallocation rather than just growth.
Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each.
I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.
I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this approach over what he claims to be the European way: long-term thinking and research done for research's sake.
That paper was written in 1982
Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector.
It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics.
This is a scandal.
--
Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]:
The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...]
In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May.
However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic.
Maybe, but something is constantly changing in the worrying direction. Humans are becoming slaves of the tools they build, not vice versa. Our biological abilities fade away in the presence of technological progress. People may fantasy about some cyberpank future, but I have doubts about it. Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. And I'm pretty sure general AI is a real thing, at least in the future. So, the confrontation between humans as biological species and tech progress is quite justifiable.
> Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them.
Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
It also frequently happens, and there are many ulti century-long stretches of time in various places in the world from which we have virtually no literature or historical record, not even enough to verify basic facts like what cities were named or where they were located. Sometimes this is because there was virtually nothing being written at the time that anyone thought worth preserving, or because movements, marauders, armies, or some pogrom burned it all and forced people not to discuss the contents on pain of death.
Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.
Which is ironic considering that Medieval Literature, and Chaucer in particular, is one of the other things the University of Leicester were talking about getting rid of.
Fortunately, a university axing Chaucer is not going to end him, not only because he's already dead, but also because he's been dead for long enough that you can just read his works online for free, no university required: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer
Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.
Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.
Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.
When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...
Well, if technological advances is the only thing you care for, sure, then go ahead and get rid of stuff like pure maths.
However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?
Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
DeepMind is European. ARM is European. The best chip manufacturing companies are in Taiwan. The best car makers are in Europe. The #1 shipping line (Maersk) is in Europe. The language we are speaking right now is European. The modern corporation, including shares, was invented in Europe. Alan Turing was European. Do I really need to go on?
cm2187: I wonder if you realize that a significant factor in the US scientific prowess is a certain event in the XX century history of Europe which forced a huge number of scientists to move to the US because they weren't 'Aryan enough'. After said XX century event another wave of scientists arrived (or were brought) to the US, only these were 'quite Aryan' but facing career oblivion in Europe due to their past political associations. One way or another, a critical mass of excellent researchers ended up in the US and became a technological asset that no other country could frankly match or even get close, solidifying its technological preeminence for the rest of the century. Obviously, this wouldn't have been possible without generous US funding for science as well (the economy being another area where the US has dominated the XX century).
Also, '90%' sounds suspiciously like a number you produced from deep within your colon.
On your first point, it is certainly the case that many scientists came from abroad, and in fact that is still the case today, you don't need Nazi persecutions for that. But we are talking about whether the academic system produces game changing research, not where the researchers were born (in fact if anything,the fact that people are attracted by this model is a testimony to its effectiveness).
As for the 90%, agree, that's where I found that number. But do the exercise of listing all the major technological advances you can think of that mattered on the XX century, and I think you will likely end up close to that.
In any event, I think this is all getting rather silly. I was simply making the point that historically science in the US has benefited tremendously from having a large number of capable people that were trained within a different system. Where they were born is absolutely irrelevant. A certain W. von Braun was indeed an American, as were his 'major technological advances' that many in the US are rightly proud of, but he was very much a product of German science (I hope you don't find this point controversial).
In Physics the 2 giant contributions from the XX century (Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity) were developed in Europe.
In Mathematics the big highlights of the XX century: the Hilbert Program, the Bourbaki group, computability,the FLT solution were mainly made outside the US.
First satellite? First man in space? USSR
Europe was a big contributor to the first computers: Colossus, Zuse's Z2.
The Germans were pioneers in rocketry and ballistics as it is sadly very well known by the rest of the work.
In Biology: Watson, Crick, Monod,Ian Wilmut,Maynar-Smith made fantastic and foundational contributions
Medicine? Antibiotics,discovery of tetanus vaccine, immunological agents, vitamins, all made outside of the US.
That's not to say that American has not make fantastic contributions, The Apollo program, the invention of the transistor, the invention of the Internet are highlights of American ingenuity and glorious gifts to the rest of the world.
But pretending that all good science is made only in the US and the rest of the world in some sort of scientific backwater is just a sad indictment of the American educational system that formed you.
Not true. Not even close to being true. Unless you very narrowly cherry pick technology advances to be whatever makes your statement true. Even the language we are speaking right now was invented in Europe.
Sadly it's the same in software these days. I've seen places where the business teams outnumber the development teams. It's such a clusterfuck with everyone trying to steer the direction their way, when only so much can be built. Of course, when it comes to hiring more devs, "we don't have the budget for it".
Patched up software with increasing technical debt is how a business should be run, haven't you heard? Oh and in the mean time get more sales, create immediate displeasure and load up the outsourced customer support with angry clients. /s
It's almost as if a capitalist system rewards people who seek dollar signs instead of real progress, and is antithetical to what is genuine and good. Progress is merely a side-effect of capitalism. If people can gain capital without it, they will.
I agree with you analysis, but is this necessarily bad (or rather, is all of this bad)?
As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.
So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.
Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".
I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).
Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood.
Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.
I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
What nerd with intellect would work as a professor if they could earn the significantly more money working for a hedge fund, FAANG, etc? Genuine question. The current academic hopeful spends their 20s in near-poverty level stipends and are more likely than not to never get a professorship as it is. If they did all that for 60k/yr why would they even bother?
(Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure.
You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure.
The flip side is you get paid a third of industry.
That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job.
As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs.
With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard:
1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love
2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life.
It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs.
Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.
Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure.
And now the German version of this tale:
You finish high school with 18/19 get your master's degree with 23/24. Then you get a PhD position but because it's tied to a three-year project with third-party funding, you're also expected to do project work that does not contribute to your thesis at all. You're only starting out in the business, though, so you're happy to help!
Then, three years later, the project is finished but your thesis is nowhere near that. Now, choose your own adventure:
1) Luckily, your supervisor can hire you using his own budget. That's nice, almost no strings attached. Now you can really focus on finishing up your thesis.
2) Luckily, there's another project that has just started and that you can work on now. You're a bit unsure, though: when the first project was up, no-one thanked you for your work, your supervisor was just surprised about the state of your thesis. Should you do that again? What's more, the new project has nothing to do with the old project, let alone with the topic of your thesis. Because you really have no other option, you agree to do it - still better than nothing.
Which brings us to the next option:
3) Your supervisor unfortunately has no funds to extend your contract. But since you've already invested so much work and you like the idea of a PhD, you apply for unemployment support through the government and hope that you can finish everything within a year. Later, you're gonna call this period an "independently funded research scholarship" on you CV.
But all good things come to an end: finally, after much hardship, you graduate! Wow!
And you even find a post-doc position in some other town! Great. You don't mind a change of scenery! Now you're rolling!
And you're good at your job. You feel good. Get lots of papers accepted.
But your contract ends after two years. Luckily, there is another post-doc position in some other town! Great! You're not so keen on moving again but hey, your new partner doesn't mind a change of scenery.
And you're still pretty good at your job. You kind of start feeling a bit disillusioned with your field though: it seems like all the research published these days is just application-driven -- not what once pulled you to the field. Oh, well, at least your job pays the rent.
But your contract ends after two years. You consider applying for professor positions because in Germany, there is no middle ground really. But you have your doubts: are you really good enough? Besides, both you and your partner hate the idea of moving yet again: you just made new friends. But what can you do?
None of your applications for a professor position go anywhere. So you go for a third post-doc. The move was really not that bad, as you were able to sell most of the old furniture. The new supervisor is great and you feel energized with a rediscovered love for the field.
You don't get as many papers out as before even though you try. But somehow, you don't have as much time for actual research anymore, as you find yourself more and more tied up in administratrivia. You work long hours but only half of it is actually dedicated to research, and it shows in your output. Nevertheless, you like the working environment.
But then your contract ends after two years. Your supervisor would love to keep you, he even has enough money in his budget for at least five years. But oh! Damn. There is a law in Germany that six years after your PhD, you cannot be hired on university budget anymore, unless it's a permanent p...
Thank you for the perspective from Germany. I wonder, should we read the above with "I" in place of "you"? Is this your personal experience? If so, what is the final outcome? Or is that nont known yet?
Perhaps we can establish a nonprofit research institution where people can do research. There are whole towns for sale in various places, we could get one for free probably. Get an endowment together, a few million, that could pay for a bit of food and refurbishment. Brew beer or some sort of herbal liqueur, might cover some expenses.
For location, you can find villages or monasteries in Europe, especially depopulating areas in Italy for brutally cheap (under $100k). If you have a bit more money, say $5-700k, you can buy an old factory or convent in France. Various tax advantages can be had with enough cleverness.
An endowment you can rustle up with sufficiently well connected people, especially if you aren't looking for that much money.
Grants I agree are a problem. Darpa as I recall doesn't necessarily require university connections, but I'm not sure if Europe has anything easy like that. Maybe you attach a startup incubator?
EDIT: In terms of financing, how much money do you really need? If you are self sufficient in terms of owning the property, endowment income and growing vegetables and selling beer/yoghurt etc., is that not enough? Would the modern academic type be interested at all in essentially living in a commune/monastery where some amount of time is dedicated to cleaning/maintenance/carpentry/agriculture?
This is false. Not-for-profits which aren't universities apply for grants all the time. Different grants come with different restrictions, but the proposed scheme would certainly be above the bar for e.g. typical NSF science grants.
Universities are hard due to accreditation, but starting a not-for-profit is quick and easy.
The really sad part of this journey is that most of those people, beyond youthful idealism, had no idea whether that dream was for them.
Because there is very little mobility into academia, MANY people land on the wrong side of the pond. You can't try industry and go back. One more difference is that colleges once wanted people with decades industry experience, and many older people saw going back to teach young'uns as a way of giving back.
It's not just older people. If you're in industry, and want to pursue a good idea for 5 years where you don't have elbowroom, or in academia and want to try to commercialize something, you break your academic track. It's possible with tenure, but I find many tenured academics distinctly underimpressive by the point they've gone through decades of abuse to get there....
It's actually worse. The current generation of professors is completely out-of-touch with industry, due to them living during a huge academic shortage. Now you hear them say:
- "I never wrote a patent and I turned out great. Why should we bother giving an innovation course to our PhD students?"
- "This person had a 10-year break in their academic career. I can't evaluate them."
So it's not only that there is a lack of mobility between industry and academia, rather this gap is actively fueled.
I know a handful of faculty at top universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc). At least one did a year at a FAANG company prior to starting so it isn't like they don't know better. They are paid well enough and don't need 400k salaries. They love their research topic and love the freedom to work on the topics they care most about. They love mentoring students specifically. They don't care about software engineering as a discipline and would rather spend time learning other things. They (most of them) like teaching. They like being part of a research community.
MIT, Stanford, etc. still give Cambridge/Mountain View housing-owning, BMW-driving salaries. With tenure, baseline CS salary is around $200k, with a 20% carve-out for consulting (which, with the brand stamp, leads many to be obscenely rich).
And most -- not all but most -- new faculty hires cheat in some way to get there, at the elites (at the very least, overselling results, but often intentionally p-hunting, stealing credit, and similar).
I'd say those are the minority - for most academics, doing the research is the most important thing, and salary second, or else, the CS departments of this world would be empty.
> Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not.
This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.
Not sure where you went to school, but this definitely isn’t the case everywhere. I went to a state school, and freshly minted faculty were making 60-80k, while folks with tenure were in the 100-125K range. The only people making salaries like you describe were higher level administrators and of course the football coach.
The opposite is also true. I read a book about early electricity discoveries. People in Europe were all about the deep end theories. America.. pragmatism reigned supreme. As long as you can make something out of phenomenon you're good to go. The book said that by the time Edison made a light bulb, European academics were still debating unproven theories.
On the other hand, by the time Europeans made the WWW, American capitalists were still trying to figure out how to micromonetize resource transclusion.
By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.
Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.
Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.
The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
* this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra.
* Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0].
* The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so.
* There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go.
* They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area.
Yeah, it used to be that the government paid that and students went for free or got a grant. Starting back in 2002 they cut the amount the government paid and increased what students paid. So the unis didn't get any more money, the government just saved cash.
It would be less of an issue if there was an actual free market, instead all unis just max out the student loan and still complain there's not enough money. I'd happily go to a shack if there's good teaching.
The US are even more innovative in ripping off students.
I'm always surprised their aren't more US schools that are just academics. They all seem to have football teams and sports stadiums and up market dorms.
I went to Exeter. I picked the cheapest accommodation. I was more than happy with the on site sports centre. I wouldn't want to pay double for gold taps and an arena.
I think it would be interesting to see how places fared if tuition was linked to rankings. Top 10 can charge full wack, Next 10 80%, etc. But that would force people to make hard decisions...
The Principal leaves money on the table if they only do academics. You get paid based on the budget of the organisation you run, and just doing academics for 1000 students obviously needs a smaller budget than doing academics, sports, entertainment, lodging etc for 1000 students.
It would have been better if they'd just actually made "tuition fees" an actual proper graduation tax, rather than a tax for the poor and a loan for the rich.
UK just wanted to stop funding EU students, since EU disallowed paying for your own students and not others. The problem is that English universities are inherently more attractive so UK has way more EU students than EU had UK students making UK support a disproportionally large number of students.
One of the craziest things is that we still fund EU students 100% as long as they go home after graduation. I actually considered doing the same but I was to wedded to my UK friends and family.
> The problem is that English universities are inherently more attractive so UK has way more EU students than EU had UK students making UK support a disproportionally large number of students.
The English evidently agree this is a problem and have been doing their part to make UK universities less “inherently” attractive.
Just to say, there are two sides to this problem. The UK govt had spent two or three decades before it brought in fees attempting to get universities to reduce costs...this was unsuccessful. The idea was: we can do literally nothing about this problem, so students will pay for it (and btw, the debt is a fairly soft one), and hopefully universities will cut back when students get angry at them...which has basically happened after the wave of Chinese money started running out a few years ago (and has now gone completely). Universities are digging their own graves, and hopefully something better will come out of it.
This issue is, btw, basically identical to the one for council funding. It is a very tricky area with no easy answers but, funnily enough, always ends up with the same solution (council funding in the UK is basically regressive, like university funding because there is literally no way to pressure these institutions to be responsible without user paying).
You state that "a drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money". This is completely unfounded and not supported by statistics at all [1]. University intake in the UK across all ethnicities has been on a steady increase.
Also, I'm not sure it's true to say UK degrees don't care about the beauty of number's. Again, the statistics show that the number of mathematics students have been according to the overall trend [2]. And anecdotally, comparing with friends from other countries the UK actually seems to have a university system unusually geared to purely academic degrees.
It's my personal belief that while of course university is about getting a job, it's also about learning about adulthood for many people. People use it to delay the start of their working life and enjoy a few years of adult freedom, as well as to get a degree. Anecdotally, I know a lot of my friends went to uni almost entirely for this reason and had no idea in their head about what they'd do after yet. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact with increasing lifetimes I think it only makes sense we continue to delay the age at which we enter the workforce.
The amount of money the uni gets is the same. Overseas pay the full price, domestic students are subsidised and only pay £9k, but the uni gets it in full anyway. And, no, they still take overseas students (with remote studies it's not more difficult, than domestic ones). Imperial's Chem department even filled more places for 1st year than usual.
About 10% of teaching income is from the government, but that's to cover courses that cost more to teach (medicine, physical sciences, engineering etc). There is no per-student subsidy as far as I am aware? Unis get the 9k a year, either cash or from the slc.
Also, international fees are unregulated. They're totally down to the uni and the student. Central government doesn't touch them. This is why there has been a big push to take on foreign students in most universities over the last 20 years.
No doubt these administrators put very low value on pure math but they also know the uproar might/will reduce some of the budget cuts they're dealing with.
I used to work as an Lecturer in the other University in Leicester and I have lots of friends and colleagues working in various departments at Leicester University. It looks like the financial situation at the University is quite bad, and this isn’t the first time the executive has threatened to close this department. I feel for the people working there at the moment. Sad times.
I think it's important to fund research for the sake of research because it's the only way to explore the unknown unknowns of the universe. At the extreme end, it's a bit dystopian to consider the future of academia being limited to only topics that can deliver immediate economic value.
But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past.
Nothing wrong with reshaping their focus if they also rename themselves into the Leicester Vocational School. They should be stripped of the title University that they are not worthy of any longer.
As a fellow Czech, who studies in one of top 20 UK universities, let me add my two cents.
As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees.
I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio...
Currently, there are two problems in UK universities:
Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!).
Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades.
This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs.
FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in!
For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price
A thought experiment that has a surprising amount of predictive power is to view the universities as a system of single-party rule on the scale of the CCP, where they vie for power internally among themselves, and use the real economy to fund their effective system of sinecures.
Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.
You're suggesting that the math department is out of line with the universities propaganda? Are you aware that they're also axing humanities departments? They're not axing applied science departments. Your "experiment" doesn't really match reality.
Are the universities a de-facto one party system? No. Does their aggregate behaviour resemble one? More often than you'd expect.
The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
Your theory is, at best, completely orthogonal to event in the tweet. Dropping the medieval literature department is secretly a plot to produce activists who seize the means of production by purging quantitatively minded people? I would seriously reconsider the underpinning of my world view if it led me to such a conclusion.
Amazing marketing fodder for any startup that wants to create a better educational system.
Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P)
Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
This is good. Too long have universities maintained the illusion that all subjects are worth studying. They are not. And we have a valuation mechanism - pay. The truth is that some subjects need far fewer participants than others. You don’t need the marginal new mathematician or historian or geographer.
We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public.
The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers.
Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small.
But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
That has to be the most capitalistic opinion I've read in a long time. This is in essence: "let's just limit access to studies yielding no current or short-term anticipated industrial benefit to rich people". This is what monetary valuation means.
What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
Probably not very useful. The problem we have is that support staff units are in control of staff expansion. They then create more support staff out of some institutional reproductive urge.
This is classic short-term MBA thinking. It completely misses that theoretical researchers are an integral part of a diverse research ecosystem, that researcher diversity is more than the sum of its parts (or in MBA-speak, is synergistic), that some theoretical work eventually does become economically valuable as it filters into applied sciences, and that this might take longer than one or two quarters after publication.
All modern technologies (including the internet) came out of not-for-profit research done at Universities. Private companies are great at exploring already existing markets but really bad at creating new ones. You need long term blue sky research to discover markets that nobody with a short term profit motive would even think about.
If their math faculty is of similar quality to (or worse than) what we had at my top 25 university, they aren't going to lose much of value. I was a math major. Our math department was so bad - because the faculty was truly, magnificently inept at teaching - that our engineering school created their own versions of every required math class so the engineers could actually learn the required math.
Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science".
If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadThe only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about.
(Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
Consider if Marks & Spencer announced it would no longer sell clothes, to focus instead on food, for example.
Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.
Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.
(That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.
Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see.
Long story short, most researcher and professors are evaluated on the basis of the output of their research (number of publications, journals, h-index and that kind of stuff).
Teaching is really an overhead, and a lot of researchers/professors game the system by making things as standard as possible in their own interest (and whatever about the students).
I had seen this myself during a surprisingly short exam (circuit theory): taken in the morning, the professor had corrected ALL of the exams before 3:30 pm. The trick was in using simple numbers (the computations were not the hard part of the exam), skimming briefly the piece of paper and then checking if the numbers in the solution matched his own numbers in his already-solved exam. Duh. I had to go there, ask to have the exam evaluated in front of me, and for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit.
You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper. (I had learned from the book instead of his lessons because I had a full-time job -- and thus he hadn't recognized the procedure)
Anyway, I had to keep my temper and explain. He agreed and assigned me the points.
To come back to the original point: somebody might think he's just an asshole (and btw they wouldn't be wrong) but if you know about the back-office dynamics you'd understand that he was/is just minimizing the overhead. In a wrong way, but still, that's what he was/is doing.
> You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper.
I can't speak to this specific case. And awarding no points at all does sound quite unusual. But, speaking as a professor, it's disturbing to see how often and how badly students overestimate the intelligibility of their work.
Important qualification: I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions. The situation may be very different in circuit theory and other areas in which answers to exam questions often aren't in prose.
Dude/Dudette, circuit theory can't be further than it already is from prose essays and and open-answer questions.
As I mentioned, part of the strategy was to use simple numbers (think of stuff like 1, 2,-1, pi, stuff like that) because the hard part of the exam was not in numbers and/or raw computation.
So basically if you can read numbers, you can see what's been done there.
And I expect an engineering professor to be able to read numbers.
If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well.
Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
An entire department might only find one star per year (or decade), but that could advance a topic 100 years overall.
Occasionally a self-taught prodigy like Ramanajuan emerges, but society needs many more.
From a simplistic standpoint, pure math is not focused on equations or numeric solutions, unlike applied mathematics. (You don't need a calculator for most pure math classes.)
The UK university model doesn’t follow the liberal arts model. That’s not what we’re aiming to do over here. Especially at a very low-tier university like Leicester. Our degrees are more highly specialised than yours.
Don’t judge our universities by your model.
Don't blame us when you misuse the damn word.
I'm not sure what you are referring to - we didn't use a liberal arts model 30 years ago. The modern idea of 'liberal arts' is an American invention, aping classical ideals but not actual traditional European practices.
Wikipedia explains
> Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
Almost zero people in Europe will have done a liberal arts education. As a mainstream thing it's really a uniquely American idea.
And again, where is this idea of the UK doing liberal arts 30 years ago from? That's a bizarre claim not grounded in any kind of reality.
> Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts.
This is utterly impossible to understand as anything other than a reference the specific medieval seven liberal arts which do historically and practically underpin the definition of the unversity as distinct from other forms of tertiary education, not the "modern" concept of a liberal arts education.
Go grind your political axe elsewhere.
It'd be illegal to call it 'Hamburger University' in the UK for comparison, as 'university' is a protected designation here and it wouldn't meet the standards for a university, while it does in the US.
(McDonald's does have the same training facility in the UK, but it doesn't claim to be a 'university' here or award 'degrees' like it does in the US.)
I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees.
Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-ou...
This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
It's gone so far that the SF school board is more worried about names of their schools named after American greats than they are re-opening schools (which have been closed in California since March).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-francisco-mayor-london...
Your second paragraph is about schools, not universities, and I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to this discussion.
Some of the "ism" culture war teaching in academia is indeed trite and silly.
But it's far less silly than Fox News and the entire right-wing media machinery - which most recently somehow managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that a valid election was stolen, that Covid is a hoax, and attacking your own political representatives is a valid expression of democracy.
Honestly, compared to that having to pay attention to pronouns or learn something about black history is a complete non-issue.
I heard it from a Rastafarian in a documentary and I have cherished it ever since.
If you’ve been out of school for >10yrs, I’d strongly encourage you to look at the current cost of your alma matter - it may well shock you.
I certainly agree that there are people who teach because they can't do, but I don't think that teaching because you can't do is even part of the kernel of teaching.
As for admins... this is a huge problem right now. They are threatening to destroy the host. But a healthy host does have a trim, effective, and dedicated group of admins.
Clearly there are lots of people who genuinely choose to enter teaching, but in certain subjects, for some people, it is the de-facto profession if you cannot use your degree to do something else. See Avenue Q's "What can you do, with a BA in English?".
This is more about high school than university-level though.
[Note - I was mistaken - please see the clarification in post below!]
Lol I think you’ve got that backwards!
The marketing slogan was a play on the common criticism of teachers which is a quote of Shaw from around 1900.
(I always heard it as "those who can't teach, consult" but I like the administrate introduction...)
Oh, you must mean rubber duck debugging, where a programmer pretends to teach a rubber duck about a bug for the purpose of doing the job of revealing the fix for it in the process.
I absolutely love rubber duck debugging, too!
Do you tend to start a bug fix with it, or do you reserve it for times when you get stuck? I feel like I should use it way more often, or at least way earlier than I tend to. That would probably eliminate a lot of headaches.
Anyway, great to see a fellow rubber duck debugger here on HN! You know I bet if we tried teaching each other about rubber duck debugging we'd reveal even more techniques to become more efficient at doing our work.
So much to talk about! So much to teach and do!
I love HN!
Do note that I'm fitting this to pre university, though the constraints are relaxed a bit once you bring in the higher statused tenured profs.
At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc).
The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000.
Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. Facilities and Plant, Campus police, not to even speak of the big ones like DoIT. (DoIT is all the IT people. Network support, web developers, DBAs etc.) I get that. At the same time, that's almost a 10 to 1 ratio. Keep in mind, the University of Wisconsin is one of the more frugal universities out there in this regard.
Again, I don't question that some of this is necessary, how much? I don't know. But having the numbers and the positions these people are employed in does put us in a better position to, at a minimum, have an informed discussion of the subject.
I know that if the University of Wisconsin shut down the math department because the web developers and DBAs at DoIT had to be paid, I would definitely be someone who would assume that to be an unwise decision. Just putting myself in the shoes of the people who care about the subject university.
If students don’t seem to be getting benefit from education by professors who focus solely on mathematics, then that problem needs to be understood.
This is the second time this has happened according to the tweet, and the professors have been unable to defend themselves both times.
Maybe someone should offer to assist in improvement of the program. It’s probably a fine place to work if they want to stay there this much.
The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staff) who had fallen over some scaffolding and broken her leg."
2020: why is our medical system running at 90% capacity in normal times?! Why don't we have some idle capacity for emergencies (natural disaster, pandemic, war)?
Professional training is not the same as hiring people to idle. See how emergency response services mobilize in case of any emergency scenario, and how that does not involve hiring armies of firemen and police officers to idle by.
This seems like a smear of people who care about social justice by implication. Why do you suppose they are not interested in education and research?
This is only shallow because you have made it so. I could also say “shallow hot topic issues like bra burning”. Drop the strawman.
The ideal business is then one that actively inflates the credential's value while lowering the difficulty of achieving it. The best way to do this is to increase selectivity/restrict supply, raise prices, lower difficulty (grade inflation), and increase the time required to get the credential, while providing alternate activities for those who are inclined to do something other than receiving an education.
Heck you can get degree credit by virtue of living in a foreign country via a study abroad program.
The other activities a university may participate in like research, or educating only matter to the extent they enhance the "prestige" of the credential or to benefit the minority of students who value academic rigor more so than the credential.
A mission that the Ivies are well on their way with. The average grade at Harvard is a 3.67 (as of a 2013 source) and the prices have never been higher (though that's an individual thing, what with scholarships). They only need to make it a 5 year program with a MA/MS tagged in to get really going; degree-inflation hopped onto grade-inflation and dollar-inflation.
Somehow, you then have to work Ultimate Frisbee or chess in there too, an athletics-inflation and club-inflation (?), so to speak. Kinda like Laurie Laughlin's daughter did with the varsity-blues scandal for admissions. I'd guess that's already happened then.
What do you end up with besides an empty savings account? A 22 years old with a very good resume and a very bad taste in beer and jazz.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/9/stats-grade-inf...
Modern universities are a mix of two contradictory ideas. It's a place for "higher learning"; trying to fit the same role as institutions from hundreds of years ago where academic learning was much rarer and was fitted for the aristocracy. While simultaneously being something that you need for a job to make money. Oh, and also the people doing the teaching are more interested in their research than actually teaching. Forget teachers putting in 100% of their effort into teaching and making sure people really get the material (here's some slides the T.A. made, deal with it), you're lucky if a professor is a half-way decent orator.
There are so many better ways to get different kinds of education, particularly for humanities. There are books, online videos, etc. that provide a better education on writing, philosophy, etc. than what a single professor charging thousands of dollars can provide.
This works out to roughly $250 per student per semester. It's difficult to price the work of T.As as they are often students themselves, but assuming each student requires an average of 2 hours per week of dedicated grading/tutoring time, then at $20/hr the total cost of providing a first tier class should be $730 dollars.
This number is roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 the cost of a class at a community college, 1/6th of the effective cost per class for UMass Amherst, and roughly 1/10th the effective price per class of MIT.
I can assure you that the lecturer at your community college is not making 300k either. But this calculation does show that most of the tuition costs do not end up in the hands of the teaching staff, and that providing a first rate education could be done for an order of magnitude lower cost than current first tier universities charge.
Or hell, offer professors 1 million per year and still charge 1/3rd the price of MIT.
This epiphany acted as a catalyst for me to leave academia.
Takes a lot of admins to recreate the upper class bubble for the poors.
I can’t really blame people for wanting this security for their children. Ultimately I don't think it will change until (at least in the US) we address things like universal healthcare, justice system reform and maybe even a UBI.
For the best example, look no further than the St. Scholastica Day Riots, which started with a drunk angry scholar and escalated into a mob riot with nearly 100 casualties. [0] When not rioting against the villagers, Oxford scholars in the 13th and 14th century were prone to riot amongst themselves.
Similar disagreements in the past culminated in lynchings and led to the founding of the University of Cambridge (to avoid more bloodshed from angry villagers, but also in part to avoid accountability for other kerfuffles). So yeah, wealthy teenager daycare with education on the side is nothing new.
Edit: fixed a few historical inaccuracies, I mixed a few events in my head.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot
>The seed of the riot was an altercation in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford [ when two students became angry at being served poor quality drink ]
I wonder if this is the etymological origin of the word 'swindle?'
The online etymological dictionary indicates that the term was of German origin, brought to England by German Jews, meaning a giddy or untrustworthy person, based on an older word meaning to languish or decline but that seems incognate with its current meaning.
Except when the police is involved which should be any time the law is broken. You make it seem like colleges are their own oasis of law and order.
This is an issue in the US, but it is worth noting this particular administrative maneuver is at University of Leicester which is in the UK. [0]
[0] https://le.ac.uk/about
It's already happening. I went to a Canadian university. The marketing material says the school wanted to give the students a "great student experience". What's great student experience? The glossy pamphlets shows varsity sports facilities, bright lecture halls and students hanging out in residences.
Namespace collision detected:
1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior"
Definition #1 isn't an edge case-- most universities are chock full of such events and seminars. Shit like this: a linguist who was tasked with helping a Northern California tribe fill in the blanks in the documentation of their dead language so they could revive it. If your curiosity isn't peaked by that concept and it's associated practical challenges and sets of choices, I'm not sure what you're doing on HN.
Definition #2 is like HN's version of cheating celebrity stories in the Enquirer. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life enumerating each case, you certainly wouldn't run out of bona fide material. But if all you talk about 99% of the time is that-- to the extent that you forget definition #1 even exists-- you have to admit at least part of your outrage is due not to your own free will but due to people clicking upvote buttons as if nudging trays of junk food close to where you're sitting.
Edit: typo
"Newly discovered primary documents" something makes me doubt that this is what the professors are looking into...
What draws the largest general audience at colleges are sports.
It would be reasonable if many HN posters wanted to critique college sports fans for diverting funds and energy from more important scholarly pursuits. It would be reasonable, if a bit odd, for them to do this by sarcastically nicknaming college sports fans, "Einsteins."
It would be understandable if HN posters extended the sarcastic nickname "Einstein" to other domains to target people who ruin that domain by spamming it with superficial, loud-mouthed, low-effort pursuits.
It would not be reasonable, understandable nor healthy if a critical mass of HN posters did this without knowing a) who Einstein is, b) the obvious fact that the nickname is being used sarcastically, and c) an entire department in every major college is concerned with an intellectual pursuit of extending the work that Einstein started. After all, hackers are supposed to understand the systems they hack!
Anyway, if this were the case then anyone with even a passing interest in impugning the reputation of Einstein himself could then leverage that ignorance to do so.
It's my rank speculation that "social justice" to a critical mass of HN'ers has become something of a backformation from "social justice warrior." E.g., an ignorant lurker reads a snippet about some historical figure from a social justice movement (or just a topic tangentially related to a social justice movement from the past), feels outrage over the superficiality and arrogance of SJW's, and unconsciously applies those same feels to whatever the conversation happens to be about.
This happens all the time with memes-- e.g., Tim and Eric make a convincing "Free Real Estate" infomercial parody, parody becomes a meme, Tim shows up in a film, and Redditors mock him: "Hey, it's that Free Real Estate huckster guy!"
Non-selective schools (like Leicester, which admits 80%!of applicants, of which only 20% choose to attend) won’t be able to pull this off. The signaling value is too weak. They can’t get you an interview at a top company. If they can’t prepare you for it, how many parents will pay for a 4 year vacation?
But with the loans, colleges and universities are flush with cash, so they build extravagant dorms, hire way too many administrators, VP's, etc.
My idea to fix this is to make the universities provide the loans. Then they have an incentive to make sure students graduate and have a career path that makes sense (and money!)
We have allowed and encouraged an entire generation to screw themselves with these outrageous loans.
This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.
Yes, Terence Tao is doing pretty well.
The top 3 (and #5) are all "HEAD COACH".
Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each.
I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.
That paper was written in 1982
Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector.
It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics.
This is a scandal.
--
Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]:
The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...]
In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May.
However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic.
--
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...
The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.
Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.
Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.
Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.
When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...
However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?
Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
DeepMind?
They certainly didn't pick it for the food ;)
I think if you look at where the researchers are, Europe does really well. As per usual though, this is poorly commercialised.
This would seem to militate against a notion that Europe doesn't do AI.
Now, Europe definitely doesn't commercialise AI well, but that's a different point.
Also, '90%' sounds suspiciously like a number you produced from deep within your colon.
As for the 90%, agree, that's where I found that number. But do the exercise of listing all the major technological advances you can think of that mattered on the XX century, and I think you will likely end up close to that.
In any event, I think this is all getting rather silly. I was simply making the point that historically science in the US has benefited tremendously from having a large number of capable people that were trained within a different system. Where they were born is absolutely irrelevant. A certain W. von Braun was indeed an American, as were his 'major technological advances' that many in the US are rightly proud of, but he was very much a product of German science (I hope you don't find this point controversial).
In Mathematics the big highlights of the XX century: the Hilbert Program, the Bourbaki group, computability,the FLT solution were mainly made outside the US.
First satellite? First man in space? USSR
Europe was a big contributor to the first computers: Colossus, Zuse's Z2.
The Germans were pioneers in rocketry and ballistics as it is sadly very well known by the rest of the work.
In Biology: Watson, Crick, Monod,Ian Wilmut,Maynar-Smith made fantastic and foundational contributions
Medicine? Antibiotics,discovery of tetanus vaccine, immunological agents, vitamins, all made outside of the US.
That's not to say that American has not make fantastic contributions, The Apollo program, the invention of the transistor, the invention of the Internet are highlights of American ingenuity and glorious gifts to the rest of the world.
But pretending that all good science is made only in the US and the rest of the world in some sort of scientific backwater is just a sad indictment of the American educational system that formed you.
As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.
So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.
Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".
I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).
Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.
I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
(Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)
You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure.
The flip side is you get paid a third of industry.
That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job.
As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs.
With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard:
1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love
2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life.
It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs.
Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.
And now the German version of this tale:
You finish high school with 18/19 get your master's degree with 23/24. Then you get a PhD position but because it's tied to a three-year project with third-party funding, you're also expected to do project work that does not contribute to your thesis at all. You're only starting out in the business, though, so you're happy to help!
Then, three years later, the project is finished but your thesis is nowhere near that. Now, choose your own adventure:
1) Luckily, your supervisor can hire you using his own budget. That's nice, almost no strings attached. Now you can really focus on finishing up your thesis.
2) Luckily, there's another project that has just started and that you can work on now. You're a bit unsure, though: when the first project was up, no-one thanked you for your work, your supervisor was just surprised about the state of your thesis. Should you do that again? What's more, the new project has nothing to do with the old project, let alone with the topic of your thesis. Because you really have no other option, you agree to do it - still better than nothing.
Which brings us to the next option:
3) Your supervisor unfortunately has no funds to extend your contract. But since you've already invested so much work and you like the idea of a PhD, you apply for unemployment support through the government and hope that you can finish everything within a year. Later, you're gonna call this period an "independently funded research scholarship" on you CV.
But all good things come to an end: finally, after much hardship, you graduate! Wow!
And you even find a post-doc position in some other town! Great. You don't mind a change of scenery! Now you're rolling!
And you're good at your job. You feel good. Get lots of papers accepted.
But your contract ends after two years. Luckily, there is another post-doc position in some other town! Great! You're not so keen on moving again but hey, your new partner doesn't mind a change of scenery.
And you're still pretty good at your job. You kind of start feeling a bit disillusioned with your field though: it seems like all the research published these days is just application-driven -- not what once pulled you to the field. Oh, well, at least your job pays the rent.
But your contract ends after two years. You consider applying for professor positions because in Germany, there is no middle ground really. But you have your doubts: are you really good enough? Besides, both you and your partner hate the idea of moving yet again: you just made new friends. But what can you do?
None of your applications for a professor position go anywhere. So you go for a third post-doc. The move was really not that bad, as you were able to sell most of the old furniture. The new supervisor is great and you feel energized with a rediscovered love for the field.
You don't get as many papers out as before even though you try. But somehow, you don't have as much time for actual research anymore, as you find yourself more and more tied up in administratrivia. You work long hours but only half of it is actually dedicated to research, and it shows in your output. Nevertheless, you like the working environment.
But then your contract ends after two years. Your supervisor would love to keep you, he even has enough money in his budget for at least five years. But oh! Damn. There is a law in Germany that six years after your PhD, you cannot be hired on university budget anymore, unless it's a permanent p...
Removing this requirement would allow competition (even from independent researchers in coffee shops).
Good luck trying to change this!
An endowment you can rustle up with sufficiently well connected people, especially if you aren't looking for that much money.
Grants I agree are a problem. Darpa as I recall doesn't necessarily require university connections, but I'm not sure if Europe has anything easy like that. Maybe you attach a startup incubator?
1)https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-for-s... 2) https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-relig...
EDIT: In terms of financing, how much money do you really need? If you are self sufficient in terms of owning the property, endowment income and growing vegetables and selling beer/yoghurt etc., is that not enough? Would the modern academic type be interested at all in essentially living in a commune/monastery where some amount of time is dedicated to cleaning/maintenance/carpentry/agriculture?
Universities are hard due to accreditation, but starting a not-for-profit is quick and easy.
In the USA the NIH is 3-4x the budget of the NSF
Because there is very little mobility into academia, MANY people land on the wrong side of the pond. You can't try industry and go back. One more difference is that colleges once wanted people with decades industry experience, and many older people saw going back to teach young'uns as a way of giving back.
It's not just older people. If you're in industry, and want to pursue a good idea for 5 years where you don't have elbowroom, or in academia and want to try to commercialize something, you break your academic track. It's possible with tenure, but I find many tenured academics distinctly underimpressive by the point they've gone through decades of abuse to get there....
- "I never wrote a patent and I turned out great. Why should we bother giving an innovation course to our PhD students?" - "This person had a 10-year break in their academic career. I can't evaluate them."
So it's not only that there is a lack of mobility between industry and academia, rather this gap is actively fueled.
I know a handful of faculty at top universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc). At least one did a year at a FAANG company prior to starting so it isn't like they don't know better. They are paid well enough and don't need 400k salaries. They love their research topic and love the freedom to work on the topics they care most about. They love mentoring students specifically. They don't care about software engineering as a discipline and would rather spend time learning other things. They (most of them) like teaching. They like being part of a research community.
And most -- not all but most -- new faculty hires cheat in some way to get there, at the elites (at the very least, overselling results, but often intentionally p-hunting, stealing credit, and similar).
This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.
By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.
Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.
Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.
The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
* this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra.
* Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0].
* The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so.
* There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go.
* They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...
Total BS imho, but don't get me started...
The US are even more innovative in ripping off students.
I went to Exeter. I picked the cheapest accommodation. I was more than happy with the on site sports centre. I wouldn't want to pay double for gold taps and an arena.
I think it would be interesting to see how places fared if tuition was linked to rankings. Top 10 can charge full wack, Next 10 80%, etc. But that would force people to make hard decisions...
It would have been better if they'd just actually made "tuition fees" an actual proper graduation tax, rather than a tax for the poor and a loan for the rich.
The English evidently agree this is a problem and have been doing their part to make UK universities less “inherently” attractive.
This issue is, btw, basically identical to the one for council funding. It is a very tricky area with no easy answers but, funnily enough, always ends up with the same solution (council funding in the UK is basically regressive, like university funding because there is literally no way to pressure these institutions to be responsible without user paying).
Also, I'm not sure it's true to say UK degrees don't care about the beauty of number's. Again, the statistics show that the number of mathematics students have been according to the overall trend [2]. And anecdotally, comparing with friends from other countries the UK actually seems to have a university system unusually geared to purely academic degrees.
It's my personal belief that while of course university is about getting a job, it's also about learning about adulthood for many people. People use it to delay the start of their working life and enjoy a few years of adult freedom, as well as to get a degree. Anecdotally, I know a lot of my friends went to uni almost entirely for this reason and had no idea in their head about what they'd do after yet. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact with increasing lifetimes I think it only makes sense we continue to delay the age at which we enter the workforce.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...
[2] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio...
The amount of money the uni gets is the same. Overseas pay the full price, domestic students are subsidised and only pay £9k, but the uni gets it in full anyway. And, no, they still take overseas students (with remote studies it's not more difficult, than domestic ones). Imperial's Chem department even filled more places for 1st year than usual.
About 10% of teaching income is from the government, but that's to cover courses that cost more to teach (medicine, physical sciences, engineering etc). There is no per-student subsidy as far as I am aware? Unis get the 9k a year, either cash or from the slc.
Also, international fees are unregulated. They're totally down to the uni and the student. Central government doesn't touch them. This is why there has been a big push to take on foreign students in most universities over the last 20 years.
Source:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I'm glad to hear Imperial Chem is doing well. Exeter Chem was closed when I was there back in 2004.
But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past.
[1] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees. I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio...
Currently, there are two problems in UK universities:
Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!).
Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades.
This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs.
FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in!
For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price
PS: appologies for spelling, insomnia...
Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.
The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P)
Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public.
The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers.
Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small.
But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
It is a flaw in The Firm.
Their alumni should complain that the administration is harming the value of their credentials.
Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science".
If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
I’m still gonna check though :)