Worth a read: End the University

I'm not really into link-blogging per se, but if you do nothing else productive today, go read this.

Marc C. Taylor, department chair and professor of religion at Columbia, is proposing some old ideas for fixing higher education that we've been talking about for ages. Funnily enough, some of these are the same "solutions" that science curricula/med school departments/NIH program projects already use (with no obvious benefits, I might add).

Allow me to elaborate (after all, it's a blog).

1. Restructure the curriculum to get rid of overspecialization.

Great idea, Marc, but here's why it won't work in the absence of other changes you propose (see below).

The curriculum is not the same as the departments. I didn't understand this fundamental problem until I started looking for a faculty position of my own.

I was trained in a sort of "umbrella" graduate program, as these are becoming the norm in the biomedical sciences. However, departments still don't hire this way. If they can't figure out where to put you, forget about getting a job. So the structure of the university has to change first or in parallel for this suggestion to be of any use.

2. Abolish permanent departments and create problem-focused programs.

Great idea, Marc, but it would have to happen everywhere simultaneously for this to get any traction. Any idea how to make that happen?

Here's the thing. This suggestion suffers from the same problem as suggestion #1 up there, that some schools have already tried to start problem-focused programs as cross-departmental efforts. Again, the employment opportunities for the graduates of these programs rest on the assumption that employers will know what these programs are.

In addition, NIH has been funding problem-directed program projects for years. You know what happens? People apply for the money under the guise of doing something related to the problem at hand, and then they go right on doing what they've been doing.

To put a finer point on it, in the absence of forced retirement and abolishing tenure, as you propose below, this suggestion would amount to nothing more than the renaming of existing departments.

You're also missing a couple of critical points in your Op-Ed, Marc. You say even for undergraduate programs, you want to do this?

Here's the thing. The way education works now, you have to give grades. There is a clear differential between students who pay tuition, and faculty who get paid to teach. What you're proposing isn't going to sit well with people who insist on hierarchies, and who refuse to treat high school graduates as adults rather than children (even though they kinda are, actually, adults already).

What you're really proposing, from what I can tell, is to turn universities into giant think-tank research companies, where students are paying for the privilege of being interns?

Which is not necessarily bad. I'm against grading, personally, but how are you going to standardize evaluations? How are you going to justify it if you have to kick someone out? Are you going to fall back on the established rules and regulations used in industry? In which case, how are you going to avoid corruption from students offering to pay extra to get ahead? Since they're paying to be there anyway, this sets up a dangerous precedent, methinks.

Also, how are you going to distribute the money? Don't you think the departments that work directly on how to generate tangible, marketable products (chemistry, engineering) are going to have a hard time justifying inclusion and payment for departments who don't (like yours)?

3. Marc writes: Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Marc. This suggestion is not helpful. Half the staff? Why? Shouldn't we, in the current economy, be looking for ways to GENERATE jobs, rather than cut them?

Your statement about one college having a strong department in one thing, and another in a different area... this already happens. You don't have to codify it.

What's interesting to me is that you're proposing to formalize something that students and postdocs already do: generate collaborations across institutions to get what we need. Even when our PIs/advisors/faculty won't speak to each other, or don't know about each other, we will and we do.

It doesn't mean there have to be fewer jobs. But I really don't see why you're trying to propose that anyway.

I won't claim to know the data on distance learning, but personally I don't really want to do it if I don't have to, and I don't really see why anyone would.

4.Transform the traditional dissertation.

Do it. I absolutely agree with this. Nobody reads them anyway, not even the thesis committees. Might as well make them in a format accessible and useful to the public.

But beware: this might encourage students by giving them a way to actually make a contribution to society!

I'm just sayin'.

5. Marc writes: Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education.

This one cracks me up. He has NO idea how to do this.

What jobs, Marc?

Also, this is something we've been proposing for ages in the sciences, but nobody really listens to us. We've said for a while that there should be different tracks in graduate school for those who want to do science journalism vs. policy vs. product development vs. basic research vs. teaching.

So, great idea Marc. Not original, but always glad to see it mentioned. Wish somebody would start doing it already.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure

HAHAHAHAHA.

Well anyway. Yeah.

But what Marc then proposes is to replace tenure with 7-year renewable contracts.

Guess what that is, Marc? That's soft-money. That's the same thing that medical schools do already.

Do you know what complete lack of job security does to a person? I guess not, because here's what you said about it:This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

Um, yes in theory, but in practice here's what happens instead.

The rich get richer and step on the younger ones trying to make it up the ladder.

The internal politics get so much worse because of these kinds of policies. Just ask around. You have a big med school at Columbia. Ask over there.

Finally, Marc writes: For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”

Yeah, because it's impossible to tell students that it's a good idea to go to grad school, or that they'll have more than a 1 in 300 chance of getting a faculty position at the end of all of it.

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I like that this guy has a conscience, and spoke out in such a public fashion. When I saw this article, there were already >400 comments on it.

Next question: do Op-Ed articles (or blogs) ever really lead to real change? We all wrote tons about Larry Summers, but look where he ended up.

Tell me what you think and how we can put this into action. I think this restructuring education thing could be a good career for me, if the university systems would just hurry up and collapse already.

Which is worse: before or after tenure-itis?

This was an interesting discussion over on FSP about someone who got tenure and seems to be acting like a prima donna now. The comments were widely varying and the only thing we can conclude with certainty is that tenure, and the tenure climate, are different everywhere.

This is especially interesting to me since I have been feeling pretty anti-academe lately, despite the fact that my research is moving along, I love students, and always wanted my own lab and the freedom to work on my own ideas.

Lately I'm thinking that even if I got a faculty position even in the highest esteem of academe, it wouldn't be worth it.

So I was thinking about where I've worked, my vague impressions of how they handle tenure (from the point of view of a student/postdoc) and how the younger profs seemed to cope with it.

I've worked at places that have Tenure and places that don't have it at all. Interestingly, the places with no tenure seem to follow more or less the same pattern as the ones that have it: a majority of the most senior profs are only indirectly involved in research, and while powerful in the Service areas, not particularly helpful in those roles (especially to women and minorities!).

The places with tenure seem to have just about as much dead wood, but the floaters they have are by far and away much worse than the floaters at places without tenure. They are usually dangerously unproductive, but worse than that, dangerous in terms of groping females, wasting resources, and blocking (in one particularly memorable case) the hiring of women and minorities into faculty positions not just in their department but sometimes across the entire university.

One thing I've seen over and over again is the tendency to restrict research lab space based on funding/hiring. So as long as the dead woods have a few young bodies at the bench, they get to keep their labs. If no one will work for them anymore and/or they don't have grants to pay people, they are restricted to smaller and smaller spaces, eventually ending up with an office the size of a small closet.

I realized I've worked almost exclusively at places where tenure is not trivial, so there is a lot of turnover at the younger prof levels. My experience has been that younger profs are stressed about research and not nearly as involved in service as the students need them to be.

I understand the logic of 'protecting' younger profs from the 'burden' of service, but I think ultimately this is another area where the system is horribly broken.

Nothing will ever change if we continue to maintain this kind of hierarchy, whatever the good intentions.

I was talking to a grad student yesterday about this, and whether it's good to choose a brand-new prof as a PhD mentor.

I am of the opinion that brand-new assistant profs fall into two categories, and only two:

Type I worked their asses off to get this job, sometimes superstars but more likely persisting as postdocs for 6 years or more. They know how to do everything already, including writing grants, papers, hiring, firing, buying, and negotiating service contracts. They will be great mentors and might tend to take on more than they can handle, but they will love it. They see it as a luxury to be able to choose to sleep in their office, because they always dreamed of the day when they could, and now they can.

Type II got their job because they had the pedigree. They don't really know what they're doing, and that includes everything from how to do basic experiments to how to supervise and train students and staff. They are usually aware of this so they're insecure, defensive, and spend most of their time employing the formula that got them where they are today: sucking up to the rich and powerful. They are horrible mentors, abhor all kinds of service, and do only as much as required to get tenure.

Type I is people like profgrrrl, who stress out about tenure because they love their jobs and genuinely want to be good at what they do and earn the respect of intelligent people.

Type II is more like FSP's little buddy, who may have kept up appearances for the sake of self-promotion, but has now run out of energy to maintain the facade of being the good colleague.

Personally, I think there are way too many Type II's out there. I also think none of this is going to go away until people adopt the strategy of industry to stop relying on recommendation letters.

Which brings me to another thing I wanted to mention. I was talking to a friend this week who just got offered a faculty position. She is a Type I and I'm really happy for her. But I was mildly dismayed when she told a story about how the interview went, where the people told her the main reason they wanted to meet her in person was because one of her recommendation letters was so good. She laughed while telling us that this was a letter she had written herself. PI just signed it.

It doesn't bother me in the least that she wrote herself a great letter, or even that PI just signed it, since, as we've discussed here before, this kind of thing goes on all the time.

What bothered me about this story was that she was left with the impression that this was the single most important factor about her application.

She doesn't seem to mind how she got her foot in the door, and I say more power to her.

But think of it this way: if many hires are Type IIs, and some fraction of them get interviews based on totally phony recommendation letters they wrote themselves, doesn't that seem like a recipe for having a bunch of idiots as faculty?

In fact, somebody wrote a book about this. It's called The Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations (L.I.A.R).

Along these lines, I heard another nightmare-inducing New Assistant Prof story the other day. Warning: this might make your head spin.

Basically this guy says he writes his postdocs' fellowships for them. Outright writes the whole thing before the postdoc ever arrives.

The way he sees it, they always get the money, and it helps him out since it's one more salary.

The way I see it, this is like paying someone take your SAT test for you. It's totally cheating the system. But worse than the SAT, where you actually have to show up in person and show ID, there is currently no way to discourage this kind of behavior or reveal how widespread it might be.

In a way, I have to commend his ingenuity. But in all reality, the whole system is predicated on the assumption that everybody believes in maintaining a certain level of fairness.

It ain't there.