While I was finishing my Ph. D., my supervisor constantly whined about how he needed someone else to pay for his research.
Bull tweet, I told him. Being a professor, he was well-educated and, supposedly creative and clever. (As it turned out, he was neither, but that’s another story.) What was stopping him from making do with less and making do with what he had on hand. His lab was filled with idle, though older, equipment. What was stopping him from using some of it? I had to when I worked in industry–it’s called a budget and I had to keep within it, as once the money was spent, that was it.
I paid for my research myself. I bought my computer and the money for the software I used came out of my pocket. I figured that if I could do that, he could, too.
But, no, that wouldn’t do for him and his well-paid, tenured ego. He had a privileged opinion of himself and told me that the general public was obligated to fund what he was doing. And using older equipment would simply not do. His results would have more credibility if he used the latest, shiniest new toys for what he was working on. (“Voltages will be more voltager! Temperatures will be more Kelvinized or Celsiuser!”)
That’s one reason universities have become money-harvesting machines. Assuming that one manages to jump through all of the white-heterosexual-men-need-not-apply hoops, one still might not get hired as a professor if one isn’t bringing in outside loot.
And, no, just because one gets a grant, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one gets to spent any of it, let alone on what. The last head of the department where I did my Ph. D. insisted that any money coming in had to go into a common pool. I wasn’t privy as to how that cash was distributed, but I’m sure that there as a song and dance associated with that.
Universities hate creativity, initiative, and independence. I’m sure one reason I never got a faculty position was that I was going to pay for my research myself. All I needed was a computer and paper and I could buy those using my own money. The department would have had no say in how I spent it.
I don’t feel sorry for academe or academics any more. There’s a word for what that system is nowadays and that word is freeloaders.
Please, please, please Rebel news ask Trudeau ” Do you believe Islam is right about women?” https://summit.news/2019/10/14/islam-is-right-about-women-signs-appear-in-austin-texas/
Wow. Thats off topic!
On Topic – I totally agree with the thoughts/opinions of the writer. One of my daughter’s former boyfriends was a genius in Organic Chemistry, but could not get a job in private industry, because 1. he had never had a job even as a teen-ager and 2. he wanted to do “pure research” chemistry in a grant funded lab at a major university. He was 29, had always lived at home with his parents and wanted “other people” to fund his research/lifestyle. He did have a job briefly for about 3 months, but was let go because of his attitude and because he felt it was “beneath him”. As well, he had very specific geographical parameters for his ideal job. It had to be in Toronto, with the western limit being the Humber River, the Northern limit being Finch Avenue and the eastern limit being just before the Rouge Valley. Needless to say, most private industry labs are located in Mississauga, or Ajax or north of Steeles, because the rent on the facilities is so much cheaper.
I am now retired (professor emeritus) after a modestly successful career in academia (eight books). I spent thousands and thousands of my own hard-earned dollars on travelling to libraries in the UK so that I could prepare books for publication. I received some important assistance from my small university in the Maritimes, and after about six years like this I was finally successful in winning my first of three standard research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). One has to enter the academic life knowing that he has to invest significantly from his own resources. I continued to spend my own money on books, which I am now giving away to universities and colleges in the West. At well-funded institutions I would assume that the pay structure foresees this kind of expenditure, but when I started out we professed to be the most poorly-funded university in the country. Still, after providing for one’s family, what better way is there to spend money than on research and books?
I have great respect for someone who chooses an academic career. Academics … esp. in the sciences should be aggressively pushing the frontiers of knowledge. The academic setting should provide freedom (from the bottom line of a corporation) to explore every promising hypothesis.
Academics USED to take something of a “vow of poverty” to “serve” mankind. Same as with those who USED to choose government service. However … sometime ago … starting in the boom years of the 1980’s (by my accounting), public service UNIONS in concert with leftist politicians started to dramatically jack-up the salaries, benefits, and pensions of EVERYONE in Public service … ESPECIALLY … at the Executive level of Government and Academia. It was argued these “top” people would be paid so much more in Private industry that they needed huge compensation packages to “retain” top talent. The end result of this is a State of CA government and UC System that is (in my opinion) literally STEALING $$$ from the taxpayers of CA.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/pensions/2017/university-california/
Very, very, few people in private industry retire with these BLOATED, Luxurious, Pensions. And remember … these pensions are a FRACTION of what these college professors, and executive administrators were being paid. And I haven’t even started talking about the bloated pensions of Prison Employees, CHP, and Firefighters. These employees routinely retire after 20years on a spiked pension of 90% of their highest income, and then get re-hired at an even greater salary.
Public employee compensation is as much as double and triple what the private sector pays. I have lost all sympathy for the “noble college professor”, or “sacrificing public employee”. Not for the last 40 years.
Kenji- That’s a pretty big “Wow!” When you figure how much somebody has to set aside for 35 and 40 years in order to have a $100,000/yr pension, let alone double and triple that, those numbers are simply way out of whack. You have to be tremendously successful in a private venture to have that kind of money. Somebody who has taken some big risks, and created employment for several dozen people, and paid off loans on some sizable capital assets, might be able to live like a retired UCal teaching faculty. If you want to retire on $360k/yr at 60-ish, you’d better have six or seven million in cash on hand. Work backwards from there, and you are looking at setting aside $50-100k/yr for the duration of a career in order to generate the kind of lump sum required to fund such pensions. What all this really means is that the public has never really been fully informed of the actual costs of these publicly funded pay packets.
Absolutely correct. And yet these “public servants” are still portrayed as humble, dedicated, workers who have sacrificed EVERYTHING to GIVE of themselves to the general public. Shhhhh … don’t look into the REAL FACTS of their “service”. Their REAL service is to themselves … just like everyone else. EXCEPT they’re making YOU pay them directly
Add to that the fact that to stay on the gravy train, you have to “publish or perish.” That means submitting research projects to the National Science Foundation, mostly, for physics. It is no different in the “higher sciences” than anywhere else. You have to know which way the wind blows, so to speak, to get a research project funded. Government support of research, which sounds so idealistic, in reality is the greatest promoter of the herd mentality. I don’t know that the general public is necessarily affected by quantum theories, but it is why “97%” of scientists agree on the theory du jour in climatology, health sciences, and nutrition, which do affect the general public. There is no more room in current academia for a Galileo than in medieval Europe.
P.S. The above rant is not motivated by personal experience. I realize I simply wasn’t good enough to do the kind of cutting edge research away from the herd I envisioned. But I was lucky enough to find my niche in industry where I could contribute.
OB:
You’re right about promotion of the herd mentality. For one’s Ph. D., one is expected to do “original” research. While I was a grad student, particularly while I was working on my doctorate, I found out that one should not be too original because nobody will understand what one is doing or the results that were obtained. And, no, trying to explain it to people doesn’t always work.
In order to be accepted by academe and, more importantly, get funding, one is expected to blend in and “go with the flow”. (That line of thinking is nicely illustrated in the movie Contact.) Deviate from that and one can become quickly isolated and branded as either a renegade or a crackpot.
One example was Dr. Robert Goddard. He was not only unpopular when he began developing is liquid-fuelled rockets, he was openly mocked and derided. Even the NYT came close to calling him a loonie for his work. Fortunately, Charles Lindbergh heard about what Goddard was doing and was willing to support him, which eventually led to financial backing by the Guggenheim family.
Back on topic:
There is also another global scourge.
My wife, the family holder of a chemistry PhD , calls it “galloping credentialism”. it’s not about the acquisition of the best skills and knowledge, but the obsessive aggregation of certificates and post-nominal letters.
Oh, and the ostentatious flaunting of same, especially the “basket-weaving” ones.
I don’t feel sorry for academe or academics any more. There’s a word for what that system is nowadays and that word is freeloaders.
I could have told you that many years ago, and I am certainly not holding a PHD in anything other than street savvy. I did attend a small university for a couple of semesters … just long enough to see the bullshit behind the curtains. Then I went for skills training and that paid off in spades ….
Lazy academics need to learn to code and embrace the engineering disciplines. Maybe then we’ll be free of the climate change unpleasantness.
Some of the most out-of-touch academics I’ve encountered were engineering professors.
While I was a grad student, many of the older ones still had a sense of practical reality as they either had industrial experience or worked closely with industry. During the last 40 years, engineering departments started hiring their faculties directly out of university. It’s come to the point that spending any time in industry could result in one’s application being rejected as it would be seen as a lack of commitment to research.
I deliberately wanted to work in industry after I finished my B. Sc. I spent the better part of 4 years as an engineering undergrad and I wanted to put into practice what I had learned before returning for grad studies. I’m glad I did it that way as I approached what I was working on from a completely different perspective.
I wish I could say the same about the new engineering professors nowadays.
In this era of burgeoning idiocracy, engineers will be replaced by experts in the use of duct tape and WD40.
I mean to say that if a f**king clown such as Justin Turdoo can become the prime minister of Canada, then Jim Carrey will someday be the president of the United States.
“Universities hate creativity, initiative, and independence.”
They aren’t the only ones. Try being a manager who saw the potential of the Internet in the early 90’s and your employer wouldn’t go there. I almost got fired.
Companies or investors missing out on the “next big thing” is nothing new. Some of it could be due to short-sightedness, while it can also be due to reasons of practicality and keeping the doors open, the lights on, and the bills paid.
One example is in amateur radio. For much of the 20th century, the ham equipment market was dominated by American firms. Many of them started during the Depression and they used the best technology available at the time. Companies such as Hallicrafters and Hammerlund began during that time. Many were small shoestring outfits and, in some cases, family-run.
The equipment they produced was good and is still available on the second-hand market. The rigs used vacuum tubes and were inevitably big, bulky, and heavy. (Radios like that have been nicknamed “boat anchors”.) Because of the parts that were used, they were also power hogs.
Those companies that survived into WW II were able to continue staying in business because they built equipment for the military and some of them kept doing so afterward. But with the development of the transistor and integrated circuit, those companies began facing competition, primarily from Japanese manufacturers, many of which were recovering from WW II. Those firms quickly adopted solid-state technology, giving them an edge in the market.
The Japanese radios were smaller, lighter, used less power, and they were good quality, quickly becoming popular with hams. In order to maintain their share of the market, the older American firms would have had to adapt by introducing new products and re-configuring their production facilities. Many of those American companies specialized in amateur radio gear, so designing new equipment and re-tooling to build them would have been quite expensive. In addition, for the Japanese manufacturers, amateur radio was simply one of their product lines.
The result is that most of the familiar names, such as those I mentioned earlier, went out of business as it would have cost them too much money to keep up. Other companies simply abandoned amateur radio and focused on building equipment for government, industry, and the military, where they could at least make money.
For the last 30 or so years, the amateur radio market has been dominated by firms such as ICOM, Yaesu, and Kenwood. I have several ICOM and Yaesu transceivers and they definitely earned their reputation for being of good quality.
Featired? I cant put my finger on why that new word is apropos of Trudeau/blackface/Bollywood/cross kilting..global ad-naudsiator.
A typo. fixed now.
Agree completely. I vowed when I first entered on my academic career that I would not pursue “external funding”. The system seemed to me to be politicized, corrupt, and a massive waste of time and effort on the part of applicants. Thus, for 15 years at a soi disant “research intensive” university, I did enough peer-reviewed and published research to acquire tenure and promotion, devoted to projects I wanted to do and paid for myself. Each year the Dean asked on the annual report form: “Grants or awards received” to which I filled in the block with: “None sought. None received. I don’t want their damned money.”
Heck, and here I was, thinking all along that it was just my intellectual laziness that had kept me away from post-secondary studies. I mean, the I-stayed-away-from-university-because-professors-are-parasites excuse is a lot easier to live with than the truth. 🙂
one nite shift at the university, I wandered around whilst the mainframes chugged away.
came across some huge pc of machinery some wag labelled a ‘budgetus eaterus’.
that was, oh, about 45 friggin years ago. some thing change very little.