The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.

Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.

The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.

Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.

(It was a day of celebration when the 8K of RAM was upgraded to 16K.)

The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant.

However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).

It'll be tough to dig up a solid citation for the HP "calculator" story but I've heard it from more than one reasonably-credible source, e.g.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_not... .

I just wanted to explain that although "No computers on NIH grants" is still current practice at most universities, it shouldn't be.

I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).

Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.

At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.

The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.

This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.

In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.

I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.

This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.

Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.

Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible).

Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.

My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.

In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.

But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service.

I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.

Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.

This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm.

As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.

150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st

The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done

Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new processes are put in place to prevent that specific harm in the future. On the other hand, nobody really cares about effective and efficient use of tax money. People surely complain about waste, but the complaints are rarely specific enough to have consequences. Given a choice between preventing a specific harm and using tax money better, people almost always choose preventing the specific harm.

The salaries are what they are, because universities can't afford to pay more. There is only so much tax/tuition money available to them. People like to complain about administrative bloat, but it's their fault really. Every time people complain about something specific in the academia, they are advocating for giving more money to the administration to fix that, and for giving less money to the people who teach and do research. That's just the way public management works.

Additionally, academic hiring processes are more involved than in the industry, because there is less responsibility. Not despite it. People are effectively given money to do things they would do anyway, and the employer often can't tell the difference between a good hire and a bad hire, except maybe much later. If you can't fix you mistakes in a timely manner, you'll probably want to think things through before making the decision.

Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.

A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most regulations are written in blood, there are tangible reasons for most administrative positions. Even the admins I don't like and I think are a waste of space are that way because of them, and I can envision a useful person being in their place.

As for beautification projects: that projects often bring in big donars. It is hard to say if they are worth the costs or not, but we need to start by being clear. A ugly brutalist building would be a lot cheaper but probably is too far the other way.

They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.

cue the audience laughter

It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.

For anyone questioning this line, let's remember a few things

- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment.

- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student.

- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)

- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)

- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award).

- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues

- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)

- Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

- Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for.

- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work.

Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee.

Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?

That whole system seems to be so ripe for disruption.

Fwiw, I intend to lead by example. I love researching. I have a long term internship where I even do research (unfortunately not closely tied to my PhD work lol). But since I read math books and research as a hobby, I intend to simply do what I call for (in other comments) and just post to GitHub + Openreview + Arxiv and call it a fucking day. I hope to get others to join me in this paradigm shift. We all fucking rely on arxiv anyways and I'm pretty sure more of us find works via twitter/google scholar/semantic scholar/word of mouth more than we find works via journal/conference listings (twitter post of "just got accepted" counts as former, not latter).

I'm not so sure we need "disruption" as much as we need to just cut off the fucking leeches. The problem was turning school into a business. Thinking that profits align with education of students. But we have no strong evidence that higher ranked schools produce higher quality students, but rather only better connected ones.

Idk, maybe the private sector can disrupt it. But they'd have to perform a pretty similar feat, though there is a monetary benefit. Because the world is disillusioned that Stanford students are substantially better than Boston College students, you can pay the BC student less. In fact, many places do, but the issue is Stanford has a huge fucking media arm so we don't hear about that. They can also stop using number of papers as criteria but rather quality of papers (i.e. use domain experts to hire domain experts. Novel idea, I know...)

I'm just shooting in the dark here. I'd actually like to hear other peoples suggestions. Even if we're just spitballing at this point (I don't think anyone has strong solutions yet, that's okay), we just need to get the ball rolling at this point instead of talking about what a ball's relationship to an apple or the sour more rounder apples that are orange.

I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.

Typically they will only take 1 credit after entering candidacy though, down from 9, so overall tuition drops significantly.

> It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess

Sounds like you should have asked for a more appropriate amount of money in the grant.

> If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

Grants can often be extended and funding can be supplemented.

> Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay

Sure, but we are compensated by other academics reviewing our papers for no financial compensation.

> Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

They take copyright over the submitted manuscript. I maintain copyright over preprints. Anyway, the point of writing the research is to distribute it, not to own copyright over it, so I don't see the problem. You can choose the venue, and not all venues take copyright over the submitted manuscript. If copyright is important, then choose one of those venues.

"- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment."

There are a number of ways to cover students - TAships, university level scholarships, and grant funding. For grant funding, the cost of the credits is something we can budget for, is in my university markedly lower than an undergraduates, and is budgeted for. This is portraying "We had to budget for someone working" in a weirdly salacious light.

"- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding."

It's not better to buy shitty lab equipment - while grants don't like funding large capital purchases that will cross projects (except for the grants for this), the equipment doesn't vaporize. The cluster nodes and servers I bought for my first project are still running, and indeed go in applications for new grants as equipments I have, in a section often titled "Facilities and Equipment".

As for not spending it out in time, there's what's called a "No Cost Extension", which is "Hey, we didn't spend the money in time, can we have a bit more time?". The NSF grants the first one of these automatically, and one grant I'm on is on it's third (a program office has been very understanding about the difficulties of conducting research in hospitals during a pandemic).

I've never had pushback from a program for getting an NCE unless it was genuinely something where we messed up spending somehow.

"- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student."

Nope, they're 100% students. This is both good and bad for them, but it's true. They're just expected to spend half - or less - of their time in classes, and the rest on research.

"- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)"

Every university I have been at has had a mechanism for a massive cut in tuition once a graduate student has passed their preliminary exams and become a candidate. It's a big enough one that literally my first instruction to my students is "File your ADB waiver please."

"- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)"

When my students are "on approach" they see me and their committee more and more. They're just expected to drive those meetings more as well.

"- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award)."

Again, this is simply incorrect.

"- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues"

Perhaps in the most abstract sense, in that scholarship is a metric by which I was judged for tenure and promotion, and without that, I don't have a job and thus am not paid. But there has never been a "paper bounty" or something like that for any position I've been in.

Venues do matter, and some places are cutthroat about it, but other places aren't. In my department for example, publications that are in respectable journals appropriate for your discipline will carry you all the way to full professor.

"- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)"

I consider this part of my service obligation, and indeed when filling out annual reports and the like, list reviewerships and editorial positions.

The rest of your stuff on publication is actually refreshingly correct.

"- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work."

I sit on my college's tenure and promotion committee. This just actively isn't true. We look at the difference between solo and co-authored papers, where a particular individual is on a paper and the balance between first, last and middle authorships (I'm in a field that doesn't alphabetize). We also consider whether someone is expected to be there, or is anticipated to contribute a lot to work that others will end up being the lead for (as a modeler, this is occasionally the position I'm in).

Then there's positions that give considerably more weight to teaching or service.

This makes zero sense to me.

They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms.

Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your term) because the university gets a cut. The university administration pays salaries, endowments, whatever with that money. They also buy that durable equipment that was excluded in the contract from their “general fund”, washing the connection to the original grant.

Suppose you want to get karma for a low-effort take on an engineering forum. If you say, for example, "academia is just like the mafia," the low-effort will be immediately recognized and down-voted.

Alternatively, you can make an assertion that is outside of the scope of engineering. Like "this is actually money laundering." Engineers don't have the expertise to assess that, but they will happily carry on a discussion of whatever process you describe for that misnomer.

Voila! Your karma has been granted.

Now you just have to devote a tiny tiny amount of time and energy downstream to clarify that you weren't talking about "actually money laundering" in the sense of, you know, "general money", but rather something else entirely.

In my analogy, that tiny tiny amount of time and energy is like the lab equipment that the university provides to the poor little grant recipient.

First, it makes the common mistake of comparing a graduate student stipends are low, while failing to assign any value at all to tuition. Many Ph.D.s are supported by grants, and their tuition is covered and is not taxed. That doesn't mean the tuition has no value, nor that money isn't exchanged to pay for that tuition. Real money is used to pay for that, and it provides a number of benefits to the student including access to the campus and all associated resources (libraries, gyms, labs, events, technology, workspaces, etc.)

People working at McDonalds don't have access to those resources from their job, so it's unfair to not include that when calculating their total compensation. When you do, they come out a lot better than low level drug dealers, as this article tries to argue.

It goes on to argue how graduate students are precariously employed. Quite the opposite, Ph.D. students are usually funded for 3-4 years under a grant. At least in the US, I don't know of many other jobs with guaranteed 4 year contracts, especially entry level. Most places are at-will and you can be fired on the spot. Ph.D. students are regarded as students, and therefore often aren't fired when they make mistakes (even big ones), because it's expected that their role is to learn.

That's another thing, is that this article focuses primarily on how the Ph.D. student is shortchanged by not being paid (in dollars) as much as a low-level employee at a corporation, but it doesn't spend any time on how such employees have different expectations. Ask a Ph.D. student if they want more money, and they say "Hell yes!" tell them they have to wear a uniform and arrive at 7:00am to open the lab, and they're fired if they're late twice, and every second of their day will be scheduled and tracked, they will be suddenly less enthusiastic at the prospect of making a couple extra bucks.

When you give some one money with legally recognized conditions then the organization has to honor those conditions. e.g donate money to a charity and tell them that it is to be used purchasing pens then that is all that money can be used for.

So if I understand correctly the 'scheme' here is that Lab A applies for and receives a grant that has stipulation X. As part of this process a portion of that grant goes to the hosting university without that stipulation. The university is free to spend that money however they wish, including providing some funds to Lab A for things that they really need but were not provided for under the grant.

He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people.

Also universities pay shit.

When I was in grad school, the refrain of "I'm not going to become a professor because I actually want to do research" is common. They usually try to go to national labs, etc instead.

This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities.

"Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request."

"But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research."

"Yes, but they bring in overhead."

Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead:

"We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."

Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.

The university I worked with had a 40+% overhead rate auto-included. This could not be negotiated. If you want to work with us, we add this amount to our Govt. request.

The university added a lot of extra work because of this. I basically brought them a proposal, I literally walked over to their partnership office and said "I've written a proposal I'd like to work with you on." It was mostly written, and said I think "some number" would be reasonable. They said, we don't apply without 40+% overhead, rewrite the whole grant so it works with our overhead and faculty tie-in requirements. I said that seems very large, and then none of the other numbers work. They said, write with 40+%.

The eventual result was that the university wanted me to work as a sub-contractor being paid less than a different contractor they were going to hire as a specialist, so I could have the pleasure of partnering with them.

Also, it needs to be completed a month before the deadline, because then all our internals need to churn over the money numbers (and predictably came back a check mark). I was glad it lost.

For example, consider the case of Winston Groom who was promised 3% of the net profits of a film based on a little book he wrote called Forrest Gump. As noted, Paramount would later argue that the film, which cleared almost 13 times its production budget, a total of $700 million at the box office or about $1.2 billion today, had actually lost $62 million, all in an attempt to weasel out of paying Groom, among others.

https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2020/06/how-hollywo...

there are remarkable stories of swindling of all kinds out of Hollywood, of course! great movie too

In my experience, when universities are allowed to submit straightforward total cost bids for things like contracts, we're often fairly competitive with private industry.

Here is old news that the HN community needs to catch up on.

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...

Once we get school vouchers going we can do that for high school too. It's going to be a revolution, man. Pure money printing.

And what's anyone going to try to say? You can't touch US universities or schools. Education is important! I think I could probably give one or two poor kids a scholarship and trot them out every now and then.

The cost of tuition for undergrads at schools is certainly ridiculous and a way to siphon money from the government though. That said, I take umbrage with the people that complain about liberal arts degrees. The education is as valuable as any other kind of education in that it hones critical thinking skills in a specific discipline. Those skills are applicable to many, many jobs. The engineers I knew and liberal arts students I knew that struggled to get jobs after college struggled because they had nothing else on their resume when they graduated because they put zero thought into getting a job until school was over.

Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.

I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.

Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".

In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.

I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.

In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.

Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.

Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.

There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.

In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)

I think the causation is reversed - if you're successful enough at writing grants, which involves convincing your peers that your research is that good, to support 30 graduate students, you've already met the qualifications for tenure which involves convincing your peers that your research is good enough to want you in their department for as long as possible.

Personally, my work load is worse post-tenure.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort.

In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago.

These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too.

Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc.

Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent.

And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(

All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".

On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you

Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless.

We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.

I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.

The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.

I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.

Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?

Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?

Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.

1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money.

2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits.

3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects.

You just have to state it in advance.

4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough.

You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.

That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.

Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]

My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.

[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)

[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.

> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).

Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."

Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.

You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.

Second, academic overhead rates are usually stated relative to direct costs. A 50% overhead rate means 1/3 of total costs.

Third, it's not just administrative overhead, but it's also used for paying for facilities and the services required for using and maintaining them. The actual administrative overhead, for administrative services and facilities used by the administration, is usually below 20% of the total.

Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable).

Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).

Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.

In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.

Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.

Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.

I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.

> prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Over the four years she has been there, faculty have received 3 3-5% annual raises. Staff have received ... 1 1% raise.

Faculty and staff were allowed to start working remotely where appropriate during COVID, or "expand the use of a home office".

Faculty got a $7,000 stipend to "set up a home office". Staff got ... nothing.

Faculty also lobbied for "increasing flexibility for students" by "offering all classes all terms", regardless of enrollment. In practice, this has lead to numerous professors and adjuncts getting paid for teaching a class that often has 2 or even 1 student enrolled.

> As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

In fact, the university recently found themselves in a near 8 digit budget deficit, with every department overrunning. And then faculty tried to throw Finance under the bus - "How could this happen?"

Finance's answer - "Because your departments generally refuse to do purchase orders and an approval process. The first time we hear of most of your expenses is when you hand us an invoice and say 'we bought something, please pay for it'". It also ignores the reality that for the most part, Finance is a facilitator, not an arbitrator. Faculty are adults - if they're given a budget (which they largely come up with themselves), then stick to it.

Things easily go both ways.

That's a very unusual university. I have never heard of such a thing. During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff. The $7000 you mention is less than my pay was cut. Staff were unaffected.

> They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks".

I don't believe this if you are talking about a US university. That's just not how it works.

> And then audits find faculty paying for flights for their partners on the university card... or first class upgrades... or very liquid lunches.

That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for. First and foremost, they have to confirm it's legal. After that, they have to confirm they're in compliance with tax laws. I'm not even getting into state laws if it's a public university and all the other potential problems. Paying a bill without knowing what it's for would simply never, ever happen at a US university.

> During covid, it was common for faculty to take large pay cuts, but not staff.

The only real benefit to staff during COVID's early days was in the (where else) athletics department (and this is very much not a sports school), where all the coaching and related staff were kept on at full pay, and only "required" on their own recognizance to "spend time keeping up with relevant information in your field".

> That's why there's no such thing as "just pay the bill, thanks". They don't pay without knowing what it's for.

The various schools thought process is "We (the school) knows the bill details, supervisor signed off, so, Finance just needs the sum total and to send payment".

Regarding home office, when covid hit we went to all online teaching with a lead time of a few weeks (changing an in person course to online teaching is not straight forward). There was no funding for setting up the home office and rules around covid meant that you couldn't even deduce your office at home from taxes.

Even when we went to hybrid teaching there was no central support for kitting out lecture halls with cameras/microphones etc. Academics often used some research (or personal) funds for purchasing cameras etc.

About flights and misuse of funds. I find it hard to believe that people could purchase flights with their cards at all universities I have been at you had to use the approved travel agent for flights. Also the only people allowed to fly business were high level management/admin, no matter where funding was from. Also I don't have an issue with submitting receipts, however I don't see why I have to spend the time on scanning receipts which I also have to send in as original. Moreover why do I need to know freaking tax codes for a train ticket or some lab consumables? Isn't that exactly what finance's job is?

I've never been at a university where I've been able to tell the finance office "Just pay it" without pushback.

They better not have. This is actively illegal. One of the major activities of our grants office is making sure you don't go over ~ 95% effort (you also can't write grants while supported on a grant).

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award.

2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell College who knew more about transistors than MIT : https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...

One of his examiners, G.E. Moore, stated the following on his examiners report:

"I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."

Having spent a good bit of time in academia I cannot imagine an institution that would make a statement so both humble and honest. Wittgenstein today would remain an interesting weirdo that, since never being formerly accredited, would be wildly considered as not worth taking seriously.

What terrifies me about today's academic environment is not only the it's own decline in quality, but it's staunch refusal to admit any knowledge created outside its walls as admissible.

It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer.

I think it might seem difficult to attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play.

I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.

This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22.

Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin

[2] https://www.aaup.org/

One of the founding tenets of U of Austin is noted as being declared that they would not factor race, gender, or class into admissions because they "stand(s) firmly against that sort of discrimination". I’m amused, but not surprised, that in the minds of some that’s a conservative idea.

When someone uses the term "anti-woke," what they are signaling is an opposition to things like fairness, awareness of systemic racism and sexism, and the ability of LGBTQ folks to live openly without fear. As with the prior paragraph, though, opposition to these things is a key position of the American Republican party.

Q.E.D.

And supposing that 60/40 split is evidence of systemic sexism towards men, what do you make of the 40/60 split in the opposite direction when you look at tenured professors?

A legacy of systemic sexism from the time when those tenured professors were in school.

The split is 50/50 among all professors.

> Is it not in men's nature to pursue education

School is a poor fit for boys' nature (to the point that boys' nature is defined as a disease to be medicated). Perhaps it's time to consider that the system is poorly designed, and expecting children to sit still for hours at a time is unwise.

It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.

I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.

I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them.

Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.

It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]

My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation

Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.

This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly.

[1] https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34

The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.

The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.

It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.

End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.

This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.

Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.

The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. "

So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.

Highly insightful.

If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business.

If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer.

They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.

Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.

Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.

Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries.

That should create an arbitrage opportunity.

The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them.

You mentioned startups. Basically that means create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.

What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.

What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.

Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.

Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".

Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.

(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)

But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.

Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.

Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.

What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.

Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.

A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.

However, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).

A few more ideas which come to mind right now include:

- Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers.

- Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education.

- Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research.

- Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD.

I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.

If the NIH gave some grants like they already do, some grants that would target someone like Karikó, some grants that would target reproducibility experts, etc. (in addition to some that may be a combination of such criteria) it would be a much more complicated political game to try to be an ideal imposter. You'd still have some but I think there would be many more filtered out, and more true positives kept.

There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.

I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.

But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.

Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.

I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.

A cargo cult by the way would be another great example of misapprehending the world as a simple deterministic or linear place where the more mock airstrips an isolated tribe builds and the more trappings of European culture they adopt or imitate (e.g. crucifixes), the more material wealth they'll get.

I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is more money for science out there.

The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resourced to really handle that.

It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.

That means the support the institution will put behind a shoot-for-the-stars research centre grant is way different than what a theorist looking to pay for 5 grad students will get, but the institution is happy to proportionately support that as well. Especially R1's that are trying to play the prestige game aggressively, they'll push for a "world class" faculty page pretty much across the board. But they don't all get the same offices.

Institutions' reliance on overhead to fund operations varies wildly as well, which makes the calculus different.

The benefit to the university for soft salary or funding grad students etc. in both scenarios is the same, but getting money for a new computer cluster or a synchrotron or whatever isn't, typically.

I think pitting theory against experiments does not address the issues. The big problem IMO is that the funding systems are so competitive and at the same time (initially) have a large luck component, that it incentives short term, low risk research.

Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewed in the context of being expensive.

As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-preserving interest to value grant-earners

It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

It would also help lower some of the pressure to publish or perish, since a lot of that comes from the need to chase grants.

From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.

Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")

On the other hand nobody cares about the waste in private industry, we are perfectly fine with paying a certain amount for e.g. a Facebook ad even though they just wasted a huge amount of money on a big VR bet.. Maybe we should just admit that there will be wastage and we can't easily measure scientific outcomes and just say we are happy with the overall benefit we get from science/academia for the price we pay for it (which in the broad picture is quite small).

There's also the old aphorism that tenure committees can't read, but they can count.

Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.

We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?

Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.

Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.

I'm just stating a situation I've observed first hand both in the academic world and in the business world.

Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows.

Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.

Let me try a sports analogy. In American football, each team takes turns (rounds) to draft new players. There are college players who are already famous, had fantastic careers at the college level, and all the scouting agencies said they are can't miss. Then there are college players who played for unknown schools and the scouts don't even have a grade for them. As a result, teams dedicate the first three rounds drafting the players everyone says are can't miss (the good fundraiser in the Academic world). However, the great teams are the ones who can find the hidden gems and draft unknowns in later rounds because they can see the talent (the hypothetical talent scout who spotted the potential of messenger RNA research 20 years ago).