Re: ABOLISH ACADEMIC TENURE
"Arthur E. Sowers"
Sun, 26 Jan 1997 22:17:25 -0500
On Fri, 24 Jan 1997, Rebecca M. Chamberlin wrote:
--deleted
>
> And maybe I can offer another twist on this issue.
>
> I know a tenured (associate) professor at a "top ten" chemistry
> department whose research program basically folded for a few years. He
> had been working on a topic that was considered old news and not worth
> funding anymore. For about 4-5 years he had no research group and no
> funds, but continued to carry a heavy teaching load. Finally he broke
> into a new area of chemistry and started hiring grad students again. He
> now has a thriving group & high publication rate.
>
> Should he have been fired during his unproductive period?
>
> Another professor at the same school hasn't had a grant or a grad
> student since 1987. He has continued to publish review articles and
> book chapters, and teaches 1 or 2 classes each semester. He is just a
> couple years from retirement.
>
> Keep him or boot him?
>
> Becky
>
>
Its easy to come up with a rationalization for terminating profs based on
loss of "recognizable" productivity. Under a harsh administrative policy,
such as at most high prestige medical schools (and many others), the guy
who had tenure and had lost his funding would have lost a big chunk of
his salary. With several years of dedicated work and luck in the research,
some of these guys can "rescue" themselves. I've heard of many such cases.
Their only safety net is tenure. Untenured guys who lost their grants are
at the mercy of the chair. Often, the chair has already set up his fiefdom
to protect a clique who he considers as important, and anyone who is
outside of that clique is just out of luck. From what I have seen, and
heard about elsewhere, who is in the "in" group and who is in the "out"
group does not have to have anything to do with merit.
Usually, nontenure track faculty end up on the street as soon as their
grants run out and its like a lottery. One thing that is already happening
is that the older guys usually stay in the line of research that they have
been in for 10-15 years and they HAVE TO do that. If they deviate from
that path, study sections and grant proposal review committees MAY see
that as going off into areas that the PI has no expertise and that is
viewed as bad. It doesn't always work that way...sometimes a guy has
enough diversity on his CV that a deviation won't be noticed. But when a
new topic gets to be a hot topic, then anyone writing up a proposal for
that will bet "brownie points". This clearly draws funding away from the
guy whho has been in a field for 10-15 years, and bombs his program.
Its a fact that this happened when AIDS was discovered. Sure, funding for
this problem was justified. But all the funding was redirected from
existing funds. A lot of people who could not switch to AIDs reseach
suffered even though their projects were not complete or were otherwise
satisfactory. It was well known back in the early 1980s that PIs could get
an AIDS grant much more easily than a non-AIDs grant. A lot of guys got
their careers started (and probably tenure too) on lower quality merit
than the guys who were already doing high quality non-AIDs work. What
would I have done if I could have controlled some of this? I don't know.
So many situations in real life are such that if you make a policy change,
then one group of people benefits and another group of people is hurt.
Overall, my preference would have been for the leaders of the granting
agencies to ask for more money from the federal government rather than to
redistribute the existing pipeline. But, the mood in Washington now (the
1990s) is clearly one of cutting the size of government, budgets, and
personnel. I don't think this is going to hurt technology and development
so much, but its going to slow down science and hurt a lot of faculty.
Art Sowers
-------------------------------------------------------
Written in the public interest, the essays on
"Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" are located at:
http://www.access.digex.net/~arthures/homepage.htm
Snail mail adr to me: P.O.Box 489, Georgetown, DE 19947
-------------------------------------------------------
Re: ABOLISH ACADEMIC TENURE
frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning)
27 Jan 1997 05:00:52 GMT
In article <32E93282.FF6@numep0.phys.nwu.edu> "Todd K. Pedlar"
writes:
> It was a technicality, yes, but a right charge. The story was that
> Epstein taught Holocaust history, and made frequent reference to Butz
> and his "libel", as you quote, in his Engineering class. Hardly
> standard curriculum.
Well, there is some question as to whether the issues would qualify
as engineering ethics, which may or may not be allowable under the
right circumstances.
That question aside, how does academic freedom fit in with a "standard
curriculum?"
> Butz to my knowledge has never mentioned the
> words Holocaust, extermination, or Jew in his classes, and there the
> distinction lies. Epstein's efforts in class were to counteract Butz's
> public disdain for Jews, and were misplaced. I think, though I disagree
> entirely with Butz's personal views, that Epsteins release was valid.
> To allow Epstein's inclusion of such material in class would open the
> door to forced inclusion of Butz's in his.
Does anybody teach evolution at Northwestern? If so, does that force
the inclusion of creationism in some other class?
> Nobody wanted that, so
> Epstein was let go. [He was only an adjunct lecturer as it turns out
> and not paid]
What do you mean "only?"
Were students given a tuition price break when they took Epstein's
class as compared with, say, Butz's class? After all, Epstein's
students would not have been getting the alleged benefits of a teacher
with the academic freedom of a tenured professor.
-- Frank Manning
Re: ABOLISH ACADEMIC TENURE
"Todd K. Pedlar"
Mon, 27 Jan 1997 03:26:03 -0600
Frank Manning wrote:
>
> In article <32E93282.FF6@numep0.phys.nwu.edu> "Todd K. Pedlar"
> writes:
>
> > It was a technicality, yes, but a right charge. The story was that
> > Epstein taught Holocaust history, and made frequent reference to Butz
> > and his "libel", as you quote, in his Engineering class. Hardly
> > standard curriculum.
>
> Well, there is some question as to whether the issues would qualify
> as engineering ethics, which may or may not be allowable under the
> right circumstances.
it's a very fine line, but from what I've read, probably just over
the line.
>
> That question aside, how does academic freedom fit in with a "standard
> curriculum?"
Good question; but I think that academic freedom is more about what
one does outside of class, rather than in class. This is why Butz's
actions have been to this point allowed, and Epstein's not.
>
> > To allow Epstein's inclusion of such material in class would open the
> > door to forced inclusion of Butz's in his.
>
> Does anybody teach evolution at Northwestern? If so, does that force
> the inclusion of creationism in some other class?
"forced" was left in my post by mistake - meant to delete it.
>
> > Nobody wanted that, so
> > Epstein was let go. [He was only an adjunct lecturer as it turns out
> > and not paid]
>
> What do you mean "only?"
Nothing as you might have imagined. My point was that adjunct faculty
are contracted in such a way that the University can easily terminate
the contract.
>
> Were students given a tuition price break when they took Epstein's
> class as compared with, say, Butz's class? After all, Epstein's
> students would not have been getting the alleged benefits of a teacher
> with the academic freedom of a tenured professor.
Like I said, my inclusion of the word "only" wasn't meant as a
perjorative remark. I should have thought twice about the way I
said what I said.
Todd
------------------------------------------------------------------
Todd K. Pedlar - Northwestern University - FNAL E835
Nuclear & Particle Physics Group
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Re: Nobel prize rubbish
"Achim Recktenwald, PhD"
Mon, 27 Jan 1997 11:44:57 -0500
Dettol wrote:
>
> Achim Recktenwald, PhD wrote:
>
> > [snip]
> >
> > I think this argument also cuts the other way.
> > Let's assume somebody is convinced he/she got a very good idea, or is
> > close to a discovery, and her/his grant is running out, the
> > 3-years-contract nears its end; alternatively, she/he got the message
> > from sombody superior that if the rate of results/output = papers
> > doesn't increase, soon, he/she better look for a new job.
> > If you are working in basic research it is normal to have long
> > time-spans, where seemingly nothing works.
> > The pressure will be very high to produce 'something', if not 'anything'
> > to be able to keep going.
> >
> > The cases of fraud uncovered I have read about are mostly connected to
> > this kind of situation.
> >
> > Achim
>
> If I understand you correctly you seem to be saying that the cases of fraud you
> are aware of have been contracted academics (apologies if I've misunderstood
> you). In any case I'd just add that all of the cases of fraud I've been aware
> of have been tenured academics usually with very well established careers.
>
> The pressure that you speak of that may have led to the fraud in these cases
> would be the pressure to obtain grants, which still exists even if you're
> tenured. Also, getting back to your example, the pressure to produce results
> when the grant is running out and you're seeking renewal (of the grant) is
> experienced by tenured academics also.
>
> Mike
But the actual fraud was in most cases done when they were not yet
tenured !!
Achim
The Monetary Motive (Re: Nobel prize rubbish)
erg@panix.com (Edward Green)
27 Jan 1997 14:20:54 -0500
>adler@pulsar.wku.edu (Allen Adler) writes:
>>The very fact that the notion of money has to be injected into
>>any discussion of things that are inherently unquantifiable is
>>fundamentally destructive. Where is the notion that things can
>>and ought to be done simply because they are good things to do?
>>It is good to help other people learn things and it is good
>>to use one's brain to understand the world better and to invent.
>>It is good to feed people who need food and to provide shelter
>>to those who need shelter. How did we ever buy into the idea
>>that it is better not to do these things because of some
>>computation about a legal fiction such as money?
wrote:
>While I agree with most of what you write above, you do, IMO, err on
>the issue of money. It is not a legal fiction but a measure of human
>labor. Talking how something is so important that it needs to be done
>regardless of monetary considerations sounds very enlightened. The
>fact that's being ignored, however is that things aren't just "done",
>somebody has to do them. This somebody, or somebodies, in turn, have
>their own needs such as food, shelter, clothing etc. which must be
>provide by yet somebody else. All of this needs to be taken into
>account.
>
>It is but a short step from the notion that "something must be done
>regardless of means available" to comandeering slave labor from the
>individuals doing this "something".
As usual, and as always, I agree with both sides, and claim this
leads to no contradiction.
Whereas you focus on the fact that "to do something" (Something must
be done!) means resources must be devoted to the problem, I am not
sure that Allen Adler is ignoring this; I hear him at least
partially criticizing a kind of thinking where money *becomes* the
resource. There is a distinction. Let me instantiate.
At about the beginning of the Great Depression the US economy flipped
like a bistable metallic strip. Suddenly people who were working
before were not working, people who wanted to contribute productive
labor could not find an outlet for it, and the pool of goods and
services shrank tremendously. Why? There was no war, no failure of
the harvest, no natural disaster, no virulent epidemic. It was just
a failure of the system -- and I don't propose to assign culpability
for this failure. The point is, is was of the nature of a software
system crash, not a hardware failure.
Now by a certain type of thinking, which many of us many recognize,
"nothing can be done" at this point because "there is no money". The
resources were all still in place, the workers ready, but "nobody
could afford to do anything".
I don't propose to make light of the personal micro-economic
problem, but at the same time, we have to step back and look at the
system overall at a time like this and say "This is ridiculous!" Not
that it is a trivial problem to get from here to there, to get people
working, to restart production; but I think it is always a useful
pole of thought to step back and look at the physical constraints. It
is in this sense that money is a "legal fiction" -- though we must
then be willing to say that all social relations and obligations are,
to the extent backed by law, "legal fictions", so "fiction" does not
seem like quite the right word. Money is tantamount to a legal
contract; but it is not itself a skill, a product, or a resource --
and I don't wish to bandy words, because I know in many good
colloquial sense we would consider money a "resource". But I think
the global distinction here is clear.
The other mental slight of hand I hear Allen Adler criticizing is
something like "Since money represents resources (wealth) anything that
makes money must be good". You hear such apologies in certain circles
when you criticize the existence of professions like tax-law
consultancy; whose sole occupation is to minimize the fraction of
wealth flowing into the hands of the government under existing tax
laws. People are paying for it -- diverting resources to the
practitioners -- so it must be "creating wealth". Well clearly,
although the client-provider pair have found a way of working in
collusion to increase their own personal share of wealth, this
activity has a zero-sum effect on net societal wealth. I don't mean
tax-law consultants are "social parasites"; there is no need to
personalize it -- they are simply filling a niche. But a global point
of view would look for ways to close this niche; to simplify tax laws
to the greatest extent possible so as to divert resources now expended
in circumventing them into more productive activity. This would be
the "supra-monetary" point of view.
I felt like I had something clearer to say when I started. Oh well.
Ed
125 wx. jobs in Jan. email job journal!!!
mejjobs@aol.com (MEJjobs)
27 Jan 1997 22:21:06 GMT
We had 125 meteorology and related jobs in the January email issue of
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Need software for fractal dimension calculation
ekoepf1173@aol.com (EKoepf1173)
27 Jan 1997 21:43:37 GMT
Hello, I m working on a NOAA Coastal Ocean Program grant
that involves relating salt marsh geomorphology, hydrology,
and meteorology to system nutrient flux dynamics. In terms
of morphology we are measuring a large number of dimensional
and non-dimensional indices from 1:40000 color IR photos. We
have need for a PC based program to measure the fractal dimension
of the drainage basin of these ecosystems, as indicated by enhanced
images. Does anyone know of a program out there that can perform
such an analysis. Thanks in advance for considering my request.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eric Koepfler
Associate Professor
Marine Science Department
Coastal Carolina University
