Brazil Gets 40%

[Lawrence]

> Lawrence wrote:
> > All three of them bailed out this year and headed for industry. All
three of
> > them told me they are immensely frustrated with academic life, the
> > restrictions, the ridiculous emphasis on publishing, the incredible
social
> > stratification based wholly on who you have published with, the non-stop
> > politics that are involved in trying to get published with someone who
has a
> > good name, and the way the work and its value is repeatedly overlooked
by
> > the emphasis on publishing in the right journal, with the right person.
The
> > arrangements they face are suffocating. The creativity allowed is nil.
> > Everything has to be OKed with an advisor who may not understand the
work
> > you are trying to do, and who absolutely will not understand it if you
try
> > to do something terribly new and interesting, especially if that is
outside
> > of their field of expertise.
> > This is a system designed to do basic research. It does not do product
> > development. It certainly does not do marketing.
>
> No argument that academia is frustrating, snobbish, and stifling, but is
> it really a system designed to do basic research?  Aren't research grants
> primarily a means to grow endowments, with any knowledge produced a
secondary
> by-product?  I'm not trying to be glibly cynical here, either; IIRC, back
> in the late 80's SUNY Stony Brook took 50% off the top of any grant it
got,
> and I was told that was small compared to the prestigious private
> universities. If the goal is to maximize research funding, then the actual
research just
> becomes a marketing tool for future grant applications; hence the
importance
> of publication in the right journal, working with the most prestigious
> people in the field, etc....
> Curtiss

All of them have gotten valuable work done, therefore, in some sense the
system works. Whether it is the best of all possible systems for basic
research is open for debate. As to whether universities take a cut, that
seems like a minor point that can be easily corrected with some adjustment
of the rules. Either you're accussing the universities of corruption, or
what they do is allowed by the grant-givers, and if it is allowed, it is
because the grant givers have accepted the reasonable argument that the
overhead of running the university should also be covered by the grant. If
the cut is excessive or if the taxpayers feel strongly about this the rule
could always be changed. If you feel strongly about this you could always
start a petition; no one ever accussed the American taxpayer of being too
genorous, and it seems easy to rile people up to fight against a perceived
excess of spending.

Hothouse design shops need radically different structures. Pick up any
business magazine that's doing a portrait of some hot design place. I think
Wired had a special issue on design not that long ago, and FastCompany has
them on a regular basis. The emphasis at a lot of these design shops is on
brainstorming and creativity. Whereas, in academic research, a major effort
is put into training people during their 20s not to make assertions as fact
that they can not prove or at least cite a reference to justify. The whole
environment in academia is anti-hypothesis and anti-speculation and
pro-testing and pro-publishing the results of those tests. There is social
pressure not to talk about hypothesises except with your advisor - don't
talk about them in public, don't appear to be a media hound. Product
development, I think, needs a sexier workplace environment than this, and
something more tolerant of rentless idea generation.


>From what I've seen my friends go through, academic life is almost
mindlessly cruel and hard. All of them now get paid more and work less than
when they were in school. My friend who gave up on her post doc went from
$28,000 a year to $70,000 a year and from 50 hours a week to a more normal
40. She now does statistical analysis for a marketing firm.