'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/10/penn-katalin-kariko-university-relationship-mistreatment

512 339 3 years ago

hodgesrm3• 3 years ago

“I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said.

A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.

wavemode• 3 years ago

woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?

rawgabbit4• 3 years ago

She was admonished for speaking in her native Hungarian.

In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.

hodgesrm3• 3 years ago

#3 factor was brilliant. According to other accounts she also speaks her mind very forthrightly. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/health/after-shunning-scientist-universi...

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

...but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed.

Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system.

Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?

hodgesrm3• 3 years ago

Fully agree on your 50 years ago point. The crux of the matter seems to be how grants are awarded. Alzheimers Disease research is a case in point. [0]

What do do about it? There should be a "crazy ideas bin" that forces a percentage of funds for big research problems to be directed to investigations of off the wall approaches. We would find out who the good revolutionaries are and could even count them.

throw_pm232• 3 years ago

A revolution will likely make things even worse. Once you decide on selecting a certain trait, a thousand imposters will pop up immediately, who superficially match all the criteria that you wanted to select for.

raincom3• 3 years ago

This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.

m_a_g• 3 years ago

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

Sadly it's not just academia either. I've seen brilliant innovative engineers get buried because they don't spend the requisite 75% of their time managing the bureaucracy of large orgs.

Const-me• 3 years ago

I’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.

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.

throw_pm232• 3 years ago

But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.

waterheater8• 3 years ago

You're talking about shifting a culture, and the culture is defined by the people. The current doctoral student mentality will define the future of academia, and most doctoral students are disheartened by the idea of writing grants for their careers. So, any future cultural solution will start with doctoral students.

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).

caddemon7• 3 years ago

You don't value and promote a single or even a handful of archetypes. You value and promote a healthy diversity of approaches. Not just diversity amongst individuals but also between institutions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford all had meaningfully different research philosophies, it wouldn't be quite so obvious how to game the system.

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.

omginternets3• 3 years ago

I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets.

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.

bluGill2• 3 years ago

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.

spamizbad• 3 years ago

Academia makes what it measures (papers that get cited). You do not need brilliant minds to do this kind of work: you just need hard-working, highly motivated "midwits" and you can pay them accordingly.

tverbeure3• 3 years ago

It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years.

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.

mjburgess4• 3 years ago

I think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident.

Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives.

ie., the "Accident" is the norm

noobermin• 3 years ago

Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?

waterheater8• 3 years ago

On this subject, I recommend the book "Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics?" by Evelleen Richards. Pharmaceutical companies have no intrinsic motivation to provide (1) cures at (2) a price one could purchase without health insurance.

caddemon7• 3 years ago

Biomedical sciences are pretty bad in general. There are truly tough problems but I also think that industry is way too intertwined with academia right now, which causes cascading effects and perhaps parts of the cultural rot to spread. Obviously the economic incentives/legal concerns you've described are a different story, but the initial mistake you've mentioned that enabled the whole scenario I'm guessing is part of a larger pattern with the quality of pharma research.

derbOac2• 3 years ago

A complementary story to the one about Karikó is one about a researcher in Texas who, prior to the pandemic, kept getting his grant proposals for a coronavirus vaccine denied because "no one cares about coronaviruses".

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.

strangattractor• 3 years ago

I've been in rooms with Academics with egos so big it displaces enough oxygen to make it stifling. No one will challenge their behavior because it may affect their career. IMHO it is the due to the culture of Academia which is often win lose and credit based. This eventually leads to unethical behavior in some cases - falsification of data, theft of ideas and believe it or not sabotage. Any type or advancement is almost strictly based on what you can take credit for doing.

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

waterheater8• 3 years ago

I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to complex political problems tend to be either elaborate or manipulative.

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.

AlbertCory2• 3 years ago

I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake."

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.

rewmie3• 3 years ago

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

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.

geodel2• 3 years ago

IMO there is nothing to wonder as it is part of everything in life. Brilliant candidates not getting job, brilliant students not getting thru school/college admissions, brilliant players not getting into school/college/professional teams of choice and so on.

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

ilaksh• 3 years ago

So what are the repercussions for the admins who misjudged or mistreated her? If there aren't sufficient changes then maybe groups should move their funding out of Penn.

smath• 3 years ago

This was my immediate thought too. We need perhaps a long lived website that captures misjudgement on the part of people in power and update their scores over a long period of time. A kind of public record, ledger. A kind of wikipedia, but simplified only to record +1s, -1s against their name, and the reason for it.

caddemon7• 3 years ago

It was largely other biology professors, not admins. It's a bad look no doubt, and there are other issues with modern university admins - but this is a direct consequence of those in the field, not typical bureaucracy crap.

myth_drannon• 3 years ago

UPenn is in the news again. Something tells me the fish stinks from the head.

kogus• 3 years ago

Your comment made me curious to look up their leadership page. As of this post, Katalin Karikó is featured very prominently on the president's page, above even the president herself. That's a pretty big mea culpa.

https://president.upenn.edu/

frostburg• 3 years ago

That's just taking undue credit.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

It's not a mea culpa if there is no sign at all of them admitting that they f*cked up.

ahoka• 3 years ago

Pharisees.

drno123• 3 years ago

If there wasn’t COVID pandemic, and mRNA vaccines did not become widely used for another decade, ms Kariko would never get the deserved recognition.

edent• 3 years ago

Ms?

malcolmgreaves• 3 years ago

* Dr. Karikó

Almondsetat• 3 years ago

are we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use your honorific every time you are mentioned

gustavus• 3 years ago

Just a reminder Einstien who was the most revolutionary scientist since Newton was unable to secure a teaching position prior to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year. Why do we think academia has suddenly magically changed?

bee_rider2• 3 years ago

Was he a good teacher?

staunton4• 3 years ago

Maybe that should play a role for getting university "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a role for Einstein.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

To be fair, he wrote those papers after not getting a job as a professor. He graduated in 1900, applied for teaching positions for two years after that, and then had his annus mirabilis in 1905, that's when he wrote the papers you're referring to. After that, he then applied again, and had a teaching position in 1908, then a full professorship in 1911. So, it's not that people looked at three Nobel-prize caliber discoveries, and said "you're not faculty quality, Mr. Einstein"

Invictus02• 3 years ago

unable to secure a teaching position *prior* to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

Well...yes. Treating the actual high-value workers like sh*t has been American Academia's SOP for how many years now?

wrycoder2• 3 years ago

I read yesterday that there are now more administrators than students at Harvard, but ‘only’ one third as many teachers as students.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

Yep. And Harvard is anything but alone in that respect.

vkou• 3 years ago

Harvard is at 19,000 employees for 23,000 students - but I'd be surprised if most of the employees are administrators, as this includes the plumbers, the janitors, the gardeners, the campus cops, the cooks, etc, etc.

My, uh, no-name school somehow managed to educate ~37,000 students with a 'mere' 7,200 employees (half of them part-time).

queuebert5• 3 years ago

Academia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be.

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.

ska3• 3 years ago

It's not really quality vs quantity.

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.

michaelrpeskin• 3 years ago

But it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theorist who needs a pencil and paper and maybe a fancy computer when you can fund an expensive lab full of state of the art lasers and optics or any other type of expensive technology. Do you want to come up with a ground breaking theory or do you want to turn the crank and measure some value a little more precise? There is value in both, but the universities really bias towards the latter because it's more expensive and needs more and bigger grants to get done.

Djle• 3 years ago

This is more of a Thomas Kuhn moment than anything else, where the mainstream doesn't accept new theories that will upend their own work.

test77777• 3 years ago

I think the opposite, we need more raw labor aimed at replicating scientific results. Today our institutions are so tiny they can hardly afford what few projects are funded to completion.

StableAlkyne3• 3 years ago

Part of it is that research grants are not used fully as a research funding source - a typical university administration will skim about a quarter of every grant for "administrative costs." It's not called out as corruption because it's the norm, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of tax-funded R&D dollars that actually make it to R&D

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.

ccooffee• 3 years ago

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.

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!")

Etheryte• 3 years ago

While I see where you're coming from, I'm very conflicted on your approach to address this. I don't think throwing more money at the problem fixes the underlying issues, if anything, I would expect them to deepen. There was an article making the rounds some time ago on HN how something like three quarters of medical studies had either strong data analysis errors in them or had complete bogus data, to the point where it was impossible to tell whether the results had any grain of truth to them. That's an absurd ratio, and not something I would want to fund.

queuebert5• 3 years ago

If the desire to inflate results comes from the intense competition, not incompetence, then more money would fix it. The fact that the top universities are suffering big fake research scandals would bolster this. Personally I've known many competent scientists who left for greener pastures not because they couldn't cut it but because they wanted higher pay and less stress.

cycomanic5• 3 years ago

I think this attitude is actually a big part of the problem. Because research is largely government funded there is big political pressure to show that the research leads to measurable outcomes and that there is zero misuse or waste of funding. This is what has lead to the current system of big administrative bodies just focused on tracking how funding is used (and we can't really blame universities for the situation, reporting requirements on everything they do have increased dramatically).

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).

antognini• 3 years ago

My dad was a professor and would joke that the way a tenure committee made their decision was that they'd print out all your papers, put them in a folder, and then throw it down a stairwell. If your packet made it to the bottom, it would be an easy yes. If it made it halfway down it would be marginal. If it only made it down a few steps it would be a definite no.

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

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

I wish every disagreement was logged in a system so that, decades later, we could know who was right and who was wrong.

It would tell us who to listen to and who yo shun.

I had hopes that Internet forums would be that record, but the nukers destroyed that.

shepherdjerred• 3 years ago

That sounds incredibly dystopian.

bjornsing• 3 years ago

If you’re very sure of yourself and typically wrong, then yes. But to me the current situation is quite dystopian.

kps2• 3 years ago

Physics Nobel winner Peter Higgs (of the boson) said the same ten years ago: “Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

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

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

I wish we had a way to see whether someone was right or wrong in the past so we can judge their decision making abilities. This would help us pick good leaders.

If only there were a way to document disagreements publicly so they could be reviewed at a later date.

I had hopes that Internet discussion forums would be that, but the nukers destroyed that along with most training materials for LLMs.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

This is a good outcome. Ideally, star researchers are expunged from academia where good ideas go to die and they're moved to industry where success depends on their work working.

anonymousDan• 3 years ago

Rolls eyes.

thelittlenag• 3 years ago

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths.

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.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.

Kye• 3 years ago

Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.

godelski8• 3 years ago

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too).

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.

raincom3• 3 years ago

Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.

exmadscientist4• 3 years ago

the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets)

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.

mjburgess4• 3 years ago

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive.

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.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

stavros3• 3 years ago

I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it?

This makes zero sense to me.

CamperBob22• 3 years ago

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)

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.

godelski8• 3 years ago

Don't forget that this is actually money laundering.

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?

tnecniv3• 3 years ago

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that.

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

robwwilliams7• 3 years ago

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

analog31• 3 years ago

In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this.

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.

zhdc1• 3 years ago

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).

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.

Fomite19• 3 years ago

"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers"

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.

pxmpxm• 3 years ago

Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money.

First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead.

Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000.

Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead):

* the building

* the real estate the building sits on

* the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods)

* security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people)

* the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc.

* construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies

* grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal

* technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff

* business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this.

* all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.

PheonixPharts2• 3 years ago

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue:

(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.

glitchc• 3 years ago

Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet.

The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.

cycomanic5• 3 years ago

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting.

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.

WoodenChair• 3 years ago

First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent.

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%.

ilya_m• 3 years ago

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".

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.

GabeIsko4• 3 years ago

It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable.

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.

godelski8• 3 years ago

Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__.

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.

bachmeier3• 3 years ago

they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets

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."

cvwright2• 3 years ago

Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research.

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

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

American universities are a fantastic scheme. I'm working on a project right now to see if I can bring this to high schools. They're a massive machine to move money from taxpayers into certain organizations very effectively. That's why you'll see that the loudest voices for student loan forgiveness go to these universities. Come on, you have a Divinities degree from Harvard? That's a fictional thing. Of course you're advocating for student loan debt discharge by the taxpayers. Ideally, if you're running the university, everyone gets $1 m to spend on university, and you charge $1 m.

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.

WalterBright2• 3 years ago

This is hilarious. I've been lectured by several PhD's that insist the NSF is an unbiased organization, doling out grants based purely on scientific merit.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort.

tombert2• 3 years ago

My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off.

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.

fritzo• 3 years ago

Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.

ChuckMcM3• 3 years ago

And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.

golem143• 3 years ago

Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?

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.

robwwilliams7• 3 years ago

Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

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.

kurthr• 3 years ago

I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard.

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.

godelski8• 3 years ago

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.

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)

Fomite19• 3 years ago

Sitting on our tenure and promotion committee, I'd be extremely skeptical about someone having 30 graduate students doing a good job supervising them, and we consider having a lab of 3-5 students to be fairly productive for a pre-tenure faculty member.

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.

justinclift• 3 years ago

The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ...

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. :(

contrarian1234• 3 years ago

I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor.

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

Fomite19• 3 years ago

There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.

kevinventullo• 3 years ago

I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?

lbeltrame• 3 years ago

50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...

seanr884• 3 years ago

In many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.

rawgabbit4• 3 years ago

While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground.

Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?

UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.

fsh• 3 years ago

I think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs were far more influential.

seanr884• 3 years ago

but the people you have to convince are the people who are doling out tax payer money for research. By definition they don't know your fabulous discovery only you know that. So you need to convince someone else that the idea you have is worth investigating and they should give you money to do it. So the people who are best at convincing other people are the people who get the grants and who get to do the research.

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.

BeetleB2• 3 years ago

Not a very helpful sentence in the context.

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.

seanr884• 3 years ago

I'm not sure you are disagreeing with me.

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

shrubble• 3 years ago

Reminder that:

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...

5kg• 3 years ago

3) Stephen Cook was denied tenure position at UCB: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook

PheonixPharts2• 3 years ago

I also find it's worth reflecting that there was a time when things were not so insane. Being unable to work at Cambridge due to a lack of advanced degress, Wittgenstein was famously pushed, at 40, to just submit his Tractatus as a PhD thesis so that he could get his PhD from Cambridge.

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.

lebean• 3 years ago

You describe a time when things weren't insane, but describe Wittgenstein being seriously considered for a PhD for a work that brought us language games and asserts "All propositions are of equal value" as an example. I tried to scribble truth tables and manipulate symbols on a chalkboard to work out how this makes sense, but I remembered that there is no such thing as truth or falsehood, so I guess I can't really judge.

robd003• 3 years ago

Reminder that Penn is the 2nd worst school for free speech: https://rankings.thefire.org/rank/school/university-of-penns...

mightyham• 3 years ago

As someone who is not in academia, I'm curious how dysfunctional the incentive structures of these institutions really are? Is it more the case that aggrieved professors doing actually good research is just a rare situation bound to happen every once in a while?

washadjeffmad• 3 years ago

Everyone thinks their research is important, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Not every chair, board, or panel can fully understand every topic, especially when it's highly specialized, much less predict its impact.

So often, people feel like they're being neglected when they're just not visible because they haven't communicated something to an audience they either don't recognize or don't value. They often write grants that don't explain the value of their work in a way that can be presented to people who don't already understand the value of the subject.

And if they're already pessimistic about support, they won't ask for support. If they're too focused on their work and not paying attention to the new hires, they won't realize they need to talk to their department about which faculty are using which labs this semester. In general, even when faculty talk to each other, they aren't always listening - at least not beyond anything that might directly be of interest to them.

And rarely does anyone ask, "How does all of this work, anyway?"

In a way, you're seeing the system working. Despite Karikó being unhappy with Penn State, she was able to perform and carry out research that did not prove critical until a global pandemic, her research was able to be located, accessed, and used, and she was subsequently recognized for it.

We can't reward potential. It's unfortunate that she felt unsupported by her department, but she did have personal advocates who helped to advance her, and she certainly wasn't the only researcher at Penn State - was she treated any differently to them?

And being blunt, if it were obvious that her research was valuable, wouldn't it have already been done by others, making this story pointless? Is it possible to be recognized for being a hidden gem before you're found?

waterheater8• 3 years ago

What is your definition of "academic research"? Not all research is academic, so take a moment to think about what that means for you. I'll give you what I think it is in the next paragraph.

A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical." I completely agree.

Many universities are majority funded by the US federal government. The proportion of money a university receives from federal student aid and federal research grants is wild, even for a state-run public university. Without those funds, the people currently employed at a university will lose their jobs, so a university will attempt to work with those funding sources as much as possible. How do universities increase incoming federal student aid dollars? Enroll more students. How do universities increase incoming federal research grant dollars? Submit more grants. Though their phrasing is different, these two goals are what drive the modern university administrator. Let's set aside the student enrollment situation and just focus on the grants.

Federal research grants come from major federal entities, such as the DHHS, NSF, DoE, DoD, and others. When a professor receives a grant, the university take a sizable cut of the grant. Some here have said that R1 institutions take 70%, and that seems reasonable to me. So, for every grant that a professor receives, the university receives money. As such, universities select for professors who can write grants and get them. Federal grants are often focused on big problems, and these big problems require lots of technical resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personnel. These problems aren't unimportant, but they aren't "game-changing" concepts; by applying for a competitive federal grant, everyone is playing the game. One important note about grants is, they typically require regular updates on results and a flow of publications.

So, you have a situation where universities tend to select for professors with grant-seeking behavior, and those professors ensure the universities receive grant dollars. If a professor is sitting around playing with ideas which might become game-changing philosophy and mathematics, they probably aren't publishing papers, which means they probably haven't received a grant, which means the university isn't getting grant dollars from that professor. As a result, in the eyes of the university, professors who publish more are better, and professors who publish less are worse.

I don't want discredit the professors who do very good work on grant dollars. It's just becoming more apparent that the current organizational structures of the modern research university is breaking down. For example, though I don't personally agree with doctoral students forming unions, I understand why they're doing it: professors try to maximize doctoral student output by paying them a pittance.

As I said in other comments, 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, it should, in time, naturally fix the problem.

derbOac2• 3 years ago

I've been in academics as a tenured faculty member and in other capacities and this story rings very true to me. Obviously extreme but by the same token clearly illustrative of prototypical problems. Note that this isn't the first Nobel prize winner in recent years to point out similar issues.

There's a kind of passing the buck phenomenon I think, for lack of a better way of putting it, combined with denial about the nature of research which is at its best by definition novel and risky. Basically no one wants to actually pay for anything, except for the federal government. The state or university doesn't say "we happily fund scientific advances", they expect it to be funded by the federal government. I always liken it to hiring a plumber, but with the expectation that they make money for you instead of fixing your plumbing, or that you hire them ostensibly for the latter but actually for the former. At some point there has to be service or product provision that is being paid for, and in our current society this is the federal government.

There are many complicating factors, like the fact that "funding" for all intents and purposes as far as a university is concerned means "federal government" (this isn't actually true but is mostly true), or that the evaluations of grants are based on current consensus about what is likely to produce significant findings, which deincentivizes novel research, or that projects rather than persons are funded, or that universities are administratively topheavy, or that the funding system also incentivizes pyramid schemes of graduate school, etc.

There are functional departments and universities where people can supportively function in the current zeitgeist, and some smart people can get funding for good grants. But the incentive structures are incredibly perverse now at most institutions, and basically boil down to how much money you bring in in the form of indirect funds on grants. I have been in conversations with colleagues at other universities, who were arguing about faculty who were bringing in large grant amounts, but from non-federal sources, with no indirect funds, and how this was unacceptable because it didn't benefit the university financially sufficiently even though it paid for grad students etc.

Yes universities have costs etc but in the current system Karikó's experience was bound to happen. Peter Higgs has said he would never be hired today and it's probably true. All of this will continue, or you just won't hear about certain advances because they will be shut down and never develop.

zamalek• 3 years ago

My experience in university convinced me that: modern universities are not institutions of learning or discovery, they are businesses and are only concerned about the bottom line. As always, enshittification follows (and arguably happened a long time ago already). That includes amazing short-term decision making at the cost of long-term sustainability.

FireBeyond3• 3 years ago

Tangential quote I heard once, "Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached".

s1artibartfast3• 3 years ago

Unpopular opinion, but this was a reasonable outcome from the university.

If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress.

They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology.

It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.

mjburgess4• 3 years ago

You have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them.

Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need.

Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those.

It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?

ModernMech11• 3 years ago

Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institution stays strong, sometimes it buckles under the pressure.

s1artibartfast3• 3 years ago

The defense would be that this set of incentives worked. We have an amazing rna vaccine that saved millions of lives. This came about from public ally funded primary research and privately funded subsequent research.

It is easy to opine on the amazing value of the amazing technology or the vaccines should have been carried forward with perfect hindsight. This was not obvious to other academics or private markets at the time.

The only way to avoid this with certainty would be to tenure every academic, and publicly fund every project.

It is widely recognized that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?

We do amazing things with wires and magnets. You know because the system worked, just like it did with mRNA vaccines.

Masses of very smart people do their best to assign government grants, and invest private money for returns. If someone can perfectly predict scientific winners and losers, there would be no problem.

Simply funding all "unprofitable" research is not a workable solution. If we did this, every university would have an alchemy department. Making something work is not just a matter of time an money.

I have defended the current incentives. Do you have a workable alternative that doesnt involve future knowledge?

rdiddly2• 3 years ago

Being currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical ground for ideas nobody else has thought of or is willing to consider. Just like startups, somebody is going to discover something huge in there. Even if you were willing to say a university isn't a place of ideas for their own sake, and is instead nothing more than a venture capital firm like their bureaucrats seem to be asserting - in short even with the profit/greed motive intact, it still seems like a dumb strategy to model the world as linear and boring.

11101010001100• 3 years ago

Sorry but no one needs more cargo cult science.

rdiddly2• 3 years ago

No one needs more failed startups either, but if your point is that some ideas are bad, yeah no kidding. In fact most of them are.

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.

d--b• 3 years ago

Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. And there she made some groundbreaking discoveries that contributed to the COVID vaccine and she got a Nobel Prize, so she probably did get some people behind her.

University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.

ceejayoz2• 3 years ago

Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible.

People stay married to abusive partners for decades, too.

godelski8• 3 years ago

I knew there was trouble as soon as I saw "Nobel Prize [winner]" and "Adjunct professor" in the same sentence. What's it take to get tenure track these days? But she mentions the rate of publications. Kps noted that Peter Higgs said something similar as well. There's many others too! Turing prize winner Hinton had this to say about ML and I couldn't agree more

One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas.
Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.

Or from Bengio

In the rush preceding a conference deadline, many papers are produced, but there is not enough time to check things properly and the race to put out more papers (especially as first or equal-first author) is humanly crushing. On the other hand, I am convinced that some of the most important advances have come through a slower process, with the time to think deeply, to step back, and to verify things carefully. Pressure has a negative effect on the quality of the science we generate. I would like us to think about Slow Science (check their manifesto!).
Students sometimes come to me two months before a deadline asking if I have ideas of something which could be achieved in two months.

I'm sure you can find one from LeCun too (drop it if you have it) and we have the 3 godfathers of ML. But as someone finishing my PhD, I'm utterly convinced that the whole process is psychotic and anti-scientific. I have written many rants on HN about this so what's another? Here's how I see it, and what I've been coining as Goodhart's Hell because the idea is more abstract that ML publishing or even academic publishing. There's just a huge fucking irony that this happens in ML.

It is Goodhart's Hell because everything in our world has become about easy to use metrics and bending over backwards to meet those metrics. There is not just a lack of concern about if the metric aligns with our intended goals, but an active readiness to brush off any concerns. We as a modern world just fucking embraced metric hacking as the actual goal. In ML we see this, as Hinton mentions, with benchmarkism with just trying to get top scores. But you need several (fwiw, I've held a top spot for over a year now on a popular generative dataset but the work remains unpublished because I don't have enough compute to tune other datasets. Reviewers just ask for more but not justify the ask by how another dataset says more). This is an insane world, especially as we've been degrading our statistical principles. The last 5+ years no one uses a validation set for classification but rather tunes their fucking hyperparameters on test set results. Generative models frequently measure metrics against the train set and don't have a test set! A true, honest to god, hold out set essentially doesn't exist (we might call it "zero shot", which is inaccurate, or "OOD"...). ML work has simply become a matter of compute. Like Higgs said, you need to publish fast, but these days top companies are asking for 5+ papers at a top conference for a newly minted PhD. I'm sorry, good work takes time. All this on top of several consistency experiments that demonstrate that reviewers are simply reject first ask questions later. Which why shouldn't they be? No one checks a reject and doing so increases the odds your work gets in since it's a zero sum game.

And in honesty, I don't see how conferences and journals are anything but fraud. Not in the sense that works in there are untrue (though a lot are and a lot more are junk. Regardless of field), but in the economic operation. The government and universities (double dipping on that gov money) pay for these to exist. Universities pay researchers to produce work. Researchers send to venues (journals/conferences). Researchers review other works submitted to the venue for no pay (so Uni pays). 80% of work gets rejected, and goes through the process again. And after all that, the only meaningful thing accomplished is that the university has a signal that the work that their researchers did is "good." Because the venue gets copyright ownership over the paper, which the university must now pay for to access (the "official" version, "preprints" are free). I'm sorry, but citation count is a bad metric but far more meaningful than venue publication and it's fucking free. Why don't we just fucking publish to OpenReview? The point of publishing is to communicate our work, nothing more nothing less. OR gives you hosting like arxiv but also comments and threads (and links to github). Do we need anything else? I mean no review can actually determine if a paper is valid or good work. But we forget that the world isn't binary, it's tertiary: True, False, Indeterminate (thanks Godel, Turing, and Young). In reviewing we do not have access to the "True" side, just as we don't have access to that in science in general. We do not know where the "True" direction points, but we know how to move away from the "False" and "Indeterminate" directions. That's why there's that famous substack named that way or Isaac Asimov's famous Relativity of Wrong paper[2]. We're not a religion here...

There is at least a few ways I know how to fight back. 1) Actually fucking review a work and do your god damn job. Your job isn't to be a filter, it is to earnestly read the work and to work with the authors to make it the best work it can be. Remember you're on the same side. 2) Simply don't review if you can't do #1. You're almost never required to and academic service isn't worth much, so why do it? 3) Flip the system on its head. Instead of concentrating on reasons to reject a paper (fucking easy shit right there), focus on reasons to accept a paper. Simply ask yourself "is there something __someone__ in the community would find useful here?" If yes, accept. Novelty doesn't exist in a world where we have 20k+ papers a year and produce works every few months. It's okay to move fast, but it's less novel and impactful, it's just closer to open science. Stop concentrating on benchmarks since if it's useful someone is going to tune the shit out of it anyways, benchmarks don't mean shit. These days benchmarks are better at showing overfitting than good results anyways (yes, your test loss can continue to decrease while you overfit).

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...

[1] https://yoshuabengio.org/2020/02/26/time-to-rethink-the-publ...

[2] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

aborsy• 3 years ago

The US academic system is focused on money, and operates like a for-profit business.

Does EU produce better science, I wonder?

slackfan• 3 years ago

It's very similar with additional niggles of who holds the purse strings. (the EU in this case)

ceejayoz2• 3 years ago

My favorite little bit about all this:

https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-...

In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

Cinderella)

mlsu3• 3 years ago

Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó.

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.

lupire• 3 years ago

Today they make companies. Karikó went private to great success.

waterheater8• 3 years ago

Look into the difficulties faced by the University of Austin [1] (not the University of Texas at Austin).

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/

ubermonkey5• 3 years ago

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

etrautmann2• 3 years ago

Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome.

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.

ip26• 3 years ago

I agree, the funding model would have to be different.

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.

brutusborn• 3 years ago

Isn’t constant evaluation the problem? If you don’t have to churn out papers to meet evaluation requirements then most of the perverse incentives disappear.

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]

Sai_2• 3 years ago

Azim Premji University? Wealthy people are definitely setting up universities except they are outside the US. The center of gravity of academia is shifting eastward imho.

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

mlsu3• 3 years ago

Yes, this is what I'm worried about. The US ought to treat this malaise as an issue of basic national security.

Fomite19• 3 years ago

They often fund new departments or centers within existing universities, because despite all the complaining about overhead rates, setting up an organization required to house, support, accept funding for, etc. research is non-trivial.

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

dbmikus• 3 years ago

Tangentially related, but her daughter is Susan Francia, who is an Olympic gold medalist rower. It's wild to me when you see family members at the top of their completely different fields.

johnp2712• 3 years ago

The research and discoveries that are most deserving of a Nobel Prize are precisely the sort that are unexpected and unpredicted in advance. All this "Monday morning quarterbacking" by everyone who now suggest that this discovery should have been obvious 20+ years ago or that the talent of those who made the discovery should have been obvious is rather silly.

Arguably the story of how this researcher was treated and what she still managed to accomplish can serve as inspiration and motivation to persevere to future generations of folks with unconventional ideas or ideas that are disparaged by the 'experts'. Yes, it can also serve as motivation to research institutions to take risks and go out on limbs every now and then as there can be some wheat hidden within the chaff.

senkora• 3 years ago

Unless something changes, this isn’t going to go well," Grady told Karikó, according to her memoir.

While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate.

In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.

But this is just petty and cruel.

very_good_man• 3 years ago

Academia seems like a wonderful place into which we, as a society, should send unlimited borrowed money.

dakial1• 3 years ago

The thing is, any human group, company, academia, etc...are influenced by politics, and those who do it well get the attention and the resources. It doesn't matter if they are technically brilliant or not.

There is no place where you don't need good communication and selling skills. That's a fact of life and it seem impossible to remove this from any of these institutions.

Kariko seems to be that very hardworking intelligent person that really needs an eloquent and self-marketer sidekick to thrive. She is a Steve Wozniak in need for a Steve Jobs.

contemporary3432• 3 years ago

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.

contemporary3432• 3 years ago

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.

zaptheimpaler• 3 years ago

Her book Breaking Through [1] also goes into more detail about this. Basically academia is now ruled by the same rotten economic lenses as the rest of the economy. Everything is about profits, labs are evaluated in "grant $/sqft." and people are evaluated on a "resume" or dumb metrics like papers published. It's really hopeless how this economic virus infects every little corner of our world and turns it to shit.

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

caddemon7• 3 years ago

At least profits have some rough relationship with reality in most industries. In academia it is the worst of both worlds. You need to be a start up hype man type (or something adjacent anyway) to get the grants, but you only need to deliver a paper at the end - not an actually functional product or organization. So we do not see the same upside that a market driven approach might have for eventually finding a stable state, only the downside of being ruthlessly metric driven.

ubermonkey5• 3 years ago

I really love how bad Penn looks on this now. It's hilarious.

DrNosferatu• 3 years ago

What about the psychology angle?

I get the feeling Katalin Karikó got a lot of that flak because she made some narcissists look bad (directly or indirectly, by comparison).

- Your views on this?

warbaker• 3 years ago

The real problem here is that funding for sciences is way too low.

Grant agencies cannot always get it right. The more funding they have, the more they can give to researchers that they aren't 100% sure about.

getpost• 3 years ago

I enjoyed this 2-Aug-2023 podcast interview covering some of this stuff: https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/

j7ake2• 3 years ago

UPenn made the right decision for itself. If Kariko was the real deal, UPenn would still get credit for Nobel. If Kariko was a dud, they let go of a liability early.

There is absolutely no incentive for UPenn to keep a professor who isn’t bringing in money.

GabeIsko4• 3 years ago

A pretty obvious consequence of the American war on funding scientific research.

DoreenMichele• 3 years ago

In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.

As a woman who wonders how we solve this, I feel like the piece doesn't cast light on actionable means to make real progress. It implicitly seems to assume a thing the world calls sexism but offers no real solutions.

Presumably, Grady was a big factor here. Why was he such a problem? There's no real explanation for his behavior and we are unlikely to ever learn anything meaningful about what drove his decisions.

It airs dirty laundry, which is perhaps an essential first step in being able to analyze the problem space: First, we have to overcome the taboo against speaking of such things.

But then the initial attempts to speak of it tend to fall within some Overton Window of acceptable assumptions and this seems to do little or nothing to give women a viable path forward.

thimkerbell• 3 years ago

Penn sold the patent to an outside company? Maybe it should be standard in such cases (if it isn't already) to give the researchers the right of first refusal.

lacker• 3 years ago

Everyone picks on Penn, but really the whole academic community made this mistake. Her research was public; any other university could have offered her a job as well. Nobody realized how important her research was at the time.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

It'd be worth taking publicly available citation network data and developing a metric based on long term (say 25y) significance vs short term. Anyone who understands how to 'play the game' can make an impact over a 5-10y period, but people who actually change the game will stand out, as would their collaborators to a lesser extent.

I'm glad to see this article calling out the people who threw stumbling blocks in her way. They deserve any career damage they get.

'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

Related Stories