What do people think of the tenure system in the sciences?

True, but the department head knows who is buttering his bread.

 

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True, and in my experience, they loathe the politics as well. And it's not like a committee ever makes a clever decision, so these guys can be pressed ganged to a vote once in a while either. I guess you are right, we just have to put up with things the way they are, as there isn't a simple, more viable alternative.

 

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Oh? What is wrong with:

 

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Twice social security vs a decent salary?

Nah.

 

The point was that in contrast to tenure, they could be discharged, if they were not earning their salary, but that doing so would still cost the university.

I did no evaluation of the amount. - Why I suggested two to show that. I think amount should be less than their current salary to financially encourage some cleaning out of the dead wood, opening spaces for the bright young Ph.D.s etc. With tenure that is not possible -That is why my suggestion is better than tenure.

However, if tenure is eliminated, there should be some financial structure to discourage firing of a productive professor, who happens to irritate others or those with power to fire him.

If you have some argument against it; Why tenure is better, that was not clear from your post. I am just questioning you claim that tenure is the best of all possible approaches by suggesting an alternative I think is better (at least until you can show it is not).

 

Sure. Monsanto, Exxon, Pfizer, and the Pentagon.

 

While universities do get funds via contracts, from your listed sources, that is mainly to the science departments (like physics). Even there, I think, more comes from government agency grants.

My comment was telling that the professors who can pull in these grants (Or contracts from industry) are known by the department head - I.e. they are "buttering his bread." He will want to keep them, perhaps even if their project are of little real importance, but judging that accurately is impossible as only known years later. For example, who would have guessed that studying the Fermi level changes in solids would lead to the transistor?

Thus, I don't understand your point. Perhaps you did not understand mine?

 

Exactly the departments at issue in the OP.

My point was that tenure - originally granted on merit, by supposition - is probably a better system than serial "productivity" evaluations by people whose major interest is in pleasing the moneyed, or even worse the political.

Dead wood is just overhead, after all - it doesn't actively seek out and ruin its enemies, devote its influence to defending the false and the collaborative.

 

How is "merit" of a research professor (and his students) to be measured / determined? How would that process ever avoid being essentially political at least 95% of the time? - Merit (or not) is very subjective and often not known until years later* as in the example I gave:

Many in the department might have asked: Why are you wasting time an money on Fermi levels when they don't change anything in the chemistry of the material or of its physical properties? - Do something with at least some merit.

The only irrefutable and CURRENT measure of merit is the that the professor is attracting funds to cover cost of his work and the scholarships the university is giving to his students. One could almost define "deadwood" as those professors who are not covering their cost to the university, but, if a prof is well known to the outside world that has value to the university in that it attracts tuition paying students.

* Why Nobel Prizes are in the sciences are often given for work done 30 years earlier.

PS Thanks for making reference to the OP - that caused me to go back and read it - I completely agree with it. It starts:

 

Not really. The vast majority of research funds come from the NSF and NIH, or other (relatively) non-political agencies. Corporate contributions to university research are usually relatively trivial. Sure, you occasionally see a school where a particular department cozies up to some particular corporation, giving you what amounts to the "Department of Chemical Engineering Brought to you by Exxon," or whatever - but that's relatively rare. There are plenty of very successful professors who have built little mini-empires for themselves in their department using nothing but NIH or NSF funds.

Also, having worked for years at a university that receives a good chunk of funding from various DOD sources, I've never observed any particular bias against professors based on their political leanings. The vast majority of the time the people at the Pentagon who decide who to award money to don't even have a clue about a professor's politics. It's not like some DOD grant guy in a basement in Virginia is going to know about it if a physics professor in Ohio is constantly writing letters to the local paper decrying the current administration.

 

Although the NIH grant review process is supposedly apolitical [I've seen for example, how old boy networks cross the corporate lines], just look how those funds are distributed:

This is Canada but see also:

 

If you simply lent some lab space and grad student labor to a little aspect of someone else's project, your name is probably going to end up somewhere in the middle of the list of authors. That sort of thing is usually given little weight, at least in my experience. Departments want you to be either the primary author or the PI on the paper. Departments are usually very aware of what sort of work their assistant professors are actually doing, and whether or not their research is actually having an impact on their field.

 

"Productivity" evaluations

Probably a better system than serial "productivity" evaluations by people whose major interest is in pleasing the moneyed, or even worse the political.

 

My experience is the same. Tenured professors tend to be lazy and generally crappy professors. Plus, science progresses at the rate at which old professors and scientists die. The quicker we can get these bastards out of their seats the better. Tenureship is a stupid, stupid, dumb idea. I have no idea how anyone got the idea that, for however brief a time, it was a good idea.

 

So what do you think of alternative offered in last short paragraph here: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2659105&postcount=10

 

It's not a bad idea. Not bad at all.

 

Well, how does every other field of employment deal with the problem? We have laws against arbitrary and capricious firings, unions, and other safeguards. It's not clear to me why this one field in particular, out of all others, should have a special arrangement that makes people basically unfireable.

 

I certainly don't want professors to be unfireable. I.e in general I think tenure is not as useful as idea I suggested. (post 10 and link a few posts earlier)

In most jobs expressing and creating ideas is not as central as it is for a professor. Doing that almost always will make you unpopular with some. I think it should cost the university to fire a professor who happens to be coherently expressing unpopular ideas.

If memory serves, it was even the dean at Harvard who said women were not as suited to the sciences as men or something like that. I tend to think he had a point. It is my observation that, in general, men can only cope with one thing at a time, but this makes it possible for them to concentrate more fully on it.

Women, again in general, are able to handle many more tasks at the same time well. Feed a child, watch another, cook dinner, talk on phone, and refine a power-point presentation for tomorrow, all at the same time!, but I think at the expense of deep, prolonged thought on one idea. There are exceptions, both ways, of course.

If he had been a mere professor I bet he would have been asked to leave. That is what tenure is to protect, but it does too much harm IMHO as the deadwood is protected too. As I recall, he was forced out - made to resign.

 

Are you arguing for or against the tenure system? Because what it sounds like to me is that the people here most unhappy with tenure are planning on replacing it with a continual series of "merit" evaluations - clearing out the dead wood, etc.

Again - for or against? Because tenure allows a prof to maintain an interest in something useless like that for years, a lifetime, without risking their livelihood.

The entire research efforts in the medical, biological, egnineering, and other profitable areas of my local public university are in the (well-advanced) process of being revamped to increase their already dominant exposure to corporate influence.

Why do you think that, to pick one example, the large land grant universities have devoted such a huge proportion of their research efforts to hybrid and genetically modified crops that are patentable and commercially profitable, while more or less abandoning efforts that would (say) allow farmers to save seed from their own harvest, do without industrial input and dependence on such imported factors as crude oil , more efficiently combine animal husbandry with row cropping to cut out various commercial middlemen, and the like?

At least a few researchers have noted that with modern breeding knowledge and genetic techniques straight-bred corn that performs as well as the hybrids should be possible with only moderate efforts. Little or no research is being done to develop such strains. Why not, think you?

In the first place, yes, they do - if only in a security clearance report they haven't bothered to read.

In the second: How would you have "observed" bias that took effect in the many personal decisions before the grant applications were even written? Do you see young researchers in the critical fields loudly and publically unwilling to take DOD money, receiving tenure anyway?

In the third, people like the Pentagon's grant money folks are not the first concern - they have countervailing motives, and objective results in mind. They need expertise above all. The greater worry is the current spread of such policies as the W/Cheney installation of a political overseer in the head offices of the major Fed agencies. Nobody "needs" ecological research on the national parks the way the Pentagon needs software control for a VTOL aircraft.

In the fourth, the current situation is tenure dominated - they overlook politics now partly because often there isn't anything they can do about them.

Fifth, the overseeing bureaucracy of the University itself is the level at which the influence, if any, would be most efficiently targeted. How were the faculty chosen, the offered terms for attracting new profs decided upon, the priorities of research and recommendation established?

And so forth. The status quo is complex - change tenure, lots of stuff changes.

They aren't. You just need a serious cause - they can't be fired on the basis of some bureaucrat's "goals and objectives" or performance standards, is all. One cost is dead wood. One benefit is exclusion of that kind of management - corporate model - from an area where it is foolish. Another benefit is insulation of intellectual work from political wind and religious whim - which were dominant factors in the old European universities before tenure was invented.

 

*** The seemly useless study of Fermi level changes in solids that was basic to later invention of the transistor. ("Useless" as Fermi level change makes no change in the chemical of material properties of the solid.)

I would not replace the tenure system with a series of periodic merit evaluations because they could only be done by his knowledgeable department collogues, some of whom, for example, may want the prof out of the way, so they would have better chance to be the next department head, etc. Outside of the department independent review people would not know much about the subject but would be better than in department review.

I am not for killing the the tenure system if it can not be replaced by something better. I think my suggestion in post 10 is better, so would replace tenure with that. In essence, I suggest that at the central university level a sort of "merit of the man" review is made and if decision is to fire, and hire someone else as replacement (or let the department head do that) it will cost the university more as they must continue to pay the fired prof a modest amount (say twice what he gets from Social Security) for the rest of his life.

(post 10 link: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2659105&postcount=10 )

This replacement with added cost system will discourage firing unless there is good evidence that the prof has "lost his marbles." I.e. this central university review would not try to evaluate the merit of his work /studies, but the man. - His character, his ability to be rational, his coherence in his defense of his work, his dedication to it and to teaching (perhaps with reports of his performance from his students). The university should have a review committee that calls in for face to face discussion any prof who has been reported by the department head as no longer a desirable member of the department.

Leave the prof free to pursue what he thinks he should, so long as he can do it well, regardless of what other profs in his department may think of the importance or merit of his chosen area of study / investigation and give him the financial security to know that he will not be too poor if he continues with what he thinks is important, yet make it possible to get rid of the dead wood who do nothing or are able to look busy as they try to hid the fact that they have lost their marbles.