I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees.
Reading that administrators actually outnumber teaching staff at some American universities today, I cannot help but ask what went wrong. This kind of bureaucratic bloat would make late Soviet Union blush and professor Parkinson rewrite his books.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/teachers-ou...
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1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior"
Definition #1 isn't an edge case-- most universities are chock full of such events and seminars. Shit like this: a linguist who was tasked with helping a Northern California tribe fill in the blanks in the documentation of their dead language so they could revive it. If your curiosity isn't peaked by that concept and it's associated practical challenges and sets of choices, I'm not sure what you're doing on HN.
Definition #2 is like HN's version of cheating celebrity stories in the Enquirer. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life enumerating each case, you certainly wouldn't run out of bona fide material. But if all you talk about 99% of the time is that-- to the extent that you forget definition #1 even exists-- you have to admit at least part of your outrage is due not to your own free will but due to people clicking upvote buttons as if nudging trays of junk food close to where you're sitting.
Edit: typo
Takes a lot of admins to recreate the upper class bubble for the poors.
I can’t really blame people for wanting this security for their children. Ultimately I don't think it will change until (at least in the US) we address things like universal healthcare, justice system reform and maybe even a UBI.
For the best example, look no further than the St. Scholastica Day Riots, which started with a drunk angry scholar and escalated into a mob riot with nearly 100 casualties. [0] When not rioting against the villagers, Oxford scholars in the 13th and 14th century were prone to riot amongst themselves.
Similar disagreements in the past culminated in lynchings and led to the founding of the University of Cambridge (to avoid more bloodshed from angry villagers, but also in part to avoid accountability for other kerfuffles). So yeah, wealthy teenager daycare with education on the side is nothing new.
Edit: fixed a few historical inaccuracies, I mixed a few events in my head.
Except when the police is involved which should be any time the law is broken. You make it seem like colleges are their own oasis of law and order.
At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc).
The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000.
Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. Facilities and Plant, Campus police, not to even speak of the big ones like DoIT. (DoIT is all the IT people. Network support, web developers, DBAs etc.) I get that. At the same time, that's almost a 10 to 1 ratio. Keep in mind, the University of Wisconsin is one of the more frugal universities out there in this regard.
Again, I don't question that some of this is necessary, how much? I don't know. But having the numbers and the positions these people are employed in does put us in a better position to, at a minimum, have an informed discussion of the subject.
I know that if the University of Wisconsin shut down the math department because the web developers and DBAs at DoIT had to be paid, I would definitely be someone who would assume that to be an unwise decision. Just putting myself in the shoes of the people who care about the subject university.
But with the loans, colleges and universities are flush with cash, so they build extravagant dorms, hire way too many administrators, VP's, etc.
My idea to fix this is to make the universities provide the loans. Then they have an incentive to make sure students graduate and have a career path that makes sense (and money!)
We have allowed and encouraged an entire generation to screw themselves with these outrageous loans.
It's already happening. I went to a Canadian university. The marketing material says the school wanted to give the students a "great student experience". What's great student experience? The glossy pamphlets shows varsity sports facilities, bright lecture halls and students hanging out in residences.
This is an issue in the US, but it is worth noting this particular administrative maneuver is at University of Leicester which is in the UK. [0]
Non-selective schools (like Leicester, which admits 80%!of applicants, of which only 20% choose to attend) won’t be able to pull this off. The signaling value is too weak. They can’t get you an interview at a top company. If they can’t prepare you for it, how many parents will pay for a 4 year vacation?
This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?
Some of the "ism" culture war teaching in academia is indeed trite and silly.
But it's far less silly than Fox News and the entire right-wing media machinery - which most recently somehow managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that a valid election was stolen, that Covid is a hoax, and attacking your own political representatives is a valid expression of democracy.
Honestly, compared to that having to pay attention to pronouns or learn something about black history is a complete non-issue.
It's gone so far that the SF school board is more worried about names of their schools named after American greats than they are re-opening schools (which have been closed in California since March).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-francisco-mayor-london...
Oh, you must mean rubber duck debugging, where a programmer pretends to teach a rubber duck about a bug for the purpose of doing the job of revealing the fix for it in the process.
I absolutely love rubber duck debugging, too!
Do you tend to start a bug fix with it, or do you reserve it for times when you get stuck? I feel like I should use it way more often, or at least way earlier than I tend to. That would probably eliminate a lot of headaches.
Anyway, great to see a fellow rubber duck debugger here on HN! You know I bet if we tried teaching each other about rubber duck debugging we'd reveal even more techniques to become more efficient at doing our work.
So much to talk about! So much to teach and do!
I love HN!
(I always heard it as "those who can't teach, consult" but I like the administrate introduction...)
This seems like a smear of people who care about social justice by implication. Why do you suppose they are not interested in education and research?
That paper was written in 1982
Fast forward ~40 years, and the presumed US model is exactly the way research funding works all across Europe today. Jumping from one project to the next, always hoping that one of your next proposals will receive funding, or you're out of a job. Your project proposal has a weak "exploitation" section? Well, goodbye proposal then! Universities are thought of as nothing more than R&D departments and providers of new young hires for the economic sector.
It's only consequential then to axe such "useless" disciplines as pure mathematics.
This is a scandal.
--
Edit: these news from last September fit perfectly into the picture [2]:
The European Union’s next research programme is likely to have a greater emphasis on funding for applied research, experts have warned, as universities were told to put pressure on politicians to increase the budget. [...]
In July, EU leaders agreed to spend €80.9 billion (£72.9 billion) on Horizon Europe, €13.5 billion less than was hoped for in May.
However, regarding the budget cut, keep in mind the costs incurred by the COVID19 pandemic.
--
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/horizon-europe-wil...
As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.
So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.
Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".
I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).
Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.
I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.
Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.
Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.
When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...
The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?
Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.
By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.
Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.
Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.
The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.
This is a shame. Pure math is a discipline with the most out of whack discrepancy between public positive externality and private benefit, even more than in physics. Pure math discoveries often have unexpected downstream benefits decades later as they percolate slowly into applied domains in unexpected ways, and its discoverers get little credit and no financial reward. Terence Tao should be getting paid in the millions for his work.
Yes, Terence Tao is doing pretty well.
The top 3 (and #5) are all "HEAD COACH".
We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public.
The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers.
Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small.
But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
What do you make of studies potentially yielding long-term benefits? Yeah, nothing. This is depressing.
It is a flaw in The Firm.
Most "professors" (or maybe TA/Instructor is the better definition) are temporary positions paying a bit more than your retail position.
* this is a UK university, tuition is limited to about 30k GBP for a (UK standard) 3 year degree. That's 30k total, not per year. Accommodation is extra.
* Leicester isn't a particularly good university. It's ranked 77th out of 121. 50th out of 68 for maths [0].
* The department has been put on notice a few times that it needs more to up its income (get more students, get more research grants, get more other funding) or cut it's expenses. It hasn't done so.
* There are a whole bunch of wider issues for university funding at the moment. A rent strike is costing them money. Inability to take on foreign students (who they can charge more) is costing them money. A drop in overall intake as more students realise it likely isn't worth the money to get a degree etc. Fewer students on campus means less sales from university bars, restaurants etc. Mix that with high fixed costs and someone has to be let go.
* They're closing the pure maths departments but seem to be keeping the others (Including actuarial science) which is likely what students actually want. Ultimately UK degrees are mostly about getting a job these days, not the beauty of numbers. That's sad but that's the predictable consequence of 20 years of government policy in the area.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2020/se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kin...
Total BS imho, but don't get me started...
The amount of money the uni gets is the same. Overseas pay the full price, domestic students are subsidised and only pay £9k, but the uni gets it in full anyway. And, no, they still take overseas students (with remote studies it's not more difficult, than domestic ones). Imperial's Chem department even filled more places for 1st year than usual.
About 10% of teaching income is from the government, but that's to cover courses that cost more to teach (medicine, physical sciences, engineering etc). There is no per-student subsidy as far as I am aware? Unis get the 9k a year, either cash or from the slc.
Also, international fees are unregulated. They're totally down to the uni and the student. Central government doesn't touch them. This is why there has been a big push to take on foreign students in most universities over the last 20 years.
Source:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I'm glad to hear Imperial Chem is doing well. Exeter Chem was closed when I was there back in 2004.
Also, I'm not sure it's true to say UK degrees don't care about the beauty of number's. Again, the statistics show that the number of mathematics students have been according to the overall trend [2]. And anecdotally, comparing with friends from other countries the UK actually seems to have a university system unusually geared to purely academic degrees.
It's my personal belief that while of course university is about getting a job, it's also about learning about adulthood for many people. People use it to delay the start of their working life and enjoy a few years of adult freedom, as well as to get a degree. Anecdotally, I know a lot of my friends went to uni almost entirely for this reason and had no idea in their head about what they'd do after yet. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact with increasing lifetimes I think it only makes sense we continue to delay the age at which we enter the workforce.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...
[2] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/16-01-2020/sb255-higher-educatio...
The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about.
(Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)
(That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)
If true this shocks me. Pure math makes up two of the seven liberal arts. The pure math department at my (US state) university had significantly higher status than the applied one, and this seemed to hold true for the other (also mostly state) universities my friends went to as well.
Community colleges and technical schools? Sure. Colleges? OK I guess, if they have a notable e.g. physics or engineering program and keep the pure math courses there for administrative reasons. A university without any pure math faculty? Then you're not a university anymore...
The UK university model doesn’t follow the liberal arts model. That’s not what we’re aiming to do over here. Especially at a very low-tier university like Leicester. Our degrees are more highly specialised than yours.
Don’t judge our universities by your model.
Their alumni should complain that the administration is harming the value of their credentials.
Do you? The implication that "applied math" doesn't involve math abilities is an interesting one, but doesn't have bearing on reality. There is a good bit of interesting, and quite challenging, applied mathematics going on out there. Including large chunks of what we usually call "computer science".
If I'm a hiring manager hiring for a position where quantitative skills matter, hiring someone who did applied math at a high level is absolutely something I would look for.
I’m still gonna check though :)
Viewed this way, it is purging principled and quantitative thinkers because they can't keep them on as a risk for where the party is going. Straight out of sci-fi, but sometimes experiments can be illuminating.
The change from, "a university should produce thoughtful and well rounded citizens and leaders to grow our society," to, "a university should produce activists to pose as experts and seize the means of production," has happened within the span of a single career cohort. I'd say that math itself isn't the target, but it does seem to have found itself in the way.
As of 2020, UK universities are not worth the cost. The tuition fees alone amount to 27000 GBP (3-year undergrad) for British (non-Scottish) students with EU students now paying foreign student fees. I am still under SAAS scheme so I don't pay a single pound, which is why I am still here. Nevertheless, the cost is too high to pay for something as uncertain as future market conditions, let alone life in general (from cancer to suddenly disliking your career choice). To make the most out of UK universities, smart students choose subjects by faculty and its professors. The best bet for Oxbridge and other is still STEM while I would be very careful with anything else. Unless the said student has a very nice liquid asset portfolio...
Currently, there are two problems in UK universities:
Firstly, the growing trend of limiting free speech and radicalisation of student on all sides of political spectrum. I witnessed my Slovak friend, who now supports views that would make Gottwald and Husak blush, while my catholic friend suddenly started to vote for open anti-semite. But that is a whole can of worms that I will let anybody else to open and examing. The issue I see now is that students and professors activelly selfcensor themselves in case of an everpresent snitch is present among their ranks (don't you dare say something against CHINA!).
Secondly, students in the UK are neither students or customers, they are lifestock. Universities now compete in monopolistic market where the quantity of students determines their profits. The quality has minimal effect on profits as due to universities international reputation, there is no shortage of students. Also due to UK government, they also operate mostly as price takers. It is not about selling education to students, but to ensure that the greatest quantity of students is processed through the university system to maximise profits. That is why university management gives priority to enlarging university premises rather than paying teaching staff a fair wage and pension, which is why many professors are striking quite regularly in the UK. In simple terms, students are not customers, but raw material that is supposed to be processed for profit. Although I am open to debate, nobody will ever convince me that an academic institution should have the total of 5 bars and nightclubs in order to achieve higher level of academic excellence. I like my beer, but my personal research never supported my hypothesis that higher volume of alcohol leads to better grades.
This is why universities in UK are being filled with pseudoscientific courses, while lowering passing grades and standards which are effects I have witnessed due to my non-academic circumstances that prolonged my degree. It is to ensure that the greatest number of students survive through the course so that the university can make money of the students from 27000 tuition + bar spending + gym spending + overpriced accomodation fees + any other unecessary bs.
FYI, the above is the reason why I am purposefully staying quite far from my university (before covid) and I do not interact with students from my university. I am there for one reason only. I love my subject and I love my professors who are amazing despite the circumstances that they work in!
For fellow Czechs, if I would have a friend who would want to go study computer engineering to Oxford, I would point them to CVUT. Less money and excellent degree! Unfortunately in my field, the education in Czechia is not on par and lacks quite behind the rest of the world...I and I have a bad feeling one day soon we will pay the price
PS: appologies for spelling, insomnia...
Some breadth is always needed, but strength is even more critical for research. Having two universities, one with a center of excellency, say in physics one in ancient history is better than two mediocre research programs in each.
I think this has nothing to do with teaching mathematics -- classes will still be taught, this is about their research program. My 2c.
But seeing how much government debt has ballooned in recent decades, it's disappointing to see moonshot research (literally [1]) may well soon be a thing of the past.
Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P)
Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
