
Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower - cantankerous
http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-i-jumped-out-of-ivory-tower.html?m=1
======
Anon84
Just a small datapoint when it comes interdisciplinarity, at least when it
comes to Physics.

I'm faculty in a Physics department working in an interdisciplinary field
(Social Networks/Human Dynamics with applications to Sociology and
Epidemiology). Over the years I've seen reactions spanning the entire range
from "how is that physics" to "that's awesome". Reactions tend to be
correlated with "age". Younger faculty and students tend to love it and find
it extremely interesting why Older (and more entrenched) faculty tend to
dismiss it completely.

Institutionally, life is not always easy. Physics departments don't really
know what to do with publications in WWW, KDD, BMC Medicine or EPJ Data
Science and CS departments don't know what to do with a PRL or a BMC
Infectious Diseases. Not all of these publications (CS ones in particular) are
indexed by ISI so you keep having to direct people to your Google Scholar page
if you don't want them to miss a large fraction of your publications.

On the bright side, being interdisciplinary means that it's easier for you to
reach out the outside world and working on applications to "real life
problems" means that you're more likely to actually make an impact in the
world. It also means that you get a bit more of media coverage than your
collegues which both helps and hurts you (hell hath no fury like a scientists
ego scorned).

I have my list of complaints as many others do, but at least when it comes to
research I can't really imagine myself doing anything else. Less teaching or
more research funding would be awesome but (at least so far) they haven't been
deal breakers.

------
pfortuny
He is so right on the 'interdisciplinary' thing: as long as you try to learn
something new, you are wasting your time (not only from the financial
standpoint but also from the 'status' one). Even more: those interdisciplinary
studies will most likely be seen as 'not interesting' by each of the
'departments' they link. So... less ranking for your possible publications.

And on and on and on. It takes guts not to grind the same mill as everybody.
And of course, it requires a permanent position to begin with! Otherwise, you
will not get it.

~~~
mathattack
There are reasons that departments exist, and that they are primary. For
better or worse, you trade off interdisciplinary studies (and organizational
flexibility) when you have a tenure driven department system. My impression is
that some schools (MIT & Stanford?) seem to get it right, but most don't. Of
course getting interdisciplinary right could just be the job of the real
world.

~~~
pfortuny
Oh, certainly, I am not the one to disagree on then necessity of departments.

The problem is that Rectors seem to push for "interdisciplinarity" but without
any reward for it in any way. So, it is just grandiloquent speech as far as it
goes on like this.

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auctiontheory
My impression of (tenured) academics is a lot like my impression of Microsoft:
they're making out like bandits in the short-term, while seriously head-in-
sand about fundamental changes necessary to tackle the long-term.

~~~
grovulent
This comment sounds flippant - but it has some truth... I've had a lot of
experience with many academics from many different disciplines, from science
to media studies, to philosophy.

The sense in which they are 'making out like bandits' in the short term is
simply the kind of isolated freedom that tenured academics have been able to
enjoy for so long. They only have to talk to one another and get the esteem of
their most immediate peers - but beyond that the world leaves them alone.

The sense in which they have their head in the sand is that the world is
increasingly asking them to justify their existence more and more - which is
forcing academics to engage in various ways more with the external world. And
naturally, they don't enjoy doing this. But rather than bite the bullet and
tackle full on the problem of demonstrating their value - they just become
somewhat histrionic at the suggestion that they have to justify themselves...
and in the end - and this is the important bit - FAIL to deliver a coherent
defense.

And before you say it: "Academics need to be left alone to their own devices
otherwise you won't get innovations borne of long terms motivation and
incomprehensible (to the common folk) abstract thinking."

This doesn't help - even if true. Because what is needed is a cost-benefit
analysis of all the wasted resources going into the research community as a
result of tenured academic life vs the the innovations that this system alone
could produce. I for one have no idea how to a) identify the innovations the
definitively WOULDN'T have been generated by an alternative system, nor do I -
b) know how to measure the costs.

However, the one group of people that probably are smart enough to figure out
an answer to this are the people who don't want to even consider the question.

(If anyone knows of actual research on this question - I'd be very
interested).

~~~
aridiculous
"I for one have no idea how to a) identify the innovations the definitively
WOULDN'T have been generated by an alternative system, nor do I - b) know how
to measure the costs."

Exactly. It can't be measured.

The situation is political, and the academics are right not to engage in a
dialog that uses the language of market economics and 'value'. The private
sector market experts are going to want to use their models and supply-demand
curves to justify resource allocation to obvious industry-relevant subjects.
The academics are going to use history, ethics, etc to defend breadth,
freedom, and security of non-obvious inquiry.

The faculties need to take back control of the university. They're being bent
over a barrel by their administrations.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If the benefits can't be measured, why are we wasting money on them? I can
also give you oodles of unmeasureable and unquantifiable benefits. Just send
me a big check and then don't try to box me in with oversight or
accountability.

(There are of course some measurable benefits from the current system. For
example:
[http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04](http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04)
)

~~~
rmk2
Excellent, alongside the Humanities, then, we can also close down physics,
because, clearly, if benefits can't be measured, why waste money?

Many of the "impact" arguments assume that the only victims will be the
humanities, a sacrifice lots of people are very willing to make. (The original
article talks, albeit not quite as strongly, of a hemorrhaging that is slowly
happening in terms of funding, jobs and perspective.) However, there is some
other, less obvious, collateral damage: physics, mathematics (except for
applied maths), economics all share similar problems.

And here are some choice quotes about the UK's REF and its "Impact" pilot
study, with "Impact" being an integral part of the future score (20%, which is
going to go up to 25% for the next one) that decides about research spending
from Research Councils over the next couple years, due in 2014:

> "Physicists had some particular concerns about the challenge of assessing
> impact in the manner foreseen by HEFCE. 1\. The difficulty in attributing
> UoA-specific ‘ownership’ of impact that arises from the work of a large
> collaboration, either experimental (in our case, a ten-institute
> international collaboration working on experiments at CERN) or theoretical
> (an eight-institute collaboration using High Performance Computing
> facilities).

2\. The blurry distinction between the ‘use of’ new high performance computers
and the ‘stimulation of’ the development of these machines. At what point does
close collaboration with a company such as IBM in the development of teraflop
or petaflop computers become ‘impact’?

4\. Commercial confidentiality became an issue. Even in this pilot exercise,
and making use of the ‘Confidential’ tag on the submissions, we still had to
remove some of the strongest material concerning cooperation with industrial
companies because of confidentiality agreements. In REF itself, this would be
a huge problem. It should be noted that this also contributed to the Institute
of Physics giving up on a recent exercise to try to quantify the impact of
Physics. It is impossible to quantify the impact of public understanding of
science initiatives such as TV and radio appearances, popular lectures, books,
etc at the scale of individuals or groups. Across the community, such work
clearly has an important impact, but this cannot be sensibly quantified." (p.
29)

> "Several respondents noted that research impact was most readily observed
> and measured where the distance between the two realms, research and impact,
> was relatively short and the pathways rather direct: for example, applied
> scientists working in collaboration with a private business seeking
> expressly to translate the generic insights into commercial advantage.

The socio-economic impact of more fundamental research might go unnoticed and
unremarked most of the time, reflecting the diffuse, cumulative and rather
unpredictable nature of intellectual advances. Indeed, one might imagine that
the occasion where a fundamental breakthrough produces a relatively immediate
and direct social improvement is rare, even anomalous. In practical terms,
this means the impact case studies track back to particular types of people
and types of work. It might also mean that some of the most consequential
socio-economic contributions will be excluded by virtue of their rather
indirect link with cutting-edge research.

There was a suggestion that institutions had taken the low hanging fruit, and
that in some sense the portfolio of case studies was not a good representation
of the breadth of research undertaken. This sentiment appears to be rooted in
a general sense that impact is most obvious in some narrow areas, within
subjects rather than between them, and largely unknowable, at least in
practical terms, in most instances. There were also suggestions made that a
proportion of the more significant, evident impacts was linked to people and
activities outside the very best academic research, albeit dependent upon that
work, and which would be overlooked as a result. There is always going to be
an over-reliance on a small number of sub-groups, even individuals, whose
research happens to lend itself to non-academic impact. The impact submission
is not necessarily representative of the UoA as a whole." (p. 30)

> "The biggest challenge was the need to acquire evidence to reveal the reach
> and significance of a given impact. There were many practical issues that
> stood in the way, and the response of the majority, for the pilot exercise
> at least, was to firstly focus on the more obvious cases and, secondly, to
> use whatever narratives, references and statistics that came to hand
> readily." (p. 31)

Source: REF Research Impact Pilot Exercise Lessons-Learned Project Feedback on
Pilot Submissions, November 2010
([http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/refimpactpilotlessons-
learnedfeedb...](http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/refimpactpilotlessons-
learnedfeedbackonpilotsubmissions/))

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm quite happy to cut unproductive parts of physics, math and economics.
Cutting the entirety of these fields seems counterproductive, since the
benefits of the fields as a whole are quite clear. Semiconductor physics alone
has certainly paid for all of physics and operations research alone has
certainly paid for all of math.

But if we can identify useless segments of these fields, I favor cutting them.
I see no good reason any particular endeavor should be exempt from a
cost/benefit analysis.

~~~
waqf
Right, the whole problem is that most of the subfields look probably-useless
until someone goes all the way down the path and discovers a use. So the
benefit side of the cost-benefit looks like huge benefit times small
probability, and that's a calculation that's very sensitive to error.

To continue your example: one of my ancestors worked on investigating the
semiconducting properties of germanium in the '30s, but he couldn't think of
anything it might be useful for. Oddly enough, he's not mentioned in the
history books.

~~~
yummyfajitas
As I said, "if we can identify useless segments of these fields". I didn't say
we could actually do that. I'm not a strong proponent of cutting scientific
funding. Science contains a lot of stories about random seemingly useless
research coming in handy in 10-30 years.

Medieval literature has far fewer stories, however.

(Incidentally, in case you think we don't currently attempt to predict the
future uses of assorted subfields, you've clearly never looked at the NSF
budget.)

------
shaggyfrog
In case anyone else sees an almost-empty page, it looks like Ghostery ends up
blocking all the content. Or should I say, the owner of the website has
inextricably and inexplicably tied the basic functionality of their blog to an
advertising script (Disqus). Very lame.

~~~
vdaniuk
In what way Disqus is an advertising script?

~~~
spindritf
It's not but if you configure Ghostery's filters strictly, it blocks a lot of
third party elements that are widespread on the web and as such can be used to
track you. Ghostery in general doesn't target ads in particular. That's what
AdBlock is for.

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mathattack
It's hard to imagine questioning a tenure decision on your wife can ever end
well. Not that you shouldn't stand by your spouse, but anything you say will
appear biased. I suspect that Mizzou knew they would lose both of them.

Here is a slightly sympathetic commentary.

[http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-
ernsts-...](http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-ernsts-
accusation-of-sexism.html?m=1)

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

------
blakesterz
As a recovering Academic myself I really enjoyed this post. And as good as it
is, that first comment really moved it from good to legendary: "Like many
career academics your pompous prose distracts from the content of your
argument."

------
sfbsfbsfb
What I took from this story was a first hand account of resistance to change.
This does not bode well for the ability of specific academic departments to
maintain relevance in the years ahead.

Experimentation in the best ways to educate has been embraced by the private
sector. It will be interesting to watch the level of competition that
universities can provide.

------
doctorpangloss
>I should begin by acknowledging that I've had some major and sometimes quite
public conflicts with my home department and administration, especially about
their treatment of my spouse, which I strongly believe to be the result of
highly sexist attitudes.

What does that concretely mean?

~~~
dead_phish
If you go back through his archives (which took more time than I thought it
would) you find a FAQ post about an essay concerning alleged sexual
discrimination in his wife's tenure hearing [1] (it's referenced here [2]).
Both claim to have links to the original article, but they're dead.

EDIT: Concretely? It seems like his wife was up for tenure and was denied it
on account of what the author claims was sexism, based on past actions of the
administrators in his department.

[1] [http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2012/03/sex-
discrimination-...](http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2012/03/sex-
discrimination-essay-ifaq.html?m=1)

[2][http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-
ernsts-...](http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-ernsts-
accusation-of-sexism.html)

