
Longest-Serving Professor at Cornell Reflects on Journey Through Academia - sbolt
https://cornellsun.com/2019/12/09/60-years-later-longest-serving-professor-at-cornell-reflects-on-journey-through-academia/
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pixelmonkey
Interesting quote here:

> The university, although still of substantial size back then [50-60 years
> ago], operated in a bottom-up manner, Nerode told The Sun. "All the faculty
> in all departments met in the auditorium to decide the future of the
> university. It is now top-down, but that is also the case everywhere else,"
> Nerode said.

I wonder, is this bottom-up (professor-led) vs top-down (administrator-led)
shift a real thing felt by many old-time academics? It seems like this may be
happening in a lot of different industries (e.g. medicine) and leading to
"cost disease"[1].

[1]: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
cost...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-
disease/)

~~~
mechhacker
I've seen this play out in some heavily funded (mechanical engineering)
organizations as well.

Some are incredibly top-heavy, with decisions being flipped from the experts
to the administrative staff who have at most 3-5 years of experience at the
company and industry, but often less.

The organizations that are self-funded from selling specialized products and
not either government bids or wealthy backers are usually much more bottom-up
organized.

~~~
Spooky23
That’s a organizational pattern common in outsourcing scenarios. There’s a
small cadre of people who know what they are talking about to some degree, who
build whatever and define an operational process.

Then the operators do whatever they do, and usually aren’t empowered to do
anything that changes the process.

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HarryHirsch
_" I learned how to acquire new subjects because I had to walk into class and
pick up everything that the people had done before," Nerode told The Sun. ...
Nerode remarked that "there was no such thing as an academic advisor for
people going to college."_

This is important. A fellow like Nerode could walk into any university and be
fine, and his background is a major reason. Nowadays, universities are open to
much wider swathes of the population, and these people need support services,
or they'd fail out. Everyone who complains about the growth of the
administrative hydrocephalus must consider this fact.

~~~
allovernow
I think over the last 2-3 decades standards have fallen across the board
because ideals behind the original purpose of such services, to prevent
underperformers from failing out, have morphed into a general administrative
goal. I went through college in the early 10s, and there was a very clear
implicit bias in all grading - failing students didn't look good for
professors, departments, or schools in general now. The result was a
consistent sort of unspoken grade padding. The goal of making college
accessable to increasingly greater swaths of the population is amicable, but
it rests on the again implicit assumption that a simple change of environment
allows everyone to thrive equally - but the result is overall reduced rigor
and a general watering down of the very meaning of a college degree.

More people may be going to school, but the distribution of talent hasn't
changed much, and by the time you're entering college there is a minimum level
of intrinsic ability necessary to really grasp technical degrees that no
amount of tutoring will mitigate.

~~~
HarryHirsch
_but it rests on the again implicit assumption that a simple change of
environment allows everyone to thrive equally_

This is emphatically not true. The SCS Noonan Scholar program is a very
successful program for underrepresented minorities. Initially, they tried just
giving money and a seat at an elite institution (Harvard, Amherst, that
caliber), and they found that their students failed out of STEM subjects with
regularity. So now they offer summer programs where they teach the subject and
soft skills, i.e. time management, networking, & so on. This improved outcomes
enormously. At Cornell they do the same. For some admits their summer program
is mandatory.

~~~
allovernow
You're talking about Ivy League institutions which sample from the tail end of
the performance distribution. What works for the cream of the crop, whatever
disadvantaged background it may come from, does not necessarily work for the
rest. I the concept of distribution statistics is sorely lacking in much of
the theory that underpins modern Western social policy, and the negative
results are gradually accumulating.

~~~
tyri_kai_psomi
Then again, even if we had sound statistics backing our policy, the facts
would be dismissed in favor of the ideology backing the social policy.

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mmmBacon
He had some great observations as a young man. I studied physics decades later
but the attitude was still the same.

 _The professor got up for the first session and said look to your right, look
to your left, one of you won’t be here next semester,” he said. “I found that
to be the attitude of physicists towards students: to cut down the number of
students as much as possible and deal only with the ones that they wanted to.
I just did not find that a very humanistic thing.”_

------
jimhefferon
My academic grandfather.

