[blazespin]

"I interpret as .. doing things that might piss off people on the committee."

Sounds like obedience to me.

There's a great HBO tv show, "The Wire". It's all about how an institution can consume personalities of those who belong to it. I'm pretty sure tenure is the same way. I see this happening to people who work in corporations for a long time. Their personalities change as they become the sort of person who can succeed in such environments.

That being said, I suspect standout researchers get tenure and get to be themselves, just as talented people can succeed in corporations and still be themselves.

They are generally the exception rather than the norm, however.

[kevhito]

Hi, although I'm new here and all of you have been teaching here for 20 years on average, let me tell you why everything you have done with the curriculum is terrible and should be completely rewritten in my style. And of course, I'll have to do all of this myself, since you are all incompetent. And I better teach the first round myself too, because I can't trust you with that either.

So yes, there is a difference between not pissing off people on the committee and "obedience".

[TheOtherHobbes]

Just because someone has been doing something for twenty years doesn't mean that what they're doing can't be improved. It doesn't even mean they're necessarily competent.

The professional response to a newcomer isn't to have a snitty fit of tutting and hissing, but to consider the possibility that maybe the younger newcomer has something to offer.

If they're just being Dunning-Kruger-ish then fine - snipe away.

But it's not at all a given that the situation is that simple - especially when they've been employed as a prospect in the first place, which suggests that at least an entire hiring committee met them and considered they had promise.

[kevhito]

No, you are right, I was perhaps too harsh. But it takes some modesty and humility to pause and consider why the system ended up the way it has, and why the elder's are resistant to change. The author shows no sign of modesty or humility, so it isn't at all clear to me that the elders were snitty or tutting and hissing. In fact, it sounds like there were other issues the author was deliberately ignoring. Finite resource allocation, campus-wide priorities, an MS program, etc.

Being able to convince others, win allies, balance priorities, and just get along with others are important skills, and the author seems to excel at none of these. At least, judging by this post. Elsewhere in this thread, a student suggested that there may really have been some nasty infighting happening, in which case this poor guy may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[simonster]

As a student who has participated in some decisions regarding changing courses at my institution, I think classes here are usually bad because no one really cares. It requires tact to say "this course is garbage and you don't care about it anyway; let me handle it" without bruising egos.

But I think it's bullshit to say that not bruising egos is an important skill, especially in science. The kinds of scientists whose egos are easily bruised are the kinds of scientists who Max Planck was talking about when he said "science progresses one funeral at a time." People who refuse to acknowledge constructive criticism unless it's sugar-coated will continue to pursue the same ideas even after others have proved them wrong.

This is a systematic issue. Science is full of people with big egos. When scientist A criticizes scientist B's idea, ideally scientist A would think really hard about scientist B's criticism and either say "yes, you're right" or "no, here's what you're missing" (ideally with experiments). Scientists with big egos don't do this. They reject other scientists' criticism out of hand, and they criticize people based on feelings rather than ideas. The problem is contagious: Scientists with big egos attract more scientists with big egos, since those are the people who continue to believe they are great despite the barrage of nonsensical criticism. And egos tend to grow larger, not smaller, as people rise in rank.

Appropriately weighing others' evaluations of your ideas is really hard. It requires the technical skill necessary to come up with those ideas in the first place; the social skill to distinguish between sycophantic praise and true positive evaluation; and the emotional control to ignore anger or disappointment that might result from negative evaluation and focus on the content instead. In my experience, people who can do these things make much better scientists, and are much better to work with. They are less guarded when brainstorming ideas and more willing to change their minds in the face of superior evidence. But in modern science, there are relatively few incentives that favor accurate self-evaluation, and many that favor persistence above all else. In a world where ~5% of incoming graduate students go on to become tenured professors, people who aren't great and know it (or are great but don't know it) drop out early, and the people looking for positions end up being a combination of great people and mediocre people who think they're great.

[kevhito]

> no one really cares

Maybe. Or maybe they care and simply have a different perspective on what is the best approach. Or maybe they have different priorities. Optimizing for one variable (e.g. making one specific course awesome) at the expense of all others (hedging against future enrollment trends, pleasing the board of directors & alumni, limited faculty resources, ....) is simply not how universities work.

So I agree with you, somewhat, in some circumstances. In the science side of thing, maybe. But we're also talking about the college's dog policy here. The author seems to think it is completely obvious that he should be free to bring his dog to his campus lab, and shows no awareness that there may be good reasons there is a no dog policy. Maybe there are students with allergies? Or maybe UB has been sued for this in the past? Or maybe its a state law? I don't know.

So reading your comment carefully, it isn't actually obvious if you think it was the author's colleagues who had the big egos and won't listen to criticism, or the author himself.

[munin]

At my university, I've asked about educational priorities only to be told, by senior professors, "making this class better or worse won't help anyone's career." This is probably what you mean by "having different priorities."

[adrianratnapala]

Actualy I see the big egos as a benefit. They just say "No, you are wrong, thanks for our input." And they really mean both sentences.

[simonster]

A benefit to what? People arguing for years over boring research questions where the evidence clearly favors one viewpoint over another does not benefit anyone except the people involved in the argument, who can ask for more funding to resolve this hotly debated open question.