[Thriptic]

> Full disclosure: I'm coming up for tenure myself, and one lesson it has taken me 5 years to understand is that people who disagree with me on campus aren't doing so out of spite, stupidity, or carelessness, they often just have different priorities than I do

In my experience, one problem is that the priorities are frequently rooted in the self-interest of powerful PIs or staff and are to the detriment of the department / university as a whole. As a staff scientist working on many different types of projects, I frequently bump up against stupid problems which should be fixed at a university level. At one point, I tried spear heading a number of these projects (creation of a central index of core facilities and support services for our university so people can actually find resources efficiently, centralized billing and training services for shared facilities across departments, secure storage and an EMR for investigators working with patient information).

All of these projects failed to launch for selfish reasons:

central index: powerful PIs feared discovery of their private core labs which they were abusing; core labs feared institute-level data would lead to institute wide optimization and loss of local control.

centralized billing: financial admins feared loss of control and had job security issues

centralized training: core labs feared loss of control

secure storage and EMR: PIs thought this was too inconvenient, preferred leaving shit on external hard drives with no access control. Feared if this were created they would be forced to use it.

I don't ever try to fix anything now beyond the lab level, and even that is frequently challenging.

I've also seen two talented investigators passed by for tenure in our department because my PI is powerful and other PIs fear that having another person from our lab in the department will further consolidate power in my PI's hands. Our department recently spent an enormous amount of money renovating a single floor in our aging building. That floor had the departmental chair's lab on it. In my experience, academia is full of people who for the most part are in it for themselves and have no interest in improving the situation of the group / lab / department / university as a whole.

[adrianratnapala]

I'm sorry but I suspect your deeply, deeply wrong and your work will damage your university. Everything you talk about is about centralising knowledge and control.

In practice, this never helps in the business of getting experiments done. Students and postdocs just pend some time doing pointless training courses, overheads increase, lead-times for ordering equiment increase. And to what purpose?

[Thriptic]

> Everything you talk about is about centralising knowledge and control. In practice, this never helps in the business of getting experiments done

We have researchers that literally cannot get work done efficiently because they don't know that core labs exist on campus to serve them, and labs that spend tens of thousands to buy instruments that they seldom use for the same reasons. At a department level (let alone an institute level), we have no idea what instruments or services people need, and no usage statistics for instruments that we already have. This means that it is likely that shared facilities are sub-optimally serving the community as a whole, and labs are buying multiple copies of the same pieces of equipment when one unit could do if it were shared. The lack of central indexing also means that most labs have no idea what other labs are working on, which hinders collaboration.

For training, right now EACH core lab forces researchers to do similar training courses for the same instruments; there is no way to prove you know how to use an instrument without taking each course. Similarly, every core lab employs different billing software which financial admins / lab admins have to sign up for and deal with.

How is this at all productive or efficient for anyone? If you were to suggest a similar setup for interacting business units, you would literally be laughed out of the room at a company.

The reason people like this current system is precisely because it's inefficient and confusing. This makes it difficult to regulate at a high level and makes it ripe for abuse by powerful people.

[sjg007]

This is why million dollar fines for HIPPA violations are a thing. Surprised that even said penalties wouldn't change things.