[_where]

The ugly at universities is much worse than what was posted.

Athletes getting easy courses. People in power positions typically don’t deserve it but think they do. So, there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. Backroom deals with private industry and government. Things that would make no one want to go there.

Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, and tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers.

To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted.

[ivalm]

I think your post comes from a non-academic viewpoint.

A research prof’s concerns are about research, their scientific progeny (phd students and postdocs) and pressures to succeed in the related publish or perish/grant writing games. In this context the blog makes perfect sense and I agree with it. However, you write:

>Athletes getting easy courses

A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?).

>there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways.

I am not sure what you mean about “ridiculous projects”? The university generally doesn’t control or fund a PI. Funding is nearly always external (in the US).

>Backroom deals with private industry and government.

I am not exactly sure whose research or publications this affects but I bet the number is tiny. This is not a concern I’ve actually ever seen play out in real life (again, I am sure you can find news where it happened, but it just doesn’t reflect the lived life of most PIs).

>Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly,

I mean, I don’t think PIs are against working with industry, but industry usually wants IP, doesn’t want to publish, and wants RoI. The government funding process is already pretty open (at least NSF/NIH) but of course can be improved.

>tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers.

Most PIs are funded effectively from research grant overhead. Tuition is usually a smaller budget line. Increasing tuition will both not overall increase budget by much and add hardship to students. I do agree that more gov funding would be nice.

>To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted

I don’t think this follows from your previous statements but I do agree there is an explosion in administrative overhead that should be curtailed.

[ridv]

> A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?).

This gets into a tangential issue but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the consequences.

Where I went to undergrad the university had invested a lot of money in bringing their basketball team to NCAA Division I.

The program ended up doing a lot of shady stuff to recruit good basketball players, many of them which were discarded from other universities due to their inability to meet academic standards at their institutions.

Guess what happened?

Softball courses created for the athletes (someone has to teach them).

This was followed by rumoured intimidation of instructors by coaches who had the immediate backing of the university's president (who has the power to make your job/life miserable).

In practice, most of those who took the grunt were lecturers but this wasn't a household even name for sports, just some ego driven project for the president of a public university.

Having been a student during that team and paying attention to the reports that came out, I wouldn't discard the possibility of a professor being caught up in major politics as a result of the athletic admissions, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as a downside.

For the record, and not that it even matters, I was an academic.

[saagarjha]

Do note that the author is living in Europe.

[izacus]

I've been part of European academia and amount of corruption I've seen there is just staggering and way beyond most of private sector firms. I'm happy that the author of the blog article ended up in one of the organizations where politics, horse trading, faking of research results for grant audits and outright bribery isn't endemic.