> Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.
Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.
> Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said)
We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions.
Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
How he treated his students was really neither here nor there, as long as the money and the citations kept rolling in.
It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole, and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every professor has so much power as your former boss, so saying that the problem is that professors have too much unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an asshole? You've got the same problem, and the solution wouldn't be to again make sure he has more oversight.
> He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you should have known this ahead of time or you did anything wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a solution to it, I would say the problem is sad narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the experience some people have had.
A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
> A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.
How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
This would require revisiting a lot of things - it basically assumes that all projects can be broken down into one-year, coherent and publishable chunks. I love Masters students, but they are often not the most productive, as they rarely get to wade really deeply into a project, and almost never get to develop a project of their own.
I like your idea a lot, but I don't think it could replace the Ph.D. proper. You really do need all that time on one project to make a dent in the state of the art sometimes. One year I spent an entire summer generating data for a single figure in my dissertation. That's part of the reason why it took me 8 years to graduate.
It wasn’t always like that in the US. Three year doctorates are still a thing in the UK and in Germany. Lower the standards for a doctorate and make a postdoc a formal necessity for a job as a professor, rather than not formally being one but practically so. You can even call it a habilitation, like the Germans do. If you want a doctorate go for it. If you want to teach at university after you get your doctorate you need to basically do another one, but it’s called a habilitation.
- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.
There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.
- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?
- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.
This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.
- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.
Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.
Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.