I find a scoring function intriguing but worry that the initial form is too much a gross output unadjusted for costs and value-added, and as a result will incentivize a combination of low-level introductory courses and super-expensive research, with insufficient attention to the long sherpa-guided trek in between that universities are meant to excel at. At a minimum, I would (1) subtract overhead/TA/RA costs of supplying teaching or research and (2) reward high-level courses more than lower-level courses--say, students in a 500-level grad course get multiplied by at least 5 compared to students in an introductory 100-level course.
As an economist, I agree! Though I would note that the hard part is allocation of fixed costs within and across depts. If we were to go further we should also consider spillover across depts. Eg economics benefits a lot from math, stats, and CS, to name a few depts. Of course these considerations can be hard to measure. So the challenge is improving the formula in ways where the incremental benefit of the formula revision is greater than its cost, accounting for measurement error.
I agree with this, which sort of is covered by the paragraph in the essay that starts "A second criticism is..."
In graduate school (and remember that is what the University of Chicago was founded as, originally, so that American students did not have to go to Europe for graduate school), one finds that the number of students, or acolytes, trickles down to a small handful as the material gets more advanced. My most advanced graduate classes (and most helpful) were almost one-on-one tutoring, but incredibly valuable. The students who took these tiny classes went on to do amazing things later.
The run-of-the-mill students had far less impressive careers, to be honest. The people who went on to really push the boundaries and produced true progress in STEM were those tiny few.
I think back to numerous tiny classes in nonlinear dynamics, differential geometry, dynamo theory, inverse theory and geometrodynamics, for example. Big enrollment classes like quantum mechanics and electromagnetism and linear algebra were helpful too, but the small "boutique" classes really made my time in graduate school a truly rewarding graduate experience.
Personal tutoring in obscure subjects like the use of group theory and differential geometry in mathematical physics, and the use of mathematical physics techniques in statistics were also invaluable to me. This is how one gets to the bleeding edge of R&D. This is how you educate the next generation to change the world.
In my undergraduate school, the same was true of the honors classes. Only 3 of us graduated from my program. It was not a mass education program, but all three were admitted to Caltech with scholarships. The other "tiers" of physics education at my school had larger classes, but they did not perform like we did.
Reminds of the comment I heard decades ago that a Masters program teaches a cookbook and the PhD program reveals where the cookbook might not work. It also bears on the depth-vs-breadth difference between top English universities and top US universities, which is often glossed over by US universities' vastly superior funding. (English undergrads typically take 4 courses at a time in their major and none outside). While there are some good aspects to the US approach, I think we go way too far in teaching our undergrads to be "sophomoric" in their thinking, and it shows. Perhaps the credit-hours tabulated for graduation should be down-weighted for introductory courses.
I personally think that one needs a lot of depth in some area if you are going to really push the envelope and contribute.
Breadth has some value in helping you to vaguely understand what goes on in other areas. It can help you to speak to people outside your narrow specialty, at least a little. It helps with general cultural understanding and smoothing off some rough edges.
I am not a huge fan of a "good liberal arts education", which is common in the US. It is often so broad that the person comes out at the end knowing almost nothing about everything, but still unable to do much of anything. In the past they at least learned how to read and write, but it is not so clear that is true now. This "good liberal arts education" is useful for the upper classes as a sort of finishing school, so they do not embarrass their family at fancy parties, I suspect.
I think most of this "broadening" should be done in grade school, and not college. That said, I also took an immense number of nonSTEM classes in graduate school and beyond. But that was mainly as a sort of an avocation and as a diversion.
I did not intend to become a dancer or a choreographer. I wanted to be a quantitative scientist. Everyone in my dance classes thought I was crazy. They were all headed for the entertainment industry in Hollywood, or wanted to dance on Broadway. A few probably wandered off to Las Vegas. Those careers did not interest me that much.
For people who really do not know what path they want to follow, perhaps a smorgasbord of classes in different areas can help. However, if one looks at many of the leaders in STEM, they often took very crooked paths of intense narrow study in a couple of different fields before they concentrated on their final area. If one looks at the history of science, many had excursions in law or engineering or philosophy before they started to focus. These meandering paths meant they "wasted" some time, but perhaps they had some broadening function as well.
I only know of a couple of really excellent people in STEM who took the "good liberal arts education" route at first. And they had a LOT of ground to make up after this dalliance.
GIven this economic reality...perhaps the students in the big lower division courses tuition should be massively reduced with upper level students in the boutique classes paying $500,000/yr to reflect the true cost of delivering that experience. It is time to stop subsidizing advanced students at the expense of others.
This is an interesting thought. I am not sure what my feelings are on this topic, but I can see your point.
Of course, if we pushed in this direction, academia would be very different. It needs to be different in many ways, but is this what is called for? Should certain obscure areas be stomped out and obliterated forever? Banished?
For example, Bell's Inequality and Wheeler's Delayed Choice Experiments barely received any attention as it was. These were really "niche" activities and efforts. And yet, now, they seem to be growing in importance. Lots of things that later led to Nobel Prizes or trillion dollar industries start out this way.
Do we want to stomp out all individual initiative, and just engage in groupthink and have everyone follow the herd?
I am not sure that is a great idea. Some might like it, for sure.
I do not think I would.
I guess I would say, what is the point of universities at all? Why should they even exist? Most lectures can be recorded and replayed. AI can tutor people and quiz them, even better than humans can, it would seem.
I think there are probably going to be some places where human contact is needed, of a sort of apprenticeship nature. But the future could look very very different indeed. Maybe it should.
As some are suggesting, we banish research from the universities completely, then it will have to be done someplace else. Because if we back off from R&D, then we are going to be in real trouble.
As for replacing R&D...no one is suggesting that. It is however entirely appropriate to challenge the idea that funds meant for teaching, whether appropriated by taxpayers or paid by students in the form of tuition should be directed to support research at the expense of teaching. When teaching is relegated to adjuncts making less than minimum wage and contingent faculty so that funds can be used to support "research" of faculty who teach 1 -2 classes with a total of less than 10 students per year, it becomes clear that what universities have been doing is not just a major grift on society and students...but out right fraud. Faculty research that cannot gain the support of external funders (public or private) should not be paid for by diverting funds from teaching. That means a "tenured" professor who only teaches a couple of upper level graduate classes but can't get external support for their research should be paid adjunct rates for their classes and NOTHING more from university funds. If that means they have to get a job at Home Depot at night to pay the bills and support themselves, so be it. That logic has been used on those who teach for years by academia. Much of this research simply isn't worth societal support and should be relegated to a personal hobby of the academic in question. Don't blame me for this model...the research oriented faculty are the ones who denigrated teaching and worked with administrators to create the academic apartheid system we have today.
You are absolutely correct about the adjunct system that is currently in place. It is absolutely obscene, in my view. It is beyond disgraceful that we allowed this blight to flourish. It should be illegal, really. It is abusive.
Of course, you are correct that teaching funds should not be used to subsidize research activities. They should be separate entities. They are connected, of course, particularly in the case of apprenticeships and mentorships. But this is more complicated.
We do need R&D, I believe (although some here and elsewhere would argue against that, vehemently). We also need some "blue sky" or "curiosity-driven" research, although how much of that we need is another question. Bell Labs, even in its heyday, spent less than 1% of its resources on blue sky or curiosity-driven long range research.
How much research or R&D should go on in colleges and universities and other educational institutions? I am not sure, but some, probably.
We need to rethink everything in STEM, I suspect. Education and training, including in grade school and higher education and where and how we do various kinds of R&D and how much.
The system is a bit rotten. The public is starting to notice and complain.
I believe research is important. A formula I was recommended during my training makes a lot of sense. 50% of your time for research should be spent on activities with a high likelihood of success (low risk, low reward). The other 50% should be spent on things most likely NOT to work out but which offer the potential for a big reward down the line (high risk, high reward). All of this, of course, only gets done after one fulfills the rest of one's duties. Faculty on the tenure track should be required to generate the funds to justify their salary whether by teaching in a formula such as the one Dorian has recommended and/or with external research funds. A faculty member who cannot get external funds would have to teach more or larger classes to cover their salaries without presuming to take advantage of others via adjunct or contingent faculty status.
I keep hearing how AI can replace teaching of all but high level classes. As we saw with "online" teaching during COVID, this idea that teaching of the masses can be automated using technology is so demonstrably false that anyone making the argument should not be considered a serious participant in the conversation. The evidence shows clearly that human learning by most people is best facilitated by engaged teachers working with a reasonable number of students. Technology has not demonstrated that it can replace that role.
I think a much more straightforward, less controversial, and equivalent way to implement this proposal would be to make academic units more financially independent of each other, with a budget model that explicitly tracks cross-unit subsidies. Several universities have already moved or are moving to this type of budget model. It doesn't automatically slate units in deficit for closure, but it does make subsidization choices conscious and discussed openly. For example, I was on faculty senate when my previous university switched to this budget model and it became apparent that the College of Music (which is excellent) needed massive subsidies due to its small enrollment and high capital costs. But people were pretty ok with that--we want to have a thriving college of music. In other cases, it revealed things that were less ok with many people (like English at the time having similar sized TT faculty as Econ and Poli Sci combined). I think the calculations are close to equivalent to what you're proposing, but they lead to less formulaic decisions and the calculations are also done in a way that doesn't implicitly pit individual faculty against each other.
There are tradeoffs. Ronal Coase pointed this out in the context of firms. Transactions across firms (ie depts in your independent units analysis) have the benefit of seeing prices (dept value in your comment). But they involve transactions costs (i.e., imagine a student buying a bundle of classes that constitute a well rounded degree, even in eg STEM; there are transactions costs in allocating revenues, especially w independent units). Conversely, put the transaction in 1 larger form, you lower transactions costs, but you might not allocate resource efficiently since you do not see prices. The goal of this formula is to take the university as given and see if we can improve resource allocation within that firm. Ie, do better without the benefit of market prices.
As someone who would score low on this metric, I fully support the value of this metric. I just want to point out that James Clerk Mawell would also score low on this metric sinece his work on the electromagnetic field was not recognized for over two decades after he completed it, and he had an average between 2 and 3 students per class (which compared with Isaac Newton's class, was jam packed)!
1/ We think this measure should be aggregated to the dept level. So depts can house a few individuals who don’t teach a lot or generate grants if they still think those ppl are very valuable. It’s just that they’ll be cross-subsidized by others within the dept. However, the dept as a whole will be judged.
2/ No formula is perfect. Without some metric, everyone says they’re important. That is our point about “experts”. Fundamentally we have an asymmetric information problem, which requires a best second-best approach. The goal is to minimize optimization error, realizing it won’t be 0.
Such a system would only work if all faculty in the department were tenured and given similar access to research dollars, departmental resources and upper level students. As the system stands now...the privileged few are like the masters of the plantation living off the work of the indentured servants and slaves who generate most of the tuition dollars but are not treated as equals in the tenure system. The tenured masters are as likely to give up the subsidies they gain from the current system as the southern plantation owners were in the pre-Civil War American South.
Indeed. We can add Albert Einstein to that list, although he was more popular with students. He liked to sit outside when weather permitted and help undergrads with their homework. If they recognized his name they mostly didn't care, which he enjoyed. He was known for unconventional teaching, and liked to encourage students to learn on their own. How do you metric that?
I got familiar with this general concept when I did factory automation and implementation of quality control and quality assurance. One has to be careful that in the rush to measure everything, one doesn't ignore important things that don't fit the measurement system.
You remind me of something Maxwell wrote (and I quoted in my Plant Cell Biology book):
I hope that this book has fulfilled James Clerk Maxwell’s goal as a teacher. He wrote (quoted in Mahon, 2003),
In this class, I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know
the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labour is not thought, and those who have with labour acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle.
Maxwell also wrote,
My duty is to give you the requisite foundation and to allow your thoughts to arrange themselves freely. It is best that every man should be settled in his own mind, and not be led into other men’s ways of thinking under the pretence of studying science. By a careful and diligent study of natural laws I trust that we shall at least escape the dangers of vague and desultory modes of thought and acquire a habit of healthy and vigorous thinking which will enable us to recognise error in all the popular forms in which it appears and to seize and hold fast truth whether it
Claude Shannon also would have probably scored low on this metric. Most of Richard Feynman's teaching was in small classes, although we do have some videos of him teaching to large audiences. However, that was a very rare experience, although I think Feynman really liked performing in front of a big audience.
I raised a lot of money as a PI. But compared to the "lab scientists" and the "field scientists" my "needs" for money are far less. In my current efforts creating prototypes for my startup, it costs very little for me to do the work. I buy a few books, paper, pens, some new computer equipment and subscribe to some stuff in the cloud. It costs almost nothing. It takes time, and thought, but that is about it. I barely travel anymore.
My collaborators, who design and build equipment for laboratory and field use and go to the field to make observations, cost huge sums. I cannot do my work without data, for the most part. I recognize the primacy of data in the scientific enterprise, so I want to accommodate that.
Carl Sagan was a sort of well known science communicator. Many in his discipline said privately he was not much of a scientist. But he engaged in public outreach.
Public outreach is a very valuable function. We should communicate to the public what we do. So I am thinking about how best to do this, if we get some resources.
Also, as I think about Dorian's career, I realize that what he is doing, in University politics and here on Heterodox STEM, fulfills a very valuable "activism" function. We need some voices crying out for rationality in academic governance. And my impression is that Dorian represents one of those voices.
I like to think that if I can fulfill the role I envision for myself in STEM R&D, in experimenting with new R&D structures, that I can contribute to something related to this myself. I think Jordan Peterson, who is exploring new methods of teaching and outreach, is doing something similar. Being an activist/pioneer is valuable, and particularly crucial right now when STEM seems to be in trouble.
Thank you, Dorian and Anup. Quantitative metrics offer an essential foundation for evaluating the value of human work. Without such measures, decisions risk being driven by impressions, superficial visibility, politics, or pressure from committee members. For example, the use of metrics such as the H-index (or similar indices) and teaching evaluations in faculty appointments and promotions illustrates this point. Start with metrics.
The Score Function is very nice idea for ranking Departments. The Dollar Amount is indeed (almost) objective metric...
On subjective note, we can also conduct surveys of professionals in their thirties and forties, whilst asking them one basic question: How useful is your university degree for the current job you hold? I'm sure we'll find many people in specific disciplines acknowledging that their time at college was quite the waste!
I showed this essay to a friend who is a retired faculty member.
They suggested using general accounting methods to show profit and loss of each component of the University. And then as in regular investing, having some very long term investments as part of the portfolio or for advertising purposes or whatever.
The Shils report made a point of saying that appointments should never be based on grant getting, recognising the corruption of the grant system. This proposal just aggravates the problem.
Are you referring to this passage? "No appointments should ever be made in which the chief or major argument is that “outside” funds would accompany the appointment sufficient to relieve the regular budget of the cost of the appointment. Similarly, no appointment should ever be made on the initiative of a person or body from outside the University who offers to defray all expenses, salary, etc. on condition of a particular person’s appointment." I interpreted that as something like, you can't appoint someone to be the Shell Oil professor of Oil stuff because Shell Oil gave you a lot of money to do it.
Or this one? "There are, accordingly, certain matters which when they do not unambiguously and demonstrably bear on the application of the foregoing criteria, must be studiously avoided in discussions about academic appointment. These matters include a candidate’s past and current associations and the objectives of his past or current employer, the sources of the funds which support his research and the uses to which third parties might or have actually put its results independently of his desires. It behooves all members of The University of Chicago to do all they can to ensure that the standards set forth above are strictly observed in discussions and decisions regarding academic appointments." I interpreted that as more like, you can't hold it against someone if they were funded by Monsanto and did great research with the money.
Is there another passage I missed?
More generally, I didn't see anything inconsistent with the proposal, applied to departments, and Shils, applied to individuals. We're proposing a way for the administration to see which fields are vibrant and thriving, not how to hire and promote individual faculty. Since there are an essentially infinite number of possible fields, the administration has to have a way to choose between them, both which to retain and which to start up.
Yes that is the passage. And Shils at the time thought that despite the anxieties about it before it was institutionalized (where people like Conant wanted to fund the person not the project) the system had worked tolerably well. But clearly that is not the case now-- the system produces conformity and grant-seeking rather than original thinking. Bronowski at the time had the right idea-- the disestablishment of science. If thriving means doing what funders dream up as goals, it is not thriving. The whole freedom of science movement was against the "planning of science." As people like Ziman pointed out a few years later, the planners won.
There is another passage from the Shils Report you missed: "the capacity or incapacity of a candidate to attract financial resources or to 'bring them with him' should not be a criterion for appointment." That's much more clearly prohibitive of your plan than the other quotes you mention.
And further from this quote about making judgments of quality based on attracting financial resources: "If this rule is not observed, the University will be in danger of becoming an aggregate of affluent mediocrities."
This is definitely a delicate issue, which is why I think it should be done at a department level, not individual faculty level, and therefore is not inconsistent with Shils. Ultimately the university can't exist for long if it can't balance its budget, and we're seriously off that goal right now. So financial constraints have to be considered at least a little bit.
I don't think that's true. Financial constraints are important, but they cannot determine academic merit. And although the Shils Report is focused on individual appointments, I think the principles must apply to departments as well. For example, when UChicago killed the education department in the 1990s, it certainly used financial constraints to help convince the social sciences faculty to go along. But I think they attacked the education department based on academic merit, not based on the money obtained in research grants.
Seeing how "education departments" nationwide are basically pretty toxic, and seemed to have spawned a lot of this rot that we are dealing with, that might have been a judicious thing to do.
I see your point on department level decision making...but the reality is that you CANNOT use the method at that level but ignore the inequities the current system creates within departments. Any institution that tries will find itself losing one class action suit after another brought by the contingent faculty who have been discriminated against in the current system. There is an alternative of course. Tuition dollars could be spent ONLY based on teaching related activities and staff and require scholarly activity to be purely soft money funded with NO status or hard money from the university to support such research.
This metric makes grant-getting the measure of research value. Theorists would be ditched. Also, there are social sciencey fields in health and education that are good for grants, but bad for scholarly quality. And if number of students is the criterion, we end up with easy courses that sound vocational (but usually aren't really because they're too easy) and all A's (we're past mere grade inflation).
The Trustees of Indiana University just approved a major in Public Relations, in the Media School. It will have plenty of majors. We are down to fewer than 5 French majors per year.
It has long been common practice for Deans to hire a few outside professors in the field write a report on the department. Subjective measures, based on quant inputs and non-quant, work better. Ask grad students why they turned the dept. down. Look at grade distributions. Look at grants and publications.
An uninspected assumption here is that all sources of money should be treated equally. What has gotten Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT (the Ivies) in trouble is certainly not access to money. In the past, a problem name was Epstein. University administrations have historically tied themselves into pretzels to get money from anywhere. Cutbacks are periodic.
When times get tough financially, smart operators will nose in because their funds buy more influence bang for their buck and standards get lowered. (e.g. corporations selling products from candy and infant formula, to drugs, alchohol, gas, oil and coal; domestic wealthy parties pushing ideology like transhumanism, gender woo; foreign nations pushing political indoctrinations). In the fossil fuel area, Stanford takes a prize. Mark Z. Jacobson, who showed his loyalty by suing Clack and PNAS for defamation because they criticized his paper has never gotten a grant from any other source than oil. (And you don't really think he paid for those attorney's costs himself, do you?)
What corrupted the Ivies that caused such backlash and the Executive branch to use grant funding shutdowns and termination of grants as a club to beat them with is Qatar's billions. There are other sources of funds, and you can bet that Qatar has spent its billions on creating cutouts now that it's being looked at. I doubt very much if the accounting for Qatari money to American universities is complete.
I like this formula. I think it is fair on its face. I think it would be fair and right if we did not have a problem with money that corrupts the university and its purpose. However, there is such money and influence buying. So there also has to be an accounting of source of funds when shutting down departments. Properly done, this will result in losing funding sources. If we are to look at this strictly from a fiscal viewpoint, universities are faced with deciding whether to do nothing, and suffer the withering of government supported research, or cut off the corrupting sources. Those corrupting sources support some of the most vocal and politically activist members of the academy, which gives them excessive power.
A major problem today is that universities, public and private, are political indoctrination centers that have foreign power tentacles in them. That indoctrination runs a gamut that includes professors who teach overthrow of this country, and revolution under the banner of "academic freedom". This latter includes bizarre recasting of islam as oppressed in a Marxist class struggle. DEI has also come from that pretzelized revision of history.
These matters have to be faced head on and named. It is easy to name "Mars Corporation" and come up with a relationship. I use that example because in grad school I had some time with the nutrition department and Mars supported research into human breast milk. The university had a kind of buffer system for that money. It has long been de rigeur to name DoD, and defense contractors, although much of that originates from those departments that teach revolution. STEM department professors are probably aware of this issue. But beyond that?
Who names James (Jennifer) Pritzker and looks carefully at where he and his family put their money, how and why? Who names Martin (Martine) Rothblatt the king-queen of transhumanist woo? Who names the oil companies and their cutouts? Who names Qatar and their cutouts? How much of this is even transparent to discover?
When thinking about this, remember that it is failure to name and face the real problems within that has landed US universities in this mess. The mood of the country is not kind towards the indoctrination factories at universities. Those are centered in the humanities, not STEM. STEM cannot continue to sit on its behind and say, "Not our department," while the problem in humanities tears down the academy.
"This boils down to arguing that the experts in a field know that their own field is extremely important, but they can’t convince others of this (neither students nor funders). It is not surprising that experts in a field would argue that their field is important, whether it actually is or not, so their opinion can’t be taken at face value without external evidence."
I don't find this a very persuasive argument, at least when it comes to funders. Many humanities fields simply don't need research funding at all. I literally can do all my research without receiving any grant money - so why should I ask anyone to fund me to do it? And why should my field be penalized for being cheap to fund?
Now, admittedly, I do need my salary, which is paid by my university - but this is where the absence of costs comes in. Grants don't usually (as I understand it) pay the primary grant-holder's salary either - it pays for other things, perhaps the salary of research assistants, perhaps equipment, lab expenses etc. Weighing up the money brought in, but not the expenses generated by that money, once again is going to weight in favor of expensive fields and against cheap fields.
I do think it is important to show that we can attract students - but I doubt that building raw grant-getting into the metric is going to do anything except encourage people to focus on the most expensive fields and sub-fields possible. And I'm not sure that is healthy either for universities as institutions or for the research likely to be generated.
I see teaching as an essential role of faculty (not a common view!). This metric values teaching in a way that is often not the case in the physical sciences, where research and research funding tend to get all the attention. So I see the metric as actually promoting the importance of teaching.
We're clearly going to continue to have humanities, and should. If there aren't any research funds across the humanities, then the metric would simply tell you which departments are attracting and engaging students. If you had to close a couple humanities departments, it seems to me that the best to close would be ones that interest very few students. So I think the metric would be effective in that limit.
If you see this as a way of measuring physical sciences departments against other physical sciences, and measuring humanities departments against other humanities departments, then yes, this metric might make sense (though I would still be concerned that science departments which simply do less expensive kinds of research would be disadvantaged against those which do more expensive kinds of research).
But my worry would be that a single metric would be applied across the board, with science departments would be measured against humanities departments, and the latter automatically disadvantaged by the inability (not to mention lack of need!) to attract research funds. To be honest, unless it was explicit that one shouldn't do it in that way (and I didn't see anything about that in your proposal), then my experience is that university administrators prefer to apply one metric across the board than employ multiple ones.
I view teaching and learning, writ large, as the *only* goal of a university. Research is nothing more than learning things that nobody else knows (yet). That’s why I believe that credit hours per faculty are the best measure of utility, assuming that credit hours cover sufficiently much teaching and learning. If grad students are enrolled full-time in independent study courses, it’s straightforward to measure average credit hours per faculty in a department. They can be weighted by course level if desired, using the course number (100-level, 200-level, etc.) to do so automatically. This information may well be already readily available — it is at my institution.
This might be fine for some institutions, or even the vast majority of institutions. However, R&D has a place in a modern society. Currently R&D wherever we look is in trouble.
Research and development is struggling in academia, in government, in private industry and nonprofits. It is not near as productive as it once was. It is overburdened with bureaucracy and rules and administration and leeches. It is inefficient. Standards have dropped.
Do I think that one of the main places where R&D is done, academia, should be abandoned? No, I do not think that is a great idea. For one thing, who else would take on the role of training the next generation of investigators and innovators? If universities do not at least share some of that role, then we will have a problem.
However, I have no issues with 90 or 95% of all colleges and universities abandoning research altogether. Many are well on their way to doing that now, effectively.
I agree that research (but not R&D) is a fundamental function of a university. Development should be the job of an outside organization — commercial or nonprofit — that can be run far more efficiently than a university.
However, I know of very few faculty who are both attracting significant research funding and teaching few students. Often, such faculty are in a non-teaching program, such as a university-run institute. If it’s a non-teaching program, money is a reasonable way to evaluate it — the number of enrolled students is (obviously) irrelevant. But for an academic department, average teaching load across all levels works very well.
The R&D pipeline has many stages. Where does R stop and D begin? This is not particularly clear. What is pure research and what is applied research? These are all complicated and ambiguous questions with no easy answers. These divisions are sort of arbitrary, anyway.
Different institutions organize themselves differently. That is fine. No one really knows the best way to organize these entities, if truth be told.
R&D training encompasses classroom instruction, individual and team efforts, mentorships and apprenticeships. Eventually, probably some of this training and education will involve computer-aided instruction and artificial intelligence agents and similar innovations. Some of this can be at a college or university or even a community college or trade school or grade school. Some of this can be in other R&D organizations.
My only point is that academia has long played a role in R&D (maybe more R than D, depending on the project and the institution, but it varies and is a matter of definition). I think it still could play a role.
If academia is to be completely barred from this role, then we will have to re-examine how we operate. It could be done, but will involve some turmoil.
However, we are going through turmoil now, and there will be much more chaos to come, I am pretty sure.
That would certainly help. But you also need to incorporate the other proposal, suggested by Prof. Abbott above - that like departments should only be compared with each other (humanities with humanities, science with science etc.) - and perhaps the humanities should only be assessed on teaching, not on grants at all?
Otherwise you still have the problem that a department like mine, which needs literally no grants or revenue for us to do research, would be penalized by any department with any net revenue, however small, and so we would be compelled to apply for unnecessary grants in order to compete. I don't think that incentivizing departments to apply for grants they don't need is really in the spirit of your proposal!
Hmm.. seems to me some fields will have grants that pay for a whole lab and a dozen students and postdocs or more and others will just pay for a couple of students (think big biology lab vs math research)....not sure that's the best way to count impact?
I want to thank the authors for proposing this system for quantifying the value of academic departments to the university. Using such a system, however, also needs must apply to the contributions made by individual faculty to a department. I did this when serving in a contingent faculty position at Tulane University. With essentially the same formula as proposed here, I demonstrated that my contributions to the university financially equaled those of the most well funded researcher in the department. (I personally accounted for HALF the FTE's of the entire program.) I used this calculation to argue that my position deserved to be tenure track allowing me to author grant applications in my own name, have my own research program, etc. Sadly, the tenured faculty in the department saw this concept as a threat to their own outsourcing of the vast majority of teaching to contingent faculty who, if treated based on the MERIT of their contributions to the university should actually be the tenured faculty while many of those holding tenure simply did not contribute enough in the way of research dollars to make up for the paucity of teaching they conducted. As in Apartheid South Africa, maintaining the academic caste system was more important to the tenured faculty than strengthening the research and teaching portfolio of their own department and institution.
I agree that such a metric should be used in making these financial decisions...further....the tenure status of currently tenured and non-tenure track faculty needs must be on the table with underperforming tenured faculty losing tenure and immediate granting of tenure (and all the rights and resources that go with it) to those contingent faculty whose merit has thus far not been realized. Failure to do so is to admit that DEI is hardly the only area in which academia has long since abandoned any pretense of making decisions based on or rewarding merit. Think the tenured faculty in academia are going to go for this? They will see their institutions closed down sooner I fear.
If they do not like you, they will ALWAYS find some reason to get rid of you. I raised IMMENSE sums (most of which was stolen). I produced technology worth billions, repeatedly (still in everyday use throughout the US and beyond). It did not matter. They hated me anyway. They forged my signature on legal contracts. I was physically threatened. And on and on and on.
It is all a pretense, basically.
Do not think you are unique. Did anyone plausibly threaten to kill you? Did they spend tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits in an attempt to destroy you? If not, then consider yourself lucky.
I would hardly say I am unique. Have I been threatened with murder? Does people keying your vehicle on campus and in your own driveway and throwing rocks through your window while engaging in a campaign of black listing years after the fact count as precursors?
Yeah, I would say you were well on the path towards a really negative experience. Welcome to the club. Of course, most people deny that this nonsense happens. I can confirm that it does. You are just another unfortunate example.
I have lots of stories about this kind of stuff from my colleagues, friends and myself. It is ugly, that is for sure.
That is the reason that I think we are in desperate need of reform in STEM. I am not sure about your experiences, but all of those that I know of happened BEFORE woke ideology made an appearance. All that wokeness did was give bullies more tools and weapons to attack those they did not like for various reasons.
I know of some FFRDCs where after wokeness appeared, were dedicated to just infighting with this new array of weapons. No one did any work anymore. It was all unimportant compared to destroying their colleagues.
Nice.
Of course, the taxpayer was paying for all this foolishness. And has been paying for it, for years, and years.
Indeed...these problems go back long before wokeism and DEI. Those fads merely added more tools and empowered even more hostile groups based bullying relative to the class based bullying that existed before. While not everyone participated in the bad behavior...the vast majority have been willing to stand by and allow it to happen to those around them while saying and doing nothing to stop it. As such, they are morally, and in some ways legally, just as culpable as the bad actors given that universities are very much self governed by faculty. That means most of the professoriate really should be dismissed for cause given the current state of academia.
I agree. I personally observed the first signs more than 40 years ago when my best friend had obtained an LLD with the highest possible honors from Oxford University (in law). He was told by the deans of every major law school in Canada at the time (about 30 if I recall), that the rules had changed in Canada. Effectively there were to never be any more male faculty or students in law schools in Canada, from then on, forever. Period. Nothing could be done about it. That was just the way it was. To be male was to be a pariah who was beneath contempt, in their view. And that was more than 40 years ago.
Of course, these deans were not completely correct, but they were correct in large measure, I am afraid.
The situation has only become worse since then, I am afraid.
As I have previously mentioned, my main mentor has advocated that we dismiss 99% of the administrative staff in academia, at a bare minimum. He also strongly contends that more than 95% of the current faculty in academia have no business being in their current positions.
That might be a bit high, but I tend to agree a bit.
Jordan Peterson and Peter Boghossian and others have opined that the current academic system in the US is badly broken and has to be burned to the ground. I am not sure that we need to go that far, but reforms are needed, clearly. Things cannot continue in their present condition.
Agreed. As a graduate student in the 90's I served on our university's diversity committee (it had a more pompous name but that was it's purpose). I remember a white male English faculty member, nearly drowning in liberal white guilt, who complained that too many white men in his generation (baby boomer) had been given faculty positions so his response was that he would never vote to hire another white male. As one of the people who would be denied fair treatment under his guilt ridden action, I asked how hiring too few women and people of color in his generation (the sin) should be paid for by discriminating against the graduates of my generation who did NOT commit or benefit from the "crime" he felt should be rectified. I suggested that if too many white males had been hired in his generation he should resign his position to a woman or person of color from his own generation. Of course, he did no seem to understand how my suggestion would be fair or practical! Clearly reform is needed...and clearly internal reform is NOT going to be possible. Those who criticize the government imposed approach need to demonstrate examples of academic institutions have corrected their own course. Given the lack of such evidence...they really have little argument with which to oppose action by the state, risky and unpleasant as that might be. As with the end of chattel slavery in the US after the Civil War...sometimes the state must act to correct class level societal dysfunctions.
I like this approach, but there’s perhaps a simpler way: just compute the average number of credit hours taught per faculty per year. This works well if grad students are required to be enrolled full-time using independent study credits, as they are at many universities. One can weight credit hours differently based on level (intro, upper division, graduate, independent study) to account for the (perhaps) greater value of more advanced studies. Since grants pay for equipment and personnel, this approach automatically factors in the cost of doing research: a large grant that goes primarily for equipment and professional (technical) support may not support a lot of grad students. The only thing it *doesn’t* cover is education for non-enrolled “students” on the grant, like postdocs. This could easily be handled by giving some number of credit hours per postdoc.
The advantage to this approach is that it uses information that’s already readily available in any university: course enrollment numbers. It also has the advantage that a faculty member who does research but doesn’t pass it on to students at *any* level is penalized somewhat, as should be the case. It’s fine to do research and primarily teach grad students, but it’s not OK to just do research and not educate *anyone*. If you want to do that, do it at a company or non-profit.
Western Civilization has been banned for decades by feminists, and now scientists and accountants are developing formulas to rule it out. No more place for Classics (anyway, white people), or history of the West (mainly men), philosophy, English, anthropology, etc. etc. Now I grant you that the humanities and social sciences have been so corrupted by woke grievance theories that no respectable university (are there any left?) would house them. But no institution worthy of the name university could do without (at least some of) these subjects done in the spirit of serious scholarship. Yes, money is limited, and maybe more lucrative fields have to carry some of the less lucrative ones. Maybe the more expensive fields need to be spread across universities. But, folks, try to remember what a university is supposed to be.
When I was an undergrad at Harvard I took "Rome of Augustus" from Professor Tarrant. It packed Sanders Theater, which has a capacity of 1,000. The humanities can generate huge enrollments when they focus on big, interesting topics.
I personally wanted extreme concentration in the extremely hard sciences and mathematics. And almost nothing else. And that is what I sought out. Exclusively.
If that is not a university, then fine. Call it something else. Let all the ..."others" have their ...whatever institutes where they can celebrate...stuff.
I was going to be far more blunt about it, but I am trying not to ruffle too many feathers.
This is sort of similar to what Jonathan Haidt has suggested. That is, you can have two types of schools; (a) those that seek truth and (b) those that are engaged in social justice and activism.
Take your pick.
This is not that different than previous differences between religious and secular institutions, or between men's and women's colleges, or trade schools and technical schools and business schools, etc.
Social justice is a sort of a religion, which many endorse and want to pursue and promote. Fine. Go, pursue it.
I personally agree with one of the previous essays here on Heterodox STEM. STEM is a perfectly good way, and perhaps the only real way, to implement needed social changes. The rest of academia...well, what can I say?
When I went to college and then began teaching at university, everyone held the Enlightenment education ideal of seeking the truth through evidence and debate. That was true of sociology and anthropology, philosophy and history. In over fifty years of university research and teaching, I strove to advance truth to the best of my ability and within the limits of my discipline. The shift in the social sciences and humanities away from truth to social justice and activism, inspired by new grievance fields, was and is deeply destructive and ruined "higher education," particularly outside of STEM (which was somewhat contaminated and undermined). But the world and human existence is much broader than STEM, and ignorance of that broader world makes a more sterile existence.
You can try to justify your field if you like. Sure, physics and mathematics and chemistry and biology are "sterile".
Why is there no Nobel Prize in anthropology?
We have rumors about why there is not one in mathematics. However after more than a century of efforts we have the Abel Prize. We might get more; we will see.
I went to college in the 70s, and that is what I wanted. You and others can want something else. Fine, I have no problem with people seeking out what they want. Where I was an undergraduate, we called anthropology and history and philosophy and sociology majors, "artsy-fartsies". Everyone knew that the graduates would never be able to get any job, anywhere, except maybe serving coffee or cleaning toilets.
My own father strongly advised me against taking courses in "any of that crap". I did get exposed to years of philosophy while studying French, but I never understood any of it, to be honest.
The difficulty with your field, which probably began while you were still active, is that it was infected with a rot, which has destroyed most of the mainstream universities. The whole point of Heterodox STEM is to try to combat that rot before it destroys STEM as well, as near as I can understand.
We make a stand, or we lose all of STEM. I know many WANT this outcome. I personally do not. I think we will lose the core of what makes us vital as a culture.
Other fields on the periphery, which are infected to varying degrees, need to deal with their issues. I am far more interested in making sure that the hardest of the fields in STEM do not fall, which they very well might if we do not push back, hard.
Many other fields see hardcore STEM struggling valiantly for its survival. Some cheer on its potential demise. Others want them to save the Humanities and soft sciences. Well, sorry. I follow the precept that is common in airline travel; "put your own oxygen mask on first".
Save yourself first. Then you might be in a position to help save others. If we do not rescue the heart of STEM, then all is lost. Period.
Do I think psychology and sociology and political science and economics and history and philosophy have a role to play in some institutions in the future? Of course they do. That should be obvious.
However, we cannot stop our efforts to bolster hardcore STEM, FIRST, or else it will be gone. The other fields will just drag us under the water. Do not forget; those other fields were the fields that unleashed this nightmare on us in the first place.
We might not survive. If we are going to salvage STEM, we need a concentrated and prolonged effort on many fronts. We can worry about other trivialities later.
The ancillary infected fields will suffer. That is unfortunate, but they brought this on themselves and are desperately trying to destroy everything else, including all of Western Civilization.
I find a scoring function intriguing but worry that the initial form is too much a gross output unadjusted for costs and value-added, and as a result will incentivize a combination of low-level introductory courses and super-expensive research, with insufficient attention to the long sherpa-guided trek in between that universities are meant to excel at. At a minimum, I would (1) subtract overhead/TA/RA costs of supplying teaching or research and (2) reward high-level courses more than lower-level courses--say, students in a 500-level grad course get multiplied by at least 5 compared to students in an introductory 100-level course.
As an economist, I agree! Though I would note that the hard part is allocation of fixed costs within and across depts. If we were to go further we should also consider spillover across depts. Eg economics benefits a lot from math, stats, and CS, to name a few depts. Of course these considerations can be hard to measure. So the challenge is improving the formula in ways where the incremental benefit of the formula revision is greater than its cost, accounting for measurement error.
I agree with this, which sort of is covered by the paragraph in the essay that starts "A second criticism is..."
In graduate school (and remember that is what the University of Chicago was founded as, originally, so that American students did not have to go to Europe for graduate school), one finds that the number of students, or acolytes, trickles down to a small handful as the material gets more advanced. My most advanced graduate classes (and most helpful) were almost one-on-one tutoring, but incredibly valuable. The students who took these tiny classes went on to do amazing things later.
The run-of-the-mill students had far less impressive careers, to be honest. The people who went on to really push the boundaries and produced true progress in STEM were those tiny few.
I think back to numerous tiny classes in nonlinear dynamics, differential geometry, dynamo theory, inverse theory and geometrodynamics, for example. Big enrollment classes like quantum mechanics and electromagnetism and linear algebra were helpful too, but the small "boutique" classes really made my time in graduate school a truly rewarding graduate experience.
Personal tutoring in obscure subjects like the use of group theory and differential geometry in mathematical physics, and the use of mathematical physics techniques in statistics were also invaluable to me. This is how one gets to the bleeding edge of R&D. This is how you educate the next generation to change the world.
In my undergraduate school, the same was true of the honors classes. Only 3 of us graduated from my program. It was not a mass education program, but all three were admitted to Caltech with scholarships. The other "tiers" of physics education at my school had larger classes, but they did not perform like we did.
Reminds of the comment I heard decades ago that a Masters program teaches a cookbook and the PhD program reveals where the cookbook might not work. It also bears on the depth-vs-breadth difference between top English universities and top US universities, which is often glossed over by US universities' vastly superior funding. (English undergrads typically take 4 courses at a time in their major and none outside). While there are some good aspects to the US approach, I think we go way too far in teaching our undergrads to be "sophomoric" in their thinking, and it shows. Perhaps the credit-hours tabulated for graduation should be down-weighted for introductory courses.
I personally think that one needs a lot of depth in some area if you are going to really push the envelope and contribute.
Breadth has some value in helping you to vaguely understand what goes on in other areas. It can help you to speak to people outside your narrow specialty, at least a little. It helps with general cultural understanding and smoothing off some rough edges.
I am not a huge fan of a "good liberal arts education", which is common in the US. It is often so broad that the person comes out at the end knowing almost nothing about everything, but still unable to do much of anything. In the past they at least learned how to read and write, but it is not so clear that is true now. This "good liberal arts education" is useful for the upper classes as a sort of finishing school, so they do not embarrass their family at fancy parties, I suspect.
I think most of this "broadening" should be done in grade school, and not college. That said, I also took an immense number of nonSTEM classes in graduate school and beyond. But that was mainly as a sort of an avocation and as a diversion.
I did not intend to become a dancer or a choreographer. I wanted to be a quantitative scientist. Everyone in my dance classes thought I was crazy. They were all headed for the entertainment industry in Hollywood, or wanted to dance on Broadway. A few probably wandered off to Las Vegas. Those careers did not interest me that much.
For people who really do not know what path they want to follow, perhaps a smorgasbord of classes in different areas can help. However, if one looks at many of the leaders in STEM, they often took very crooked paths of intense narrow study in a couple of different fields before they concentrated on their final area. If one looks at the history of science, many had excursions in law or engineering or philosophy before they started to focus. These meandering paths meant they "wasted" some time, but perhaps they had some broadening function as well.
I only know of a couple of really excellent people in STEM who took the "good liberal arts education" route at first. And they had a LOT of ground to make up after this dalliance.
GIven this economic reality...perhaps the students in the big lower division courses tuition should be massively reduced with upper level students in the boutique classes paying $500,000/yr to reflect the true cost of delivering that experience. It is time to stop subsidizing advanced students at the expense of others.
This is an interesting thought. I am not sure what my feelings are on this topic, but I can see your point.
Of course, if we pushed in this direction, academia would be very different. It needs to be different in many ways, but is this what is called for? Should certain obscure areas be stomped out and obliterated forever? Banished?
For example, Bell's Inequality and Wheeler's Delayed Choice Experiments barely received any attention as it was. These were really "niche" activities and efforts. And yet, now, they seem to be growing in importance. Lots of things that later led to Nobel Prizes or trillion dollar industries start out this way.
Do we want to stomp out all individual initiative, and just engage in groupthink and have everyone follow the herd?
I am not sure that is a great idea. Some might like it, for sure.
I do not think I would.
I guess I would say, what is the point of universities at all? Why should they even exist? Most lectures can be recorded and replayed. AI can tutor people and quiz them, even better than humans can, it would seem.
I think there are probably going to be some places where human contact is needed, of a sort of apprenticeship nature. But the future could look very very different indeed. Maybe it should.
As some are suggesting, we banish research from the universities completely, then it will have to be done someplace else. Because if we back off from R&D, then we are going to be in real trouble.
As for replacing R&D...no one is suggesting that. It is however entirely appropriate to challenge the idea that funds meant for teaching, whether appropriated by taxpayers or paid by students in the form of tuition should be directed to support research at the expense of teaching. When teaching is relegated to adjuncts making less than minimum wage and contingent faculty so that funds can be used to support "research" of faculty who teach 1 -2 classes with a total of less than 10 students per year, it becomes clear that what universities have been doing is not just a major grift on society and students...but out right fraud. Faculty research that cannot gain the support of external funders (public or private) should not be paid for by diverting funds from teaching. That means a "tenured" professor who only teaches a couple of upper level graduate classes but can't get external support for their research should be paid adjunct rates for their classes and NOTHING more from university funds. If that means they have to get a job at Home Depot at night to pay the bills and support themselves, so be it. That logic has been used on those who teach for years by academia. Much of this research simply isn't worth societal support and should be relegated to a personal hobby of the academic in question. Don't blame me for this model...the research oriented faculty are the ones who denigrated teaching and worked with administrators to create the academic apartheid system we have today.
You are absolutely correct about the adjunct system that is currently in place. It is absolutely obscene, in my view. It is beyond disgraceful that we allowed this blight to flourish. It should be illegal, really. It is abusive.
Of course, you are correct that teaching funds should not be used to subsidize research activities. They should be separate entities. They are connected, of course, particularly in the case of apprenticeships and mentorships. But this is more complicated.
We do need R&D, I believe (although some here and elsewhere would argue against that, vehemently). We also need some "blue sky" or "curiosity-driven" research, although how much of that we need is another question. Bell Labs, even in its heyday, spent less than 1% of its resources on blue sky or curiosity-driven long range research.
How much research or R&D should go on in colleges and universities and other educational institutions? I am not sure, but some, probably.
We need to rethink everything in STEM, I suspect. Education and training, including in grade school and higher education and where and how we do various kinds of R&D and how much.
The system is a bit rotten. The public is starting to notice and complain.
I do not blame them.
I believe research is important. A formula I was recommended during my training makes a lot of sense. 50% of your time for research should be spent on activities with a high likelihood of success (low risk, low reward). The other 50% should be spent on things most likely NOT to work out but which offer the potential for a big reward down the line (high risk, high reward). All of this, of course, only gets done after one fulfills the rest of one's duties. Faculty on the tenure track should be required to generate the funds to justify their salary whether by teaching in a formula such as the one Dorian has recommended and/or with external research funds. A faculty member who cannot get external funds would have to teach more or larger classes to cover their salaries without presuming to take advantage of others via adjunct or contingent faculty status.
I keep hearing how AI can replace teaching of all but high level classes. As we saw with "online" teaching during COVID, this idea that teaching of the masses can be automated using technology is so demonstrably false that anyone making the argument should not be considered a serious participant in the conversation. The evidence shows clearly that human learning by most people is best facilitated by engaged teachers working with a reasonable number of students. Technology has not demonstrated that it can replace that role.
Some recent lower-level tutoring results showed the opposite.
I think there is a role for both humans and technology here. We have to investigate and experiment.
I would not suggest that humans are obsolete yet by any means.
I think a much more straightforward, less controversial, and equivalent way to implement this proposal would be to make academic units more financially independent of each other, with a budget model that explicitly tracks cross-unit subsidies. Several universities have already moved or are moving to this type of budget model. It doesn't automatically slate units in deficit for closure, but it does make subsidization choices conscious and discussed openly. For example, I was on faculty senate when my previous university switched to this budget model and it became apparent that the College of Music (which is excellent) needed massive subsidies due to its small enrollment and high capital costs. But people were pretty ok with that--we want to have a thriving college of music. In other cases, it revealed things that were less ok with many people (like English at the time having similar sized TT faculty as Econ and Poli Sci combined). I think the calculations are close to equivalent to what you're proposing, but they lead to less formulaic decisions and the calculations are also done in a way that doesn't implicitly pit individual faculty against each other.
There are tradeoffs. Ronal Coase pointed this out in the context of firms. Transactions across firms (ie depts in your independent units analysis) have the benefit of seeing prices (dept value in your comment). But they involve transactions costs (i.e., imagine a student buying a bundle of classes that constitute a well rounded degree, even in eg STEM; there are transactions costs in allocating revenues, especially w independent units). Conversely, put the transaction in 1 larger form, you lower transactions costs, but you might not allocate resource efficiently since you do not see prices. The goal of this formula is to take the university as given and see if we can improve resource allocation within that firm. Ie, do better without the benefit of market prices.
As someone who would score low on this metric, I fully support the value of this metric. I just want to point out that James Clerk Mawell would also score low on this metric sinece his work on the electromagnetic field was not recognized for over two decades after he completed it, and he had an average between 2 and 3 students per class (which compared with Isaac Newton's class, was jam packed)!
That’s how I look at it. But…
1/ We think this measure should be aggregated to the dept level. So depts can house a few individuals who don’t teach a lot or generate grants if they still think those ppl are very valuable. It’s just that they’ll be cross-subsidized by others within the dept. However, the dept as a whole will be judged.
2/ No formula is perfect. Without some metric, everyone says they’re important. That is our point about “experts”. Fundamentally we have an asymmetric information problem, which requires a best second-best approach. The goal is to minimize optimization error, realizing it won’t be 0.
Such a system would only work if all faculty in the department were tenured and given similar access to research dollars, departmental resources and upper level students. As the system stands now...the privileged few are like the masters of the plantation living off the work of the indentured servants and slaves who generate most of the tuition dollars but are not treated as equals in the tenure system. The tenured masters are as likely to give up the subsidies they gain from the current system as the southern plantation owners were in the pre-Civil War American South.
Indeed. We can add Albert Einstein to that list, although he was more popular with students. He liked to sit outside when weather permitted and help undergrads with their homework. If they recognized his name they mostly didn't care, which he enjoyed. He was known for unconventional teaching, and liked to encourage students to learn on their own. How do you metric that?
I got familiar with this general concept when I did factory automation and implementation of quality control and quality assurance. One has to be careful that in the rush to measure everything, one doesn't ignore important things that don't fit the measurement system.
You remind me of something Maxwell wrote (and I quoted in my Plant Cell Biology book):
I hope that this book has fulfilled James Clerk Maxwell’s goal as a teacher. He wrote (quoted in Mahon, 2003),
In this class, I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know
the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labour is not thought, and those who have with labour acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle.
Maxwell also wrote,
My duty is to give you the requisite foundation and to allow your thoughts to arrange themselves freely. It is best that every man should be settled in his own mind, and not be led into other men’s ways of thinking under the pretence of studying science. By a careful and diligent study of natural laws I trust that we shall at least escape the dangers of vague and desultory modes of thought and acquire a habit of healthy and vigorous thinking which will enable us to recognise error in all the popular forms in which it appears and to seize and hold fast truth whether it
be old or new.
Claude Shannon also would have probably scored low on this metric. Most of Richard Feynman's teaching was in small classes, although we do have some videos of him teaching to large audiences. However, that was a very rare experience, although I think Feynman really liked performing in front of a big audience.
I raised a lot of money as a PI. But compared to the "lab scientists" and the "field scientists" my "needs" for money are far less. In my current efforts creating prototypes for my startup, it costs very little for me to do the work. I buy a few books, paper, pens, some new computer equipment and subscribe to some stuff in the cloud. It costs almost nothing. It takes time, and thought, but that is about it. I barely travel anymore.
My collaborators, who design and build equipment for laboratory and field use and go to the field to make observations, cost huge sums. I cannot do my work without data, for the most part. I recognize the primacy of data in the scientific enterprise, so I want to accommodate that.
Carl Sagan was a sort of well known science communicator. Many in his discipline said privately he was not much of a scientist. But he engaged in public outreach.
Public outreach is a very valuable function. We should communicate to the public what we do. So I am thinking about how best to do this, if we get some resources.
Also, as I think about Dorian's career, I realize that what he is doing, in University politics and here on Heterodox STEM, fulfills a very valuable "activism" function. We need some voices crying out for rationality in academic governance. And my impression is that Dorian represents one of those voices.
I like to think that if I can fulfill the role I envision for myself in STEM R&D, in experimenting with new R&D structures, that I can contribute to something related to this myself. I think Jordan Peterson, who is exploring new methods of teaching and outreach, is doing something similar. Being an activist/pioneer is valuable, and particularly crucial right now when STEM seems to be in trouble.
Thank you, Dorian and Anup. Quantitative metrics offer an essential foundation for evaluating the value of human work. Without such measures, decisions risk being driven by impressions, superficial visibility, politics, or pressure from committee members. For example, the use of metrics such as the H-index (or similar indices) and teaching evaluations in faculty appointments and promotions illustrates this point. Start with metrics.
The Score Function is very nice idea for ranking Departments. The Dollar Amount is indeed (almost) objective metric...
On subjective note, we can also conduct surveys of professionals in their thirties and forties, whilst asking them one basic question: How useful is your university degree for the current job you hold? I'm sure we'll find many people in specific disciplines acknowledging that their time at college was quite the waste!
I showed this essay to a friend who is a retired faculty member.
They suggested using general accounting methods to show profit and loss of each component of the University. And then as in regular investing, having some very long term investments as part of the portfolio or for advertising purposes or whatever.
The Shils report made a point of saying that appointments should never be based on grant getting, recognising the corruption of the grant system. This proposal just aggravates the problem.
Are you referring to this passage? "No appointments should ever be made in which the chief or major argument is that “outside” funds would accompany the appointment sufficient to relieve the regular budget of the cost of the appointment. Similarly, no appointment should ever be made on the initiative of a person or body from outside the University who offers to defray all expenses, salary, etc. on condition of a particular person’s appointment." I interpreted that as something like, you can't appoint someone to be the Shell Oil professor of Oil stuff because Shell Oil gave you a lot of money to do it.
Or this one? "There are, accordingly, certain matters which when they do not unambiguously and demonstrably bear on the application of the foregoing criteria, must be studiously avoided in discussions about academic appointment. These matters include a candidate’s past and current associations and the objectives of his past or current employer, the sources of the funds which support his research and the uses to which third parties might or have actually put its results independently of his desires. It behooves all members of The University of Chicago to do all they can to ensure that the standards set forth above are strictly observed in discussions and decisions regarding academic appointments." I interpreted that as more like, you can't hold it against someone if they were funded by Monsanto and did great research with the money.
Is there another passage I missed?
More generally, I didn't see anything inconsistent with the proposal, applied to departments, and Shils, applied to individuals. We're proposing a way for the administration to see which fields are vibrant and thriving, not how to hire and promote individual faculty. Since there are an essentially infinite number of possible fields, the administration has to have a way to choose between them, both which to retain and which to start up.
Yes that is the passage. And Shils at the time thought that despite the anxieties about it before it was institutionalized (where people like Conant wanted to fund the person not the project) the system had worked tolerably well. But clearly that is not the case now-- the system produces conformity and grant-seeking rather than original thinking. Bronowski at the time had the right idea-- the disestablishment of science. If thriving means doing what funders dream up as goals, it is not thriving. The whole freedom of science movement was against the "planning of science." As people like Ziman pointed out a few years later, the planners won.
There is another passage from the Shils Report you missed: "the capacity or incapacity of a candidate to attract financial resources or to 'bring them with him' should not be a criterion for appointment." That's much more clearly prohibitive of your plan than the other quotes you mention.
And further from this quote about making judgments of quality based on attracting financial resources: "If this rule is not observed, the University will be in danger of becoming an aggregate of affluent mediocrities."
This is definitely a delicate issue, which is why I think it should be done at a department level, not individual faculty level, and therefore is not inconsistent with Shils. Ultimately the university can't exist for long if it can't balance its budget, and we're seriously off that goal right now. So financial constraints have to be considered at least a little bit.
I don't think that's true. Financial constraints are important, but they cannot determine academic merit. And although the Shils Report is focused on individual appointments, I think the principles must apply to departments as well. For example, when UChicago killed the education department in the 1990s, it certainly used financial constraints to help convince the social sciences faculty to go along. But I think they attacked the education department based on academic merit, not based on the money obtained in research grants.
Seeing how "education departments" nationwide are basically pretty toxic, and seemed to have spawned a lot of this rot that we are dealing with, that might have been a judicious thing to do.
I see your point on department level decision making...but the reality is that you CANNOT use the method at that level but ignore the inequities the current system creates within departments. Any institution that tries will find itself losing one class action suit after another brought by the contingent faculty who have been discriminated against in the current system. There is an alternative of course. Tuition dollars could be spent ONLY based on teaching related activities and staff and require scholarly activity to be purely soft money funded with NO status or hard money from the university to support such research.
This metric makes grant-getting the measure of research value. Theorists would be ditched. Also, there are social sciencey fields in health and education that are good for grants, but bad for scholarly quality. And if number of students is the criterion, we end up with easy courses that sound vocational (but usually aren't really because they're too easy) and all A's (we're past mere grade inflation).
The Trustees of Indiana University just approved a major in Public Relations, in the Media School. It will have plenty of majors. We are down to fewer than 5 French majors per year.
See also https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/well-just-have-to-drop-the-sociology
What is the alternative in a world of a/ asymmetric information and b/ resource constraints?
It has long been common practice for Deans to hire a few outside professors in the field write a report on the department. Subjective measures, based on quant inputs and non-quant, work better. Ask grad students why they turned the dept. down. Look at grade distributions. Look at grants and publications.
An uninspected assumption here is that all sources of money should be treated equally. What has gotten Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT (the Ivies) in trouble is certainly not access to money. In the past, a problem name was Epstein. University administrations have historically tied themselves into pretzels to get money from anywhere. Cutbacks are periodic.
When times get tough financially, smart operators will nose in because their funds buy more influence bang for their buck and standards get lowered. (e.g. corporations selling products from candy and infant formula, to drugs, alchohol, gas, oil and coal; domestic wealthy parties pushing ideology like transhumanism, gender woo; foreign nations pushing political indoctrinations). In the fossil fuel area, Stanford takes a prize. Mark Z. Jacobson, who showed his loyalty by suing Clack and PNAS for defamation because they criticized his paper has never gotten a grant from any other source than oil. (And you don't really think he paid for those attorney's costs himself, do you?)
What corrupted the Ivies that caused such backlash and the Executive branch to use grant funding shutdowns and termination of grants as a club to beat them with is Qatar's billions. There are other sources of funds, and you can bet that Qatar has spent its billions on creating cutouts now that it's being looked at. I doubt very much if the accounting for Qatari money to American universities is complete.
I like this formula. I think it is fair on its face. I think it would be fair and right if we did not have a problem with money that corrupts the university and its purpose. However, there is such money and influence buying. So there also has to be an accounting of source of funds when shutting down departments. Properly done, this will result in losing funding sources. If we are to look at this strictly from a fiscal viewpoint, universities are faced with deciding whether to do nothing, and suffer the withering of government supported research, or cut off the corrupting sources. Those corrupting sources support some of the most vocal and politically activist members of the academy, which gives them excessive power.
A major problem today is that universities, public and private, are political indoctrination centers that have foreign power tentacles in them. That indoctrination runs a gamut that includes professors who teach overthrow of this country, and revolution under the banner of "academic freedom". This latter includes bizarre recasting of islam as oppressed in a Marxist class struggle. DEI has also come from that pretzelized revision of history.
These matters have to be faced head on and named. It is easy to name "Mars Corporation" and come up with a relationship. I use that example because in grad school I had some time with the nutrition department and Mars supported research into human breast milk. The university had a kind of buffer system for that money. It has long been de rigeur to name DoD, and defense contractors, although much of that originates from those departments that teach revolution. STEM department professors are probably aware of this issue. But beyond that?
Who names James (Jennifer) Pritzker and looks carefully at where he and his family put their money, how and why? Who names Martin (Martine) Rothblatt the king-queen of transhumanist woo? Who names the oil companies and their cutouts? Who names Qatar and their cutouts? How much of this is even transparent to discover?
When thinking about this, remember that it is failure to name and face the real problems within that has landed US universities in this mess. The mood of the country is not kind towards the indoctrination factories at universities. Those are centered in the humanities, not STEM. STEM cannot continue to sit on its behind and say, "Not our department," while the problem in humanities tears down the academy.
"This boils down to arguing that the experts in a field know that their own field is extremely important, but they can’t convince others of this (neither students nor funders). It is not surprising that experts in a field would argue that their field is important, whether it actually is or not, so their opinion can’t be taken at face value without external evidence."
I don't find this a very persuasive argument, at least when it comes to funders. Many humanities fields simply don't need research funding at all. I literally can do all my research without receiving any grant money - so why should I ask anyone to fund me to do it? And why should my field be penalized for being cheap to fund?
Now, admittedly, I do need my salary, which is paid by my university - but this is where the absence of costs comes in. Grants don't usually (as I understand it) pay the primary grant-holder's salary either - it pays for other things, perhaps the salary of research assistants, perhaps equipment, lab expenses etc. Weighing up the money brought in, but not the expenses generated by that money, once again is going to weight in favor of expensive fields and against cheap fields.
I do think it is important to show that we can attract students - but I doubt that building raw grant-getting into the metric is going to do anything except encourage people to focus on the most expensive fields and sub-fields possible. And I'm not sure that is healthy either for universities as institutions or for the research likely to be generated.
I see teaching as an essential role of faculty (not a common view!). This metric values teaching in a way that is often not the case in the physical sciences, where research and research funding tend to get all the attention. So I see the metric as actually promoting the importance of teaching.
We're clearly going to continue to have humanities, and should. If there aren't any research funds across the humanities, then the metric would simply tell you which departments are attracting and engaging students. If you had to close a couple humanities departments, it seems to me that the best to close would be ones that interest very few students. So I think the metric would be effective in that limit.
If you see this as a way of measuring physical sciences departments against other physical sciences, and measuring humanities departments against other humanities departments, then yes, this metric might make sense (though I would still be concerned that science departments which simply do less expensive kinds of research would be disadvantaged against those which do more expensive kinds of research).
But my worry would be that a single metric would be applied across the board, with science departments would be measured against humanities departments, and the latter automatically disadvantaged by the inability (not to mention lack of need!) to attract research funds. To be honest, unless it was explicit that one shouldn't do it in that way (and I didn't see anything about that in your proposal), then my experience is that university administrators prefer to apply one metric across the board than employ multiple ones.
I view teaching and learning, writ large, as the *only* goal of a university. Research is nothing more than learning things that nobody else knows (yet). That’s why I believe that credit hours per faculty are the best measure of utility, assuming that credit hours cover sufficiently much teaching and learning. If grad students are enrolled full-time in independent study courses, it’s straightforward to measure average credit hours per faculty in a department. They can be weighted by course level if desired, using the course number (100-level, 200-level, etc.) to do so automatically. This information may well be already readily available — it is at my institution.
This might be fine for some institutions, or even the vast majority of institutions. However, R&D has a place in a modern society. Currently R&D wherever we look is in trouble.
Research and development is struggling in academia, in government, in private industry and nonprofits. It is not near as productive as it once was. It is overburdened with bureaucracy and rules and administration and leeches. It is inefficient. Standards have dropped.
Do I think that one of the main places where R&D is done, academia, should be abandoned? No, I do not think that is a great idea. For one thing, who else would take on the role of training the next generation of investigators and innovators? If universities do not at least share some of that role, then we will have a problem.
However, I have no issues with 90 or 95% of all colleges and universities abandoning research altogether. Many are well on their way to doing that now, effectively.
I agree that research (but not R&D) is a fundamental function of a university. Development should be the job of an outside organization — commercial or nonprofit — that can be run far more efficiently than a university.
However, I know of very few faculty who are both attracting significant research funding and teaching few students. Often, such faculty are in a non-teaching program, such as a university-run institute. If it’s a non-teaching program, money is a reasonable way to evaluate it — the number of enrolled students is (obviously) irrelevant. But for an academic department, average teaching load across all levels works very well.
The R&D pipeline has many stages. Where does R stop and D begin? This is not particularly clear. What is pure research and what is applied research? These are all complicated and ambiguous questions with no easy answers. These divisions are sort of arbitrary, anyway.
Different institutions organize themselves differently. That is fine. No one really knows the best way to organize these entities, if truth be told.
R&D training encompasses classroom instruction, individual and team efforts, mentorships and apprenticeships. Eventually, probably some of this training and education will involve computer-aided instruction and artificial intelligence agents and similar innovations. Some of this can be at a college or university or even a community college or trade school or grade school. Some of this can be in other R&D organizations.
My only point is that academia has long played a role in R&D (maybe more R than D, depending on the project and the institution, but it varies and is a matter of definition). I think it still could play a role.
If academia is to be completely barred from this role, then we will have to re-examine how we operate. It could be done, but will involve some turmoil.
However, we are going through turmoil now, and there will be much more chaos to come, I am pretty sure.
Then you should like the net revenue or profit revision to our formula suggested by one of the comments above.
That would certainly help. But you also need to incorporate the other proposal, suggested by Prof. Abbott above - that like departments should only be compared with each other (humanities with humanities, science with science etc.) - and perhaps the humanities should only be assessed on teaching, not on grants at all?
Otherwise you still have the problem that a department like mine, which needs literally no grants or revenue for us to do research, would be penalized by any department with any net revenue, however small, and so we would be compelled to apply for unnecessary grants in order to compete. I don't think that incentivizing departments to apply for grants they don't need is really in the spirit of your proposal!
Hmm.. seems to me some fields will have grants that pay for a whole lab and a dozen students and postdocs or more and others will just pay for a couple of students (think big biology lab vs math research)....not sure that's the best way to count impact?
I want to thank the authors for proposing this system for quantifying the value of academic departments to the university. Using such a system, however, also needs must apply to the contributions made by individual faculty to a department. I did this when serving in a contingent faculty position at Tulane University. With essentially the same formula as proposed here, I demonstrated that my contributions to the university financially equaled those of the most well funded researcher in the department. (I personally accounted for HALF the FTE's of the entire program.) I used this calculation to argue that my position deserved to be tenure track allowing me to author grant applications in my own name, have my own research program, etc. Sadly, the tenured faculty in the department saw this concept as a threat to their own outsourcing of the vast majority of teaching to contingent faculty who, if treated based on the MERIT of their contributions to the university should actually be the tenured faculty while many of those holding tenure simply did not contribute enough in the way of research dollars to make up for the paucity of teaching they conducted. As in Apartheid South Africa, maintaining the academic caste system was more important to the tenured faculty than strengthening the research and teaching portfolio of their own department and institution.
I agree that such a metric should be used in making these financial decisions...further....the tenure status of currently tenured and non-tenure track faculty needs must be on the table with underperforming tenured faculty losing tenure and immediate granting of tenure (and all the rights and resources that go with it) to those contingent faculty whose merit has thus far not been realized. Failure to do so is to admit that DEI is hardly the only area in which academia has long since abandoned any pretense of making decisions based on or rewarding merit. Think the tenured faculty in academia are going to go for this? They will see their institutions closed down sooner I fear.
If they do not like you, they will ALWAYS find some reason to get rid of you. I raised IMMENSE sums (most of which was stolen). I produced technology worth billions, repeatedly (still in everyday use throughout the US and beyond). It did not matter. They hated me anyway. They forged my signature on legal contracts. I was physically threatened. And on and on and on.
It is all a pretense, basically.
Do not think you are unique. Did anyone plausibly threaten to kill you? Did they spend tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits in an attempt to destroy you? If not, then consider yourself lucky.
I would hardly say I am unique. Have I been threatened with murder? Does people keying your vehicle on campus and in your own driveway and throwing rocks through your window while engaging in a campaign of black listing years after the fact count as precursors?
Yeah, I would say you were well on the path towards a really negative experience. Welcome to the club. Of course, most people deny that this nonsense happens. I can confirm that it does. You are just another unfortunate example.
I have lots of stories about this kind of stuff from my colleagues, friends and myself. It is ugly, that is for sure.
That is the reason that I think we are in desperate need of reform in STEM. I am not sure about your experiences, but all of those that I know of happened BEFORE woke ideology made an appearance. All that wokeness did was give bullies more tools and weapons to attack those they did not like for various reasons.
I know of some FFRDCs where after wokeness appeared, were dedicated to just infighting with this new array of weapons. No one did any work anymore. It was all unimportant compared to destroying their colleagues.
Nice.
Of course, the taxpayer was paying for all this foolishness. And has been paying for it, for years, and years.
Indeed...these problems go back long before wokeism and DEI. Those fads merely added more tools and empowered even more hostile groups based bullying relative to the class based bullying that existed before. While not everyone participated in the bad behavior...the vast majority have been willing to stand by and allow it to happen to those around them while saying and doing nothing to stop it. As such, they are morally, and in some ways legally, just as culpable as the bad actors given that universities are very much self governed by faculty. That means most of the professoriate really should be dismissed for cause given the current state of academia.
I agree. I personally observed the first signs more than 40 years ago when my best friend had obtained an LLD with the highest possible honors from Oxford University (in law). He was told by the deans of every major law school in Canada at the time (about 30 if I recall), that the rules had changed in Canada. Effectively there were to never be any more male faculty or students in law schools in Canada, from then on, forever. Period. Nothing could be done about it. That was just the way it was. To be male was to be a pariah who was beneath contempt, in their view. And that was more than 40 years ago.
Of course, these deans were not completely correct, but they were correct in large measure, I am afraid.
The situation has only become worse since then, I am afraid.
As I have previously mentioned, my main mentor has advocated that we dismiss 99% of the administrative staff in academia, at a bare minimum. He also strongly contends that more than 95% of the current faculty in academia have no business being in their current positions.
That might be a bit high, but I tend to agree a bit.
Jordan Peterson and Peter Boghossian and others have opined that the current academic system in the US is badly broken and has to be burned to the ground. I am not sure that we need to go that far, but reforms are needed, clearly. Things cannot continue in their present condition.
We are in trouble; big trouble.
Agreed. As a graduate student in the 90's I served on our university's diversity committee (it had a more pompous name but that was it's purpose). I remember a white male English faculty member, nearly drowning in liberal white guilt, who complained that too many white men in his generation (baby boomer) had been given faculty positions so his response was that he would never vote to hire another white male. As one of the people who would be denied fair treatment under his guilt ridden action, I asked how hiring too few women and people of color in his generation (the sin) should be paid for by discriminating against the graduates of my generation who did NOT commit or benefit from the "crime" he felt should be rectified. I suggested that if too many white males had been hired in his generation he should resign his position to a woman or person of color from his own generation. Of course, he did no seem to understand how my suggestion would be fair or practical! Clearly reform is needed...and clearly internal reform is NOT going to be possible. Those who criticize the government imposed approach need to demonstrate examples of academic institutions have corrected their own course. Given the lack of such evidence...they really have little argument with which to oppose action by the state, risky and unpleasant as that might be. As with the end of chattel slavery in the US after the Civil War...sometimes the state must act to correct class level societal dysfunctions.
I like this approach, but there’s perhaps a simpler way: just compute the average number of credit hours taught per faculty per year. This works well if grad students are required to be enrolled full-time using independent study credits, as they are at many universities. One can weight credit hours differently based on level (intro, upper division, graduate, independent study) to account for the (perhaps) greater value of more advanced studies. Since grants pay for equipment and personnel, this approach automatically factors in the cost of doing research: a large grant that goes primarily for equipment and professional (technical) support may not support a lot of grad students. The only thing it *doesn’t* cover is education for non-enrolled “students” on the grant, like postdocs. This could easily be handled by giving some number of credit hours per postdoc.
The advantage to this approach is that it uses information that’s already readily available in any university: course enrollment numbers. It also has the advantage that a faculty member who does research but doesn’t pass it on to students at *any* level is penalized somewhat, as should be the case. It’s fine to do research and primarily teach grad students, but it’s not OK to just do research and not educate *anyone*. If you want to do that, do it at a company or non-profit.
Western Civilization has been banned for decades by feminists, and now scientists and accountants are developing formulas to rule it out. No more place for Classics (anyway, white people), or history of the West (mainly men), philosophy, English, anthropology, etc. etc. Now I grant you that the humanities and social sciences have been so corrupted by woke grievance theories that no respectable university (are there any left?) would house them. But no institution worthy of the name university could do without (at least some of) these subjects done in the spirit of serious scholarship. Yes, money is limited, and maybe more lucrative fields have to carry some of the less lucrative ones. Maybe the more expensive fields need to be spread across universities. But, folks, try to remember what a university is supposed to be.
When I was an undergrad at Harvard I took "Rome of Augustus" from Professor Tarrant. It packed Sanders Theater, which has a capacity of 1,000. The humanities can generate huge enrollments when they focus on big, interesting topics.
I personally wanted extreme concentration in the extremely hard sciences and mathematics. And almost nothing else. And that is what I sought out. Exclusively.
If that is not a university, then fine. Call it something else. Let all the ..."others" have their ...whatever institutes where they can celebrate...stuff.
I was going to be far more blunt about it, but I am trying not to ruffle too many feathers.
This is sort of similar to what Jonathan Haidt has suggested. That is, you can have two types of schools; (a) those that seek truth and (b) those that are engaged in social justice and activism.
Take your pick.
This is not that different than previous differences between religious and secular institutions, or between men's and women's colleges, or trade schools and technical schools and business schools, etc.
Social justice is a sort of a religion, which many endorse and want to pursue and promote. Fine. Go, pursue it.
I personally agree with one of the previous essays here on Heterodox STEM. STEM is a perfectly good way, and perhaps the only real way, to implement needed social changes. The rest of academia...well, what can I say?
When I went to college and then began teaching at university, everyone held the Enlightenment education ideal of seeking the truth through evidence and debate. That was true of sociology and anthropology, philosophy and history. In over fifty years of university research and teaching, I strove to advance truth to the best of my ability and within the limits of my discipline. The shift in the social sciences and humanities away from truth to social justice and activism, inspired by new grievance fields, was and is deeply destructive and ruined "higher education," particularly outside of STEM (which was somewhat contaminated and undermined). But the world and human existence is much broader than STEM, and ignorance of that broader world makes a more sterile existence.
You can try to justify your field if you like. Sure, physics and mathematics and chemistry and biology are "sterile".
Why is there no Nobel Prize in anthropology?
We have rumors about why there is not one in mathematics. However after more than a century of efforts we have the Abel Prize. We might get more; we will see.
I went to college in the 70s, and that is what I wanted. You and others can want something else. Fine, I have no problem with people seeking out what they want. Where I was an undergraduate, we called anthropology and history and philosophy and sociology majors, "artsy-fartsies". Everyone knew that the graduates would never be able to get any job, anywhere, except maybe serving coffee or cleaning toilets.
My own father strongly advised me against taking courses in "any of that crap". I did get exposed to years of philosophy while studying French, but I never understood any of it, to be honest.
The difficulty with your field, which probably began while you were still active, is that it was infected with a rot, which has destroyed most of the mainstream universities. The whole point of Heterodox STEM is to try to combat that rot before it destroys STEM as well, as near as I can understand.
We make a stand, or we lose all of STEM. I know many WANT this outcome. I personally do not. I think we will lose the core of what makes us vital as a culture.
Other fields on the periphery, which are infected to varying degrees, need to deal with their issues. I am far more interested in making sure that the hardest of the fields in STEM do not fall, which they very well might if we do not push back, hard.
Many other fields see hardcore STEM struggling valiantly for its survival. Some cheer on its potential demise. Others want them to save the Humanities and soft sciences. Well, sorry. I follow the precept that is common in airline travel; "put your own oxygen mask on first".
Save yourself first. Then you might be in a position to help save others. If we do not rescue the heart of STEM, then all is lost. Period.
Do I think psychology and sociology and political science and economics and history and philosophy have a role to play in some institutions in the future? Of course they do. That should be obvious.
However, we cannot stop our efforts to bolster hardcore STEM, FIRST, or else it will be gone. The other fields will just drag us under the water. Do not forget; those other fields were the fields that unleashed this nightmare on us in the first place.
We might not survive. If we are going to salvage STEM, we need a concentrated and prolonged effort on many fronts. We can worry about other trivialities later.
The ancillary infected fields will suffer. That is unfortunate, but they brought this on themselves and are desperately trying to destroy everything else, including all of Western Civilization.