Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, says he doubts any university would give him a job today. Higgs says universities wouldn't consider him productive enough — though the papers he published were important and of high quality, he didn't have the volume necessary for serious consideration in today's competitive employment environment. 'He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.' His comments highlight the absurdity of the current system for finding researchers in academia. How many researchers of Higgs' caliber have been turned down for similar reasons?"

Comments

kind of ruins the point.......

[phantomfive]

That ruins tenure.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[segedunum]

The publishing frequency is not really the determining factor.

I very much think you will find it is these days. The research that is being done today is mostly junk, cheap industrial research and that's based on keeping the grants and the patent applications flowing. If you aren't part of the team who buys into that and wants to do something that takes time and effort you're not going to fit in.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[serviscope_minor]

I very much think you will find it is these days.

RCUK have thankfully acred to reverse this. To compete in university rankings in the UK you submit at most 4 papers from the past 5 years. No others count.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[codegen]

I very much think you will find it is these days.

RCUK have thankfully acred to reverse this. To compete in university rankings in the UK you submit at most 4 papers from the past 5 years. No others count.

I don't think you have that right. In Canada when we submit grant proposals to NSERC we can only include at most 4 papers from the past 5 years as well, but that is the copies for the referees to read. Your CV that you submit lists all of your publications in the last 6 years, and the referees certainly look at those. From discussions with my colleagues in the UK, it is the same over there. You submit a few best papers for the referee to read, but your CV better have listed all of the papers in the review period or you are sunk.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[Antique Geekmeister]

4 scientific papers in 5 years is a tremendous rate for more physical sciences. It's possible, in my observation, to have have a few basically "filler" papers in progress while the genuinely interesting or illuminating paper is published. But effectively publishing one significant paper a year, accepted to reputable journals, is a tremendous amount of work in most fields such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Social science papers can publish analyses of analyses of analyses as "new" publichations, and have been doing so for decades. But in sciences where you have to actually collect raw data, it's very frequent publication.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[PopeRatzo]

Universities don't care about educating students

Universities cannot care because they are not human beings, they are institutions.

It's up to the teachers to care. This is my belief as a lifelong teacher in higher education.

I don't mean to demean your point, but anthropomorphization of institutions, corporations, governments, etc has made it easier for us to get into the situation we're in today, at least in developed nations.

In the US, institutions are supposed to care, corporations have human rights and religious beliefs and can be involved in elections and government is ascribed all manner of human attributes. It cheapens the human attributes and it gives non-human entities an exalted status they do not deserve.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[TheRaven64]

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the ranking of UK universities. The REF replaces the older Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which happened every four years. The last RAE was 4 years ago, and the current REF is just finishing. Established academics have to submit 4 research outputs since the last RAE / REF. These are usually papers, but can be other things (systems you've built and so on).

The REF is a really big deal in UK universities, because it directly impacts the availability of research grants. The CVs of individual researchers are taken into account, but the REF / RAE score of the department is the biggest factor. If you have 4 papers in top-tier publications (conferences or journals, depending on your field), then it's very easy to get hired in the run up to the REF, because a lot of second tier universities are looking to find people who will bump them up the rankings.

Conversely, if you don't have the 4 publications (or other impressive things), then it's very hard to get a tenured position, but if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher: part of the point of publicly funded research is that the results are communicated to the public, and if you're not doing this then you're not keeping up your end of the deal.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[MLCT]

Almost everything you say is valid, but:

if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher

That is *exactly* what Peter Higgs is complaining about. His point is that great ideas don't come about once a year - and that if he was 40 years younger he wouldn't get positions because he wouldn't be fulfilling the quota - and thus great ideas are being lost in this treadmill.

Re:kind of ruins the point.......

[Antique Geekmeister]

Until the fifth year, at which time they'd better have the papers ready for the performance review and any discussion of tenure track. So I'm afraid that's not a really meaningful exemption unless that professor has no plans for tenure track. It can even be worse. I've seen very gifted professors rejected for tenure, not because their research was not meaningful, but because their teaching was _so good_ that it frightened the existing staff into thinking that they'd have more expected of them. In one case, an intern at work asked me to help. I read the research papers: they were solid work, and far more clear than most other papers I'd seen in the field. Helping was politically awkward, and disenchanted me with a great deal of tenure evaluations. I do believe I did manage to help: partly by discussing the technical implications of the work with several of his reviewers, and partly by introducing him socially to the secretaries of the most recalcitrant professors. It's _amazing_ how much those secretaries control the information flow to and from their employers.

The apportionment of credit for academic papers is rife with both confusion and abuse. The need for citable publications is so large that people who had no meaningful involvement with a project are being listed as authors, to protect their academic careers. Other students or technical staff who collaborate extensively are ignored in favor of tenure track staff, to help reach their required number of publications. I'm afraid that the result is often "co-authors" who have no idea what the original research established, or how. I've even seen listing someone as a "co-author" used to prevent them from publicly disagreeing with the results. The "co-author" status is, I'm afraid, may never have been a reasonable way to measure research publication due to frequent abuses.

Money, Money, Money.....

[segedunum]

That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing.

I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.

Re:Money, Money, Money.....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing.

I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.

I think some research needs to be done and a paper written about that phenomena.

Re:Money, Money, Money.....

[DavidClarkeHR]

That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing. I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.

No. There is a distinct difference between poor quality science and bad science.

There's also the public tendency to reduce everything to a simple answer, when it's rarely simple.

Re:Money, Money, Money.....

[sandytaru]

welllllll if we actually paid university scientists directly for research like R&D departments do instead of making them beg for grants on a yearly basis, we might not have this problem.

"Here is your lab, here is your staff. We will pay for your lab and your staff for the next five years, plus materials and equipment and a small petty cash budget for operations (computers, pizza parties.) You have five years to produce a quality research paper that is accepted for publication on the first shot. No paper, no promotion. No science happens, you're back to teaching undergrads for the rest of your career. Go!"

I can confirm that

[gweihir]

Doing actually good research takes a lot of time. It is a sure way to not get tenure or to not even being considered for a position in the first place. It starts with your PhD taking longer than the ones of the streamlined cretins that never will have a deep though in their whole career. Academic research is pretty much dead at this time, what is being done is industrial research on the cheap and often with very low quality.

Re:I can confirm that

[pikine]

Let's suppose you're the fund manager and you want to maximize impact of your dollars. But there are too many researchers applying for grant. What do you do? You divest rather than invest, and hope that one of the projects will churn out useful outcome.

If you want to focus your money for deeper impact, people will definitely accuse you of favoritism. It is hard to prove innocent because research is, intrinsically, a very specialized craft, and only very specialized people understand the qualifications. Sometimes experts don't agree on the qualifications either. Once you are accused and unable to prove yourself innocent, your career as a fund manager would be ruined due to academic misconduct allegations. If you distribute your funds fairly and squarely, people can still accuse you of favoritism, but at least you have plausible deniability.

From a researcher's point of view, research is really about begging money to do things you want to do. Or if you end up not doing what you want to do, simply begging money. Historically only the nobles have the time and money to do research. This is what I always tell my friends:

• If you have no money and no time, make time.
• Now you have time but still no money. Make money with your time.
• Now you have money but no time. Make money smarter so you save time.
• Now you have both time and money, do whatever you want.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[gweihir]

You completely misunderstand what this is about. The problem is that productivity is measured in number of publications, regardless of quality of said publications. Anything that can scape by the reviewers, often in a 3rd or 4th attempt counts. The guy that gets all his stuff published on the first attempt, because it is actually good, does not stand a chance, because he will never get the numbers.

The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.

Re:Me, for one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. I'm a certified awesome bad ass ninja genius. But egghead academics think i should write papers and grant proposals instead of saving religious artifacts from nazis that will try to use them to win the war.

The double standard

[timholman]

Go to most science and engineering departments in the U.S. today, and you'll find senior faculty members sitting on P&T (promotion and tenure) committees who would never qualify for tenure if they were judged by the same standards they apply to junior faculty. You'll meet assistant professors who've published more journal papers in two years (and brought in more research money) than a full professor has done in his entire career, while being told it isn't good enough by the P&T committee.

That double standard is not lost on the younger faculty, nor does not make them happy. To add insult to injury, the younger faculty generally tend to be better teachers, as well. It is a topsy-turvy world where the people in charge are often the least qualified of anyone there.

Re:The double standard

[Anubis IV]

Quite correct, but you're missing the obvious. In the case of your senior manager, their decision to hire a more qualified person means that there should be an improvement from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect things to keep improving as time goes on. In the case of a full professor hiring someone who can churn out more papers of a lower quality, we're actually pretty much assured that we'll see a step backwards from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect that the quality of research will decline as time goes on.

Old judging the young is not the problem, nor is the problem that a different standard is being applied. The problem is that a worse standard is being applied.

This

[Tyler Durden]

Making sure someone is constantly busy in any intellectual field is a sure-fire way to kill any hope of creativity. The best ideas often come from moments when you can just clear your head completely or just play around with ideas on your own without worrying about your productivity. Modern society seems to have forgotten this.

Re:This

[ColdWetDog]

No, it's not forgotten. Just not emphasized. There is nothing in the Big Book of How Science Is Done that says 'progress' has to happen. There are fits and starts. TImes when people seem to be making headway in some fields, not in others. Times when research is well funded and times when it isn't. Times when society needs to be introspective and re evaluate what it's doing and how it's doing it (perhaps now).

There is no single best way here. At present, there is a whole bunch of crap science being done, but there are also pretty impressive gains in knowledge on a regular basis. I certainly can't keep up with anything other than a tiny fraction of it. Higgs is probably right that he could not get a University job at present, mayhaps he could get some rich billionaire to keep him in funds for a couple of decades (the usual way science was funded before big government - got us into the Industrial Revolution).

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[Grishnakh]

This reminds me of my Health class in high school. At the end of the semester (it was a 1-semester class only, usually the other semester was used for driver's ed), the crazy old teacher gave everyone a grade on their notebook. His method for determining the quality of your notebook? The number of pages in it. I got a bad grade, because I wrote small and had few pages, even though I wrote down everything important. The guy next to me had giant writing, and filled up a bunch of pages just writing "Health is cool!" and got a high grade.

You think Universities would be more intelligent in their rating of professors than some idiotic old gym coach, but apparently not.

Science is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not science research. The problem and one which can be solved is that we have a pyramid in the research community. Thousands of low wage postdocs doing the grunt work for a small number of people that have tenure. And very very few of those postdocs if anything make it into a position when they gain access to tenure. And if that's the case they have to wait decades to get it. Now think to how things were 100-80-70 years ago. The pyramid was much less skewed, and young post docs actually had a good chance of gaining tenure after a normal length of time.
The corrective measure is not to increase producing thousands of insignificant research papers, but actually limit those that can enter into a science career. Make the exams very difficult, pick the brightest of the brightest. Give postdocs positions to them. Of course you must pay them accordingly so no more slave wages. And then within 10-15 years grant them tenure. And for God's sake send them into retirement when they get to 65-70 years of age.
Can politics accept such a situation ? The answer is left to the reader. :)

Re:Science is not the problem

[ceoyoyo]

Tenure historically was important for arts and philosophy. The idea was that you could say things that were unpopular in safety because nobody could fire you.

Research professors don't really have terribly meaningful tenure anyway, because if you aren't performing you can't get grants and/or the university may deny you students. Either of those essentially means you're washed up.

Can We Compete Against Them?

[mx b]

I've often wondered lately if there are enough dissatisfied PhD-dropouts and overworked junior professors that if we got together, we could start a new college and directly compete against these attitudes (both the problems with professors and research, and the problems with the student curriculum and lack of teaching enthusiasm in general). I am quite seriously interested in doing exactly this if I could build up a coalition and some funding.

Re:Can We Compete Against Them?

[IndustrialComplex]

Good luck with your accreditations. I'd be willing to bet that there are a few 'pedigree' requirements with regard to your faculty. That said, if you make enough news with your 'alternative' you might be able to get people to not care.

Unfortunately for someone like me, any contract I work for the government usually has strict degree/education standards.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[joe_frisch]

This is a result of attempts to use "quantifiable metrics". The original idea is great: By having a numerical measurement of a workers productivity (whether that worker is a floor-sweeper or a physicist), we reduce the effects of bias, favoritism, etc in evaluating employees. The problem though is that it is impossible to produce a good metric for many types of work. When a poor metric is used, we strongly motivate workers to maximize that metric, not their "real" productivity. There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.

In my opinion, where I work the most productive scientists are not the ones who publish the largest number of papers.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[prefec2]

The problem is that the quality of a scientist is measured by the number of publications and the reputation of the journal or conference they published their work. However, both values do not measure quality. The first is just quantity and can be achieved by spreading results over different publications, which lowers the overall quality of every single publication. The second tries to correct this, by factoring in that good publication channels do quality checks with peer review. However, that fails when you look into peer review process. While in general it is a good idea, there are several problems with this. First, the review may miss the point of the publication especially when it is a new thought. Second, reviewer are more convinced of work which they know the author or the professor also listed in the author section. And third, even with good reviews, the program committee favors known and liked scientists over unknown scientists. So there is a lot of bias at work. Finally, the reputation of a publication channel is determined by its impact in the past. Even if it is crap right now, it is rated higher than a good publication just because of the history.

Beside these problems, the present system limits science and its potential outcome as scientists optimize for it. An alternative would allow for more think time. However, this is not possible with the present system. He does not propose a new one, but we should start thinking about a new one or lose our ability to innovate and increase our understanding of the universe.

Honest Research

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a tenured full professor at a mid-to-leading rank European
university. I work each day for several hours on ideas I consider interesting, publishing
if the results seem useful. I also take seriously my teaching duties (mostly low level courses that no one else wants).
However I refuse to play office politics or participate in advancing the careers of others (like writing articles for them). And while this excludes any possibility of promotion it is a fair trade-off for having the peace and tranquility required to research difficult ideas.
So problems that Higgs mentions exist also at lower levels. Either you play their game or else you get shunted out.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[sjames]

That is Higgs actual point. Because of the demanded quantity, it is not actually possible to do quality work anymore. He believes that under today's conditions, he would not have had his key insight at all. In fact, he doesn't believe that anyone else is likely to have such an insight under today's conditions.

Further, he states flat out that if he wasn't widely favored to win a Nobel Prize, he would have been fired. by the '80s. In other words, his employer was more interested in his celebrity than with his actual work.

Don't forget failure

[kencurry]

Having the freedom to fail, then to be able to analyze and think about why you failed is one of the most important methods of learning. When you succeed , you really don't spend the time to analyze why, but you sure do when you fail.

In today's world, the importance of failure is not understood.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[sjames]

How about forgetting the metrics obsession and focusing on actually assessing worth. Yeah, yeah, it's so hard to do that waaaaaah. The obsession with metrics is doing a lot of harm all over.

In particular, the quantity over quality which exists primarily because any lazy fool can count quantity but quality takes actual effort to assess.

Which is better, 100 metric tones of cholera infested dirty water or 1 kg of antibiotic? More and more, employers are preferring the dirty, infectious water.

Idiocy

[warrax_666]

And regardless, how idiotic is it to grade someone based on the number of pages of their notes anyway?

It's unbelievably idiotic and absurd... until you consider human nature.

The people above you are incompetent (cf. "Peter Principle") and will latch onto anything that they can use to judge you to avoid appearing as the incompetents that they are. Even when it makes no sense from an analytical point of view. We humans seem to be hardwired to avoid (being perceived to be, or actually) being wrong. (The book's also pretty good!)

Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).

Who does the research?

[Kwyj1b0]

The system isn't designed to support outliers - no one in the auto industry complains that they are having Ph.Ds design cars using CFD simulations and a lot of technical know-how. Would Ford have been able to start an automotive company and be challenging today? These moments of individual brilliance changing a field are few and far between. The entire system is geared towards improving the average, rather than gambling on the outliers.

Another differences is that the nature of research has changed as well (at least in the engineering side). Even a brilliant researcher requires massive computational facilities, expensive equipment, and a lot of programming. So they hire grad students and supervise them, which needs grant money. To convince your sponsors that they are getting their moneys worth, you need a lot of publications. If the sponsorship mentality is - "see what you can do, we aren't going to be looking at publication count", things would be quite different. But can you imagine the outrage if an academic gets a one million dollar grant and turns out one paper on the effect of honey-bees on rainfall or some such topic? The NSF is being held up as a political punching bag. Everyone is in a CYA mentality. Not the "try your best, and if it doesn't work we will still stand behind you because we want to cultivate an environment of innovation." mode.

The system that really leads to low quality

[davidannis]

You take a young researcher who has put 7 years into a PhD and 3 into a postdoc, have them write grants that on average grant 20% of applicants funding, and give them a mandate to publish or kiss their career goodbye. They can't take a chance on looking at a hypothesis that has a small chance of revolutionizing their field, because if it doesn't pan out they are screwed. So, the researcher chooses a hypothesis that is safe. They spend a year or two gathering data at great expense. Now, if that data comes back and is ambiguous there is a strong incentive to use the data set to test other hypotheses. The problem with that is eventually you find a hypothesis that gives significant results just by chance. Some of the solutions are to:

1. 1. Evaluate based on more than just publications. Look at what the scientist did, why they did it, and how they did it.
2. 2. Get journals to publish negative results. That way if you test a theory and find it is wrong, it still counts as successful research.
3. 3. Set aside 20% of research funds to fund replication of published studies. Right now there is no downside to publishing a result that is likely spurious because nobody is likely to figure it out for decades. If a researcher knows that there is a 20% chance his study will be replicated the following year it will make him very careful to do things right. Make reproducing experiments count toward career progression.
4. 4. Include grant applications with the papers that they produce. That way readers can see if the hypothesis tested in the paper is actually the one that the scientist set out to test. If not, there should be information on why and on how many alternate hypotheses were tested.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[jafac]

Only a complete moron would judge quality based on quantity.

. . . or an MBA.

Re:Impact factor metrics

[maxwell demon]

Of course, if e.g. all you have ever published are four papers, your H index cannot go above four, even if those four papers are the best papers ever and each of them gets more citations than all the other papers in the world combined.

Also, the H index by its very nature gives advantage to people doing lots of collaborations, because that increases the chance that your collaborators (or people associated with them) will cite your articles (in part because some of them are also their articles, and in part because they are simply more likely to recognize your papers because they know you). Of course doing lots of collaborations doesn't imply you're a better scientist. It just means you're better at networking.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[sjames]

If theoretical physicists are re-purposed as fundraisers by age 51, then that just enlarges on his point.

Re:But what system does he suggest instead?

[hey!]

Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.

This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.

About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.

The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.

Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.