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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?"
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
Happy people make bad consumers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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 :).
HAND.
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.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Only a complete moron would judge quality based on quantity.
. . . or an MBA.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If theoretical physicists are re-purposed as fundraisers by age 51, then that just enlarges on his point.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.