Tenure isn't an immunity to removal: it is simply a guarantee that the removal be justified through due process.
I understand how it is usually justified, but I merely point out that a professorship is not something that anyone has a right to, or is entitled to have as a matter of course. The position is ultimately the university's to give or withhold or withdraw as it sees fit, for any reason, or for no reason at all - anything less is a rather sly way of implying that a person has a right to something that belongs to someone else.
Why do they have such a large endowment? Good long-term planning -- which includes tenure. Stability is key.
Again, I must disagree - that $17 billion did not simply spring forth sua sponte, which is more or less what is implied by chalking it up to "good long-term planning". Rather, I expect that a significant fraction of it originated from alumni donations and contributions, which have in turn been supplemented by returns on investments made with that alumni money. Being a postdoc yourself, I suspect that you benefit directly from such contributions in the form of fellowships and stipends and the like - in fact, according to the Harvard Graduate School Fund itself, 65% of their funding came from alumni donations. And for alumni donations, I think we can fairly read "satisfied customers".
If and when Harvard should stop producing satisfied customers, or stop producing students with the wherewithal to earn the sort of money that enables them to make such donations, that funding will inevitably dry up and blow away. And I have yet to see anyone attempt to make the case that tenure is a critical part of the student experience - rather, the focus has been on how tenure benefits faculty, and students are at best a sort of one-off consideration in that equation. If tenured faculty are not critical to the student experience at Harvard, then tenure is not critical to funding and maintaining the university on its present course, despite assertions to the contrary.
Very true, except that Random House, by-and-large, does not generate this knowledge, it merely provides the service of publication to authors.
Neither does Harvard University generate the knowledge that you produce in your work, despite your being directly employed by them - you do. Harvard merely provides you with the service of a desk and a library card. Nor does Harvard University generate the knowledge created by its faculty - it merely provides them with services designed to facilitate the creation of such knowledge. And I see no reason that Harvard should stop doing that, even in the absence of tenure.
Uh, no. A university is not a business. It does not sell a product or service for profit (except those institutions alluded to which sell athletics, to me an abhorrent activity incompatible with academia). Key words: for profit.
Uh, yes. "Profit" is not the key here - providing a service to paying customers is. How long would Harvard stay in business if it stopped providing value to its students? Not very long, I'll wager. For all intents and purposes, Harvard University is a nonprofit corporate entity, and has to do all the same sorts of things that other nonprofit corporations do. There's absolutely no difference between Harvard's business model, and the American Red Cross's business model - neither of them are immune to fiscal realities, despite the fact that neither of them are intended to produce profits. And neither of them are served by reducing their ability to accomplish their respective missions by removing their flexibility to employ whomever they see fit under such terms as they see fit.
As discussed in many other posts at this point the primary reason is that academic institutions are held to vastly different standards than businesses, as the primary product of academic institutions is knowledge. As discussed in many other posts at this point the primary reason is that academic institutions are held to vastly different standards than businesses, as the primary product of academic institutions is knowledge. Thankfully, in our society, we value the accuracy and truthfullness in this knowledge enough to recognize that sometimes it is difficult to break established views with unpopular theories.
The primary product of the Random House publishing company is knowledge, and they manage to do it accurately and profitably, despite not guaranteeing lifetime employment to their authors, their editors, or their various and sundry support staff. Heck, they even publish books that "break established views with unpopular theories" every once in a while. How does Random House manage to do so with at-will employees, while we are simultaneously told that Harvard cannot?
Remember, a university is NOT a business, and there is no reason for it to be run under a business model.
Except, of course, that it is a business, and it's already run as a business, albeit one with much less flexibility in retaining employees than most businesses. Or did you think that Harvard's budget and payroll and endowment and so forth were somehow handled by elves?
Suggesting that universities are - or should be - somehow immune to the realities of the business world is pure pipe-dreaming - the difference between Larry Summers and Jack Welch is probably less than you'd care to admit. That being said, the critical question is, why shouldn't universities have the same sort of freedom that other businesses have - to hire and fire staff at will? Why is lifetime tenure something that you are inherently entitled to, but not the rest of the (non-academic) world?
Only a fool could think that all you need to bring in tech companies is a place for them to plug in. Luckily for these snake-oil-selling jerks, many of our leaders really are fools.
People by and large get the sort of government they deserve. Watch how many people on this very thread - among the self-proclaimed digerati, no less - proclaim what a great idea this is;)
If people should be paying for music to which they listen, why are radio stations paid to play music instead of charged?
Uhhh, they aren't, at least not in the US. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC all charge radio stations a licensing fee for playing music by the artists they represent.
A lot of the best things they have produced (Walking with Dinosaurs 'documentary', The Blue Planet) are huge projects and would never have got off the ground if it was't for the funding structure.
I'll take your word for it, but I feel compelled to point out that neither of those are very good examples to make such a case, as both "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "Blue Planet" were joint productions with the Discovery Channel (US), where DCI kicked in the money and the Beeb contributed "its renowned programme strengths and its long established international reputation as a high-quality public service broadcaster" - as per the fine print on the press release announcing the DCI/BBC joint venture. Plus, both of those have been huge money-makers for the Beeb - think they'll reduce license fees as a result?;)
You're describing the problem in some detail, and very well, too, whereas I simply assert that their attempts at solving that problem have been a miserable failure. I'm not entirely sure why you say you disagree with me - it seems to me that we're running on parallel tracks here.;)
Yes, but as you say, those points are all false when considering the Japanese economy. The population is shrinking and aging - causing an increasing amount of resources to be directed into their social welfare system. They don't have a low savings rate - for two generations now, they've had one of the highest rates in the world.
The best thing for them now is not more government spending - what they really need to do is get the average Japanese consumer to loosen his death-grip on his wallet and spend the money himself, rather than simply taking it and spending it on his behalf. They've cut interest rates to the bone, and they're still in serious danger of runaway deflation - and once you hit that point, there isn't a heck of a lot you can do with monetary policy.
The problems Japan has are deeply rooted, systemic and political. And only systemic and political reform can help them now - there's a host of things they can do to help themselves, virtually all of which are politically impossible. But they need to do something, or we'll be able to look back in a couple of centuries and see that the high-water mark for the Japanese nation was in about 1987.
Keynesian pump-priming doesn't work, my ass.
I'm open-minded - give me an example where it did work. Take all the time you need;)
The potential benefits to basic research and R&D have nothing to do with Keynesian 'pump priming'.
Well, they do and they don't. I don't agree with the assertion that the bulk of economic stimulus money has been put into R&D in the first place - as I said, it's mostly been spent on infrastructure improvements, rather than R&D.
And the second underlying assumption here is that government spending on R&D is a good idea. I think it isn't - yes, spending on R&D is a good idea, but you're much better off if you simply free up capital and let the money seek out the ideas, rather than giving it to a bureaucracy like MITI and assuming that mid-level flunkies can predict the future, and thereby predict which R&D investments will be winners and put money into them. And that's not the case, by any stretch of the imagination - look at MITI's much-vaunted Fifth Generation Computing project. After two decades and billions of dollars spent, it's produced virtually nothing of any commercial value.
R&D spending is a good idea, absolutely. Government spending on R&D is a bad idea, unless its for things the government wants to have, like new and better ways to kill people, or it's for basic science that benefits everyone, rather than being intended to provide commercial benefits - basically, giving money to Tokyo University for a new particle accelerator is good, giving money to Sony for smaller radios is bad. And trying to have a twofer by getting government spending on R&D to have a stimulus effect on your economy is the worst idea of all.
It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the main difference between innovation in the US and in Europe/Japan is the existence of well-developed, well-funded private capital markets. Here, if you have some hot new idea, you have a competitive market of investors to sell it to. Over there, you go hat-in-hand to the government, and if they don't think it's worthwhile, you're just shit out of luck as far as developing your idea yourself is concerned.
Well I'm a programmer and, as such, I'm more concerned with what works than finding support for somebody's pet theory. I wager any actual economist (as opposed to somebody giving expert advice about the impending recovery on CBS) will feel the same way as I do.
You'd be amazed. Or maybe not - as a programmer, I bet you've seen the phenomenon of one of your co-workers discovering some clever new tool or trick, and then spending weeks or months trying to solve every single problem with that same technique. People get attached to their pet theories, and would rather defend them to the death than admit that they made a mistake. It's a human thing - we all do it from time to time;)
Well, infrastructure improvements can be great in the long term, as long as its the correct infrastructure.
If you're doing it because it needs doing - the roads are falling apart, people are getting sick because the water supply is shit, et cetera - then it's pretty much a necessary evil. If, on the other hand, you're doing it to "stimulate" your economy, then it won't work - you'll get lots of shiny new infrastructure, but for the "stimulus" you get, you might as well have just put it in a big pile and burned it. FDR's alphabet-soup agencies didn't pull the US out of the Depression, World War II did.
I'm now waiting to see what reaction the 'bankers' comment gets!
Me too. Probably nothing, but you never know. Slashdot used to have a much more techno-libertarian bent than it does nowadays. User-moderation is both the blessing and the curse of this board - on the one hand, you get rid of the penisbirds and other assorted fruitcakes, but on the other, people very quickly discover that they can use it to reward opinions they agree with, and punish opinions they disagree with.
Well, I haven't flown any flight sims in a while, and none of the more recent versions - do they include the "Simulated Board of Inquiry" nowadays?
Actually, that would be kind of fun, and go a long way towards satisfying people anal enough to complain that PC-based flight sims aren't realistic enough - every time you crash, the simulator grounds you for six months or so, while it decides if it was your fault or not. And if it was your fault, the simulator automatically uninstalls itself and refuses to reinstall;)
Yes, but a big part of Japans efforts to improve the economy have been focussed around increasing research, especially basic reasearch.
Actually, most of it has been poured into capital-works types of projects - lots of infrastructure improvements, that kind of thing. The fact that their economy is still in the crapper is just more empirical evidence that that sort of Keynesian pump-priming simply doesn't work in the real world.
Now, if Slashdot really is populated by bankers (and economists) these days, that last sentence ought to be good for picking a fight;)
Hell, in theory I could run nighttime bombing ops from a F-117 and probably make it back to the base in one piece if the simulators are even half-accurate.
The part where you click on "Restart mission" after smacking into the ground is remarkably inaccurate;)
And the way you get that is to spend several years and millions of dollars per pilot to train them to do what they do, which you can do because there are a few thousand of them in the world - it gets awfully expensive if you want to hold millions of drivers to that same standard. And while carrier pilots are generally very good at what they do, even with all that training there is still the occasional spectacular fuck-up...
Let's not get goofy - MS owns Rareware, but Nintendo still owns the characters from Mario, DK, and Starfox. Ain't gonna be no Mario games on the XBox...
If the US Government gets outraged enough, it can revoke specific patents or a whole class of patents with a simple law passing Congress and gaining either presidental approval or overriding the veto
No they can't. The best you could get from Congress would be compulsory licensing of the patent(s) in question, and then only if the public good were shown to far outweigh the harm to SCO, which is a higher hurdle than it sounds at first blush. That whole Fifth Amendment thingy about not depriving people of their property without just compensation and due process gets in the way of simple patent revocations.
Yes, I know - you said IP isn't really property. At best, that's your opinion of how things should be, not a reflection of the law as it currently stands.
Good post. Glad to see good posts still exist around here;)
DirecTV uses its own proprietary encryption scheme which isn't supported by anything but DTV-licensed receivers, and while Dish Network uses Nagravision [nagravision.com] encryption, which is supported by some things (like Hauppauge's WinTV DBS card), they marry their smartcards to their receivers, so a Dish Network smartcard will only work in the receiver in which it was first activated unless you hack it (and even then it may not work outside a Dish Network receiver).
I'd only add one small thing to this. You're absolutely right about not being able to pick up DTV channels - DirecTV has their own proprietary scheme which is incompatible with DVB. But Dish, OTOH, does broadcast some channels unencrypted, which you can pick up with a DVB receiver - the Lyngsat site can tell you which ones are FTA.
Of course, the channels people want for free (HBO, Showtime, whatever) are all encrypted by Dish, so thinking a DVB receiver will get you free HBO is hopeless, as you rightly point out.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand how it is usually justified, but I merely point out that a professorship is not something that anyone has a right to, or is entitled to have as a matter of course. The position is ultimately the university's to give or withhold or withdraw as it sees fit, for any reason, or for no reason at all - anything less is a rather sly way of implying that a person has a right to something that belongs to someone else.
Again, I must disagree - that $17 billion did not simply spring forth sua sponte, which is more or less what is implied by chalking it up to "good long-term planning". Rather, I expect that a significant fraction of it originated from alumni donations and contributions, which have in turn been supplemented by returns on investments made with that alumni money. Being a postdoc yourself, I suspect that you benefit directly from such contributions in the form of fellowships and stipends and the like - in fact, according to the Harvard Graduate School Fund itself, 65% of their funding came from alumni donations. And for alumni donations, I think we can fairly read "satisfied customers".
If and when Harvard should stop producing satisfied customers, or stop producing students with the wherewithal to earn the sort of money that enables them to make such donations, that funding will inevitably dry up and blow away. And I have yet to see anyone attempt to make the case that tenure is a critical part of the student experience - rather, the focus has been on how tenure benefits faculty, and students are at best a sort of one-off consideration in that equation. If tenured faculty are not critical to the student experience at Harvard, then tenure is not critical to funding and maintaining the university on its present course, despite assertions to the contrary.
Very true, except that Random House, by-and-large, does not generate this knowledge, it merely provides the service of publication to authors.
Neither does Harvard University generate the knowledge that you produce in your work, despite your being directly employed by them - you do. Harvard merely provides you with the service of a desk and a library card. Nor does Harvard University generate the knowledge created by its faculty - it merely provides them with services designed to facilitate the creation of such knowledge. And I see no reason that Harvard should stop doing that, even in the absence of tenure.
Get rid of it everywhere, and that problem will solve itself - universities will attract talent the same way they always heve...
Uh, yes. "Profit" is not the key here - providing a service to paying customers is. How long would Harvard stay in business if it stopped providing value to its students? Not very long, I'll wager. For all intents and purposes, Harvard University is a nonprofit corporate entity, and has to do all the same sorts of things that other nonprofit corporations do. There's absolutely no difference between Harvard's business model, and the American Red Cross's business model - neither of them are immune to fiscal realities, despite the fact that neither of them are intended to produce profits. And neither of them are served by reducing their ability to accomplish their respective missions by removing their flexibility to employ whomever they see fit under such terms as they see fit.
As discussed in many other posts at this point the primary reason is that academic institutions are held to vastly different standards than businesses, as the primary product of academic institutions is knowledge. As discussed in many other posts at this point the primary reason is that academic institutions are held to vastly different standards than businesses, as the primary product of academic institutions is knowledge. Thankfully, in our society, we value the accuracy and truthfullness in this knowledge enough to recognize that sometimes it is difficult to break established views with unpopular theories.
The primary product of the Random House publishing company is knowledge, and they manage to do it accurately and profitably, despite not guaranteeing lifetime employment to their authors, their editors, or their various and sundry support staff. Heck, they even publish books that "break established views with unpopular theories" every once in a while. How does Random House manage to do so with at-will employees, while we are simultaneously told that Harvard cannot?
Now its pratically considered an ivory league school.
Harvey Mudd called - they want you to stop telling people that you're an alum.
Except, of course, that it is a business, and it's already run as a business, albeit one with much less flexibility in retaining employees than most businesses. Or did you think that Harvard's budget and payroll and endowment and so forth were somehow handled by elves?
Suggesting that universities are - or should be - somehow immune to the realities of the business world is pure pipe-dreaming - the difference between Larry Summers and Jack Welch is probably less than you'd care to admit. That being said, the critical question is, why shouldn't universities have the same sort of freedom that other businesses have - to hire and fire staff at will? Why is lifetime tenure something that you are inherently entitled to, but not the rest of the (non-academic) world?
People by and large get the sort of government they deserve. Watch how many people on this very thread - among the self-proclaimed digerati, no less - proclaim what a great idea this is ;)
The problems of the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania will not be solved by running fiber through steam tunnels. Bank on it.
Based on a few people I've seen, I'd say "neuromuscular disorder"....
Uhhh, they aren't, at least not in the US. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC all charge radio stations a licensing fee for playing music by the artists they represent.
I'll take your word for it, but I feel compelled to point out that neither of those are very good examples to make such a case, as both "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "Blue Planet" were joint productions with the Discovery Channel (US), where DCI kicked in the money and the Beeb contributed "its renowned programme strengths and its long established international reputation as a high-quality public service broadcaster" - as per the fine print on the press release announcing the DCI/BBC joint venture. Plus, both of those have been huge money-makers for the Beeb - think they'll reduce license fees as a result? ;)
No, of course they won't. But someone else will - Rareware isn't the only gaming house on the planet ;)
You're describing the problem in some detail, and very well, too, whereas I simply assert that their attempts at solving that problem have been a miserable failure. I'm not entirely sure why you say you disagree with me - it seems to me that we're running on parallel tracks here. ;)
The best thing for them now is not more government spending - what they really need to do is get the average Japanese consumer to loosen his death-grip on his wallet and spend the money himself, rather than simply taking it and spending it on his behalf. They've cut interest rates to the bone, and they're still in serious danger of runaway deflation - and once you hit that point, there isn't a heck of a lot you can do with monetary policy.
The problems Japan has are deeply rooted, systemic and political. And only systemic and political reform can help them now - there's a host of things they can do to help themselves, virtually all of which are politically impossible. But they need to do something, or we'll be able to look back in a couple of centuries and see that the high-water mark for the Japanese nation was in about 1987.
Keynesian pump-priming doesn't work, my ass.
I'm open-minded - give me an example where it did work. Take all the time you need ;)
Well, they do and they don't. I don't agree with the assertion that the bulk of economic stimulus money has been put into R&D in the first place - as I said, it's mostly been spent on infrastructure improvements, rather than R&D.
And the second underlying assumption here is that government spending on R&D is a good idea. I think it isn't - yes, spending on R&D is a good idea, but you're much better off if you simply free up capital and let the money seek out the ideas, rather than giving it to a bureaucracy like MITI and assuming that mid-level flunkies can predict the future, and thereby predict which R&D investments will be winners and put money into them. And that's not the case, by any stretch of the imagination - look at MITI's much-vaunted Fifth Generation Computing project. After two decades and billions of dollars spent, it's produced virtually nothing of any commercial value.
R&D spending is a good idea, absolutely. Government spending on R&D is a bad idea, unless its for things the government wants to have, like new and better ways to kill people, or it's for basic science that benefits everyone, rather than being intended to provide commercial benefits - basically, giving money to Tokyo University for a new particle accelerator is good, giving money to Sony for smaller radios is bad. And trying to have a twofer by getting government spending on R&D to have a stimulus effect on your economy is the worst idea of all.
It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the main difference between innovation in the US and in Europe/Japan is the existence of well-developed, well-funded private capital markets. Here, if you have some hot new idea, you have a competitive market of investors to sell it to. Over there, you go hat-in-hand to the government, and if they don't think it's worthwhile, you're just shit out of luck as far as developing your idea yourself is concerned.
You'd be amazed. Or maybe not - as a programmer, I bet you've seen the phenomenon of one of your co-workers discovering some clever new tool or trick, and then spending weeks or months trying to solve every single problem with that same technique. People get attached to their pet theories, and would rather defend them to the death than admit that they made a mistake. It's a human thing - we all do it from time to time ;)
If you're doing it because it needs doing - the roads are falling apart, people are getting sick because the water supply is shit, et cetera - then it's pretty much a necessary evil. If, on the other hand, you're doing it to "stimulate" your economy, then it won't work - you'll get lots of shiny new infrastructure, but for the "stimulus" you get, you might as well have just put it in a big pile and burned it. FDR's alphabet-soup agencies didn't pull the US out of the Depression, World War II did.
I'm now waiting to see what reaction the 'bankers' comment gets!
Me too. Probably nothing, but you never know. Slashdot used to have a much more techno-libertarian bent than it does nowadays. User-moderation is both the blessing and the curse of this board - on the one hand, you get rid of the penisbirds and other assorted fruitcakes, but on the other, people very quickly discover that they can use it to reward opinions they agree with, and punish opinions they disagree with.
Actually, that would be kind of fun, and go a long way towards satisfying people anal enough to complain that PC-based flight sims aren't realistic enough - every time you crash, the simulator grounds you for six months or so, while it decides if it was your fault or not. And if it was your fault, the simulator automatically uninstalls itself and refuses to reinstall ;)
Actually, most of it has been poured into capital-works types of projects - lots of infrastructure improvements, that kind of thing. The fact that their economy is still in the crapper is just more empirical evidence that that sort of Keynesian pump-priming simply doesn't work in the real world.
Now, if Slashdot really is populated by bankers (and economists) these days, that last sentence ought to be good for picking a fight ;)
The part where you click on "Restart mission" after smacking into the ground is remarkably inaccurate ;)
And the way you get that is to spend several years and millions of dollars per pilot to train them to do what they do, which you can do because there are a few thousand of them in the world - it gets awfully expensive if you want to hold millions of drivers to that same standard. And while carrier pilots are generally very good at what they do, even with all that training there is still the occasional spectacular fuck-up...
Battery life? Dude, you took a wrong turn - this is PRNewswire now, not Slashdot. All you need to know is that it's got a "stylish metal body"...
Let's not get goofy - MS owns Rareware, but Nintendo still owns the characters from Mario, DK, and Starfox. Ain't gonna be no Mario games on the XBox...
No they can't. The best you could get from Congress would be compulsory licensing of the patent(s) in question, and then only if the public good were shown to far outweigh the harm to SCO, which is a higher hurdle than it sounds at first blush. That whole Fifth Amendment thingy about not depriving people of their property without just compensation and due process gets in the way of simple patent revocations.
Yes, I know - you said IP isn't really property. At best, that's your opinion of how things should be, not a reflection of the law as it currently stands.
DirecTV uses its own proprietary encryption scheme which isn't supported by anything but DTV-licensed receivers, and while Dish Network uses Nagravision [nagravision.com] encryption, which is supported by some things (like Hauppauge's WinTV DBS card), they marry their smartcards to their receivers, so a Dish Network smartcard will only work in the receiver in which it was first activated unless you hack it (and even then it may not work outside a Dish Network receiver).
I'd only add one small thing to this. You're absolutely right about not being able to pick up DTV channels - DirecTV has their own proprietary scheme which is incompatible with DVB. But Dish, OTOH, does broadcast some channels unencrypted, which you can pick up with a DVB receiver - the Lyngsat site can tell you which ones are FTA.
Of course, the channels people want for free (HBO, Showtime, whatever) are all encrypted by Dish, so thinking a DVB receiver will get you free HBO is hopeless, as you rightly point out.