Two stories came out of UC Berkeley over the weekend that will make you question your opinion of academia — or maybe reinforce your opinion. The first story comes from Michael Eisen’s blog and has a bad news, good news, bad news flavor. The bad news is that a prominent astronomy professor at Berkeley named …
On July 1, a symposium at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts tackled the role of bureaucracy in academia. The event was framed this way: Does bureaucracy go hand in hand with neoliberalism, or is it neoliberalism’s guilty secret, a riposte to its professed efficiency? How is bureaucracy represented in literature and theory – from Franz …
To people who have been involved with academic science recently (say, the past forty years), this will not come as a shock, but the National Academy has released a report concluding that, well, being a postdoc sucks. The report, released in December, was summarized by Science Careers: The penetrating analysis in The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited …
Last week, the Institute for Policy Studies released a report on executive pay at Universities. They focused specifically on the 25 Universities with the highest compensation for the top executive at the main campus, ranging from $10.2 M at Ohio State to $3.7 M at Florida State. First, they found that student debt has increased …
Randy Schekman made news this week when he published a column in the Guardian, where he proclaimed that his lab would be boycotting Science, Nature, and Cell, probably the three most prominent scientific journals. There is a lot to be happy about in Schekman’s column. Most of all for its existence: Schekman just won the …
Read more “Science, Nature, and Cell Aren’t the Problem, Exactly”
[Update (5/29): Eric Weinstein will be giving a follow-up lecture this Friday (5/31) at 2pm at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute in lecture room L2 (which, I believe, is at location 22 on this map). Physicists and mathematicians in the area! I hope some of you will be able to attend, and will post your thoughts / …
So, there’s a nice little op-ed piece up at the Chronicle for Higher Education. (For the non-academics out there, it’s sort of like People magazine, but with History professors instead of Kardashians.) It was written by Jon Bardin, a current PhD student at Cornell Med School, who is planning to abandon the canonical academic path. …
This was originally posted at Lost in Transcription on October 26, 2011. So, I had not realized until I got a twitter-prompt from Kiona Strickland that so much time had passed since I put out my call for opinions on what one would need to successfully do academic research outside the confines of traditional academia. The call was put …
