Interesting essay. I think the idea of flexibility is good in general: for example, I know of a case where a scientific programmer position on an academic project cannot be properly filled because the salary is far below the market; this is well understood by the project leader but cannot be fixed due to strong regulations of fund allocation.
However, I'm wondering what would this model lead to for PhD students that want to stay in academia? Already in the current system, there are not enough tenure positions for everyone, in the Compton model it seems that there will be even fewer, which would discourage some amount of people from following an academic route.
2ericgilliam1ySo it's unclear, to me at least, whether this would grow or shrink the number of
academic jobs. The number of "budgetary shot callers" would shrink by a lot
since far fewer professors would have a bank account/grant to direct. But many
of these teams would still require PhDs to be doing real research.
To many, that sometimes sounds like a demotion. But I think that's a knee-jerk
way to look at it. You can liken many of the new roles to what it was like being
one of the many many smart PhDs/professors who worked on something like the
Manhattan Project or in the GE Lab. You had probably a sort of comparable amount
of freedom since your mind was respected by your "bosses" and they let you
explore how to find things out on your own, but you did your research while also
productively working within a "team" rather than a loose collection of
individuals with different goals entirely.
Of course there are certain jobs that PhDs currently do, such as writing
software, that would probably be efficient to hand over to non-PhDs in many
cases. But the whole operation would also work more efficiently with the unified
budget and possibly have more money for PhD researchers as well. So I find it
hard to tell whether jobs would be harder or easier to come by.
Interesting essay. I think the idea of flexibility is good in general: for example, I know of a case where a scientific programmer position on an academic project cannot be properly filled because the salary is far below the market; this is well understood by the project leader but cannot be fixed due to strong regulations of fund allocation.
However, I'm wondering what would this model lead to for PhD students that want to stay in academia? Already in the current system, there are not enough tenure positions for everyone, in the Compton model it seems that there will be even fewer, which would discourage some amount of people from following an academic route.