I have experience in technology and biomedical research.
IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine.
And they got caught by the system already... You can't just snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again.
The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure board in 5 years, and there's basically no grant money for replication and no prestige at all.
What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'?
Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University".
And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.
Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford’s presidency and remained on the faculty. His case was far worse in my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and resulted in the misdirection of further millions downstream. Everyone knew Gay’s work was useless BS, it just also turned out to contain plagiarism.
A second topic which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s management and oversight of his scientific laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices, resulting in at least five publications in prominent journals now requiring retraction or correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.
Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something incredibly difficult to do.
There need to be checks against people in positions of great wealth, power, and influence because people cannot be trusted to self-regulate and Do the Right Thing when large sums of money are on the table. "Self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."
> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution
... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.
More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.
Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.
People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down? Fire some university president heads who've been caught or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.
The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are massively cutting back the number of admissions they're taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting up their labs because they can't get research started quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity or because a few high placed people faked some data?
China has been building nuclear successfully and worked out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it all down" approach would work for academia.
Despite how things could be structured better, in medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing much worse.
It would help further a good-faith discussion if you were first more precise in defining what you mean. Please be specific with your premise and what you would do to fix the flaws you see.
Maybe start with the part where you say "science and medicine are stagnant", therefore "we should burn it all down and start over". This is how misinterpretations and assumptions start and does not benefit mutual intellectual understanding.
This approach has an abysmal track record historically and I expect history will repeat itself here. Burning complex systems down is many orders of magnitude easier than building them up, and much less fun for the people who like burning things down. So the predictable effect is that blunt wide-scale destruction almost always makes things worse.
Yes Academia and government could be vastly more efficient. Almost everyone agrees on that and a lot of work has been put into improving things. But doing that in a way that's net good requires patience and competence, traits the current people running the government openly disdain.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding extremely high titles at both institutions, which would ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a professor at Harvard.
They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.
Claudine Gay was Harvard's president. Harvard receives >$2B from the federal government each year, including $100Ms in NIH funding. What does it say about an organization when the choose a charlatan and plagiarist to lead it? Why should taxpayer's give that organization a single dime?
"Academia is all rotten! Here are my 2 cherry-picked examples!"
Of course, burning these institutions down and running them like businesses will work well. After all, we all know fraud doesn't happen in business, and if it did, the market would soon sort that out, right?
IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine.
Multiple things can be true at once.