“Maybe a few of us can sacrifice 20% of our time to administration” is tempting, but you can’t really run an organization that way, and besides “sacrificing time to administration” is exactly what we didn’t want…pic.twitter.com/bQnoyPMrTF
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“Maybe a few of us can sacrifice 20% of our time to administration” is tempting, but you can’t really run an organization that way, and besides “sacrificing time to administration” is exactly what we didn’t want…pic.twitter.com/bQnoyPMrTF
What do you mean by administrative? Do you mean someone like Bode at Bell labs?
Hamming: I went to my boss, Bode, one day and said, "Why did you ever become department head? Why didn't you just be a good scientist?''
He said, "Hamming, I had a vision of what mathematics should be in Bell Laboratories. And I saw if that vision was going to be realized, I had to make it happen; I had to be department head.''
Well let me think out loud a bit… with the caveat that I have zero relevant knowledge (BTW I’ve read the Haming book but don’t remember that exchange or who Bode was)
Let’s say you have something around $10^8 you want to spend on nontraditional basic research (nontraditional because you understand there’s too much funding for run-of-the-mill science already).
And you aren’t going to be hiring individual scientists because you don't have the expertise and also you want to spend your time sailing or whatever. Instead you want to create an institution that will do that work for you, that you control but don't have to manage.
The anti-model and default option here is a "center of excellence." You pick an attractive-sounding, socially approved field and put up a building and fill it with the most credentialed people you can lure away from academic departments in that field.
You free those people from their university admin responsibilities, which is a plus. But they will mostly do slightly more of whatever they'd be doing in academia. They're stars, so they wouldn't be struggling for grants anyway.
And you probably end up with club full of like-minded cronies who are all pursuing the same approach to the same general topic. They don't have the necessary friction of people telling them they're doing everything wrong and their emperor is a naked baby.
And worse you may well end up with a like-minded club pursuing a smoke-and-mirrors field that couldn't make it in academia at all and that exists only because your institution is so well-funded it can spew out hundreds of cut-and-paste nonsense papers every year.
(Presumably you can guess some of the ones I have in mind!) This is especially a risk if the funder got sold on the bogus field by smoke-and-mirrors in the first place, and then is ego-invested in keeping it going in the face of doubters.
So you have a principal-agent problem. You need institutional management that is somehow accountable to you to spend your money well. However, you know you don't have the expertise to assess that, at least not on a timescale less than 5-10 years.
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