Academics can have stupid ideas and say stupid things.

• space allocated by need or merit (2022-04-16)

  At a recent faculty meeting, a colleague expressed concern about the need for space in the department: that research opportunities were limited because there were no offices to house new hires.

  The department administrator suggested making use of remote work. (Yup, the university is seeing that there are cost savings in not giving folks offices.)

  The department chair said, “If we keep doing what we do so well, keep doing our research and training, they’ll be crazy not to support us.” As if university space has ever been allocated by need or merit.

• the magic number is five (2022-05-07)

  At a recent faculty meeting, in a discussion of the assistant professors’ progress, there was talk about the value of grants versus publications, which then led one colleague to comment on how many papers are sufficient. They’d heard that the magic number was five per year. “Unless you have a Science or a Nature Methods paper, you want five publications per year.”

  No need to read people’s work or think about the importance of their ideas. We just count up their publications, maybe weighted by the impact factor of the journal in which they appeared.