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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Well sometimes when you are a tenured professor, it's really hard to mess up in many cases. I personally know professors that have "gone senile" to put it mildly, if not then it just means they were stupid from the start. That have ridden their one good discovery from decades ago, and can keep getting funding because other orgs are also funding them. Have way too many students than they can handle in their lab, make postdocs do the management, and fire people if they don't publish well. Of course that's the only example I have seen of someone that incompetent. But I have seen mildly incompetent people riding on "collaboration" with other labs and people from university, or by being "cheaper to hire than consultants". Academia in US is a lot like a boy's club of who knows who. And once you have a certain momentum you'll have funds that can support more people than you can manage while new professors will struggle with getting funding and have to use those old professors to get funds and "collaborate" with them. Basically giving away a chunk of funding for their names.
again, it depends. the momentum is completely different at a state university than at a top private research university (personal experience with both). I'm a clinician-scientist, so my pressure is to support my research effort, or be forced to see a lot more patients (for which I'm severely underpaid and undersupported). I'll say science is all about your network, I translate bench researcher's methods to the clinic with a pretty high throughput. Being able to connect researchers, for example a group who developed a mouse model for X with a group who uses technique Y to refine the data, can make one quite popular. That said the main difference between the state uni and the research uni is that at the state, finding good mentorship was very hard (I was very lucky), and at the research uni it is mandated by the institution with protocolized mentorship committees and they only take people whom they know will be able to succeed academically.