Cutting someone down with a smile

Another assistant professor at M.I.T. has been fired for falsifying data. Whilst scientific fraud happens everywhere, it seems that M.I.T. has had more than it's fair share with the spectacular example of the case involving David Baltimore who was the president at the time.

One of the things that we postdocs pay attention to is the tenure rate of universities. When universities hire young faculty, there is a probation period of 3 to 5 years, at the end of which, tenure is either awarded or the professor is fired. This can be a heart-breaking moment but tenure is a serious committment for a university. But the exact rate of tenure gives an indication of how ruthlessly a university culls the young faculty.

Where I work, the tenure rate is around the 80% mark, a pleasingly high rate for new young faculty. It's likely that a new hire will get tenure, but not so absurdly high that jeckyl-and-hyde personality types automatcially become faculty members. But this is an anomaly amongst top universities. Harvard, Berekeley and MIT have ridiculously low tenure rates, of the order of ~15%. This means that most new-hire faculty will not get tenure. Often these universities will hire young professors with similar qualifications and watch them compete viciously so that they will get tenure.

Whilst at Harvard, this is recognized, and the professors there are known for their cold-blooded competitiveness, MIT seems a little bit schizophrenic. A colleague of mine who had just done the job rounds was really weirded out by the professors at MIT when he gave a job interview there. All the professors at MIT tried really hard to pretend to be nice and jovial and not ruthlessly competitive. But it came across as a charade, as some kind of cognitive dissonance.

The low tenure-rate clearly says otherwise for MIT professors. Because how a university is run structurally flows through into how the staff sees each other. What makes MIT odd is the need for the professors to feel the need to pretend to be collegial when clearly they are not. This schism I think may be one of the reasons why fraud has manifested itself once again at that place.