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Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-22-2012

University of Florida: cut their computer science program, increase athletic department budget. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/university-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm/



Re: Today in athletics run amok - yvonne - 04-22-2012

How do you eliminate a CS department?

???

Re: Today in athletics run amok - Roberton3 - 04-22-2012

(04-22-2012, 07:14 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:University of Florida: cut their computer science program, increase athletic department budget. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/university-of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets-hmm/

The headline is misleading.  Yes, it takes some very misplaced priorities to cut a very important department while increasing spending on athletics.  But the real reason CS is getting cut (as the linked article mentions) is that the Florida legislature has drastically cut state appropriations for the university.  Most states have cut spending on higher education by a lot, but the cuts in Florida have been unusually severe.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - Farm93 - 04-22-2012

Hmmm,

By now a university with a decent CS department should have enough wealthy donors to make up the shortfall.  So in my mind the "real villans" are either the CS faculty that have not produced enough qualified alums or the alums who have not decided to support their program by giving back.

My guess would be that the university leadership suspects that the CS department has enough alumni wealth to find $1.7 million.  Threatening to kill the CS department will show everyone that times are tough, but some people or companies will find a way to give a few million to UF to save CS.

The $99 million of the AD is not that excessive by SEC standards.  The $2 million increase is probably a function of TV revenue and donations.  Florida probably can find plenty of people willing to pay to thousands to watch Florida v Tennessee or Bama with ease.

Sad on some levels, but that is what happens.  I bet the football team could literally take all of the donation oxygen away from the rest of the school if given a chance.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - OutsiderFan - 04-23-2012

Not to get into a political discussion, but, there is a book coming out this week called "What Money Can't Buy."  I downloaded and read the first chapter on iBooks.  It's premise is to question whether turning everything into a market makes sense and really is in our best interest as a country.  I bring this up because what Farm93 is suggesting may have some merit, that the UF is expecting white knight donors to step up and save the program, but even that could carry an unwanted cost.

The issue is basically that when this is done (funding is provided by a few with money, and it isn't a shared public sacrifice), you essentially are selling to the highest bidders.  The implications in the UF example might be that the best talent the CS program produces will be pushed to the donors' preferences, like perhaps the companies they own.  Or research might be done on things that aren't going to best serve the citizens.  If the program was funded by the citizens of Florida, then the best talent might be free to start their own companies doing their own things that might benefit all the citizens of the state, or things could be researched that improve the state.  Pushing the narrow and selfish interests of a few donors puts an outsized premium on wealth accumulation, shuts out many people from the opportunity to have a say in their lives, and creates the conditions for corruption and cheating because if the only way to get ahead is with more money, well...

The book is quite interesting and raises a lot of issues that go to the fabric of what it means to live in a society.  This UF CS example is quite instructive, and has the potential for major implications.  There very well could be long-term costs to relying on markets to solve our problems, unforeseen in the here and now.







Re: Today in athletics run amok - Roberton3 - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 06:07 AM)garvin link Wrote:There's possibly less here than meets the eye. What's being eliminated is not the teaching of computer science, but the research side of the department.

In a field like CS, that's a distinction without a difference.  If you eliminate the research side of the department, all of the competent faculty will leave, and it won't be possible to replace them, so you'll wind up with a community-college-level CS department.  In other fields, where the supply of good faculty greatly exceeds the demand (e.g., the humanities and most social sciences), you could get away with this and only have a small drop in quality.  But in fields where good faculty are scarce (e.g., CS, law, medicine, economics, most engineering fields, etc.), eliminating the research side of the department is tantamount to eliminating the department.

(04-23-2012, 06:07 AM)garvin link Wrote:As for the Athletic Department, it appears to be self-supporting,

I don't know the details on Florida, but I suspect that "appears" is the key word there.  But I do know the details at the University of Texas, where I used to teach.  UT has a "self-supporting" athletic department, but if you look closely, athletics gets credit for a lot of revenue that doesn't come entirely from athletics.  For example, 100% licensing revenue for items (clothing, etc.) with the UT logo and/or name is counted as athletic department revenue.  I'm sure many (and probably most) of those items are sold to UT sports fans -- but I'm also sure that sales to sports fans are substantially less than 100% of all sales.  And that's just one of the many ways in which the accounting is skewed to credit athletics with as much revenue as possible and as low as share of costs as possible, thus making it look self-supporting even when it really isn't.  I'm almost certain that Florida does the same thing.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - OutsiderFan - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 07:08 AM)garvin link Wrote:Yes. Donors who want a say in where their money goes are "selfish." But those who want to fund their career training by extracting money from me at gunpoint are merely "having a say in their own lives." Thanks for the quick lesson in Orwellian doublespeak.

The ones that have a say in their lives are tax payers of the state of Florida.  If taxes are cut on the citizens so they don't have to pay for CS, and market forces decide what should be taught or researched, they are giving up the right to have a say in their lives.  The visceral "taking my money at gunpoint so they can fund their training" attitude in this response is showing a great deal of defensiveness, and missing the issue at hand in full context.

It can be argued whether or not we are better off with the Internet than we would be without it.  But if we left market forces to decide everything, we probably wouldn't have an Internet, had the Apollo program, or have the Interstate Highway system.  So sure it is the prerogative of any donor to see to it their money is spent how they want it spent.  The issue is considering the opportunity cost of allowing that dynamic to prevail across the board.

Are Floridians really better off paying less taxes so they can let the market decide what happens to the CS program?  This is the point the author of the book wants to see debated. 


Re: Today in athletics run amok - LuckE2Bhere - 04-23-2012

Clearly government has had a successful role in driving technological advances (such as the development of the internet, and the space program, which generated "astronomical" returns on investments in basic science, at least in the mid-20th century), but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a decent economist who could argue with a straight face that governments tend to be better venture capitalists than the "free markets" (which don't really exist in the modern era).  Without getting into a rat-hole debate, many would argue that "governmental investment" often crowds-out (or at least delays) private investment, with the classic example being "if the government had funded and prescribed the development of the cell phone, we'd all still be carrying 20 pound briefcase phones instead of iPhones!".

Of course, the truth is that while the vast majority of us support societal ethics such as a "social safety net" (albeit with great debate re: its size, etc.) it is extremely difficult to decide when the government should and shouldn't "compete" with its citizenry or tell the market what it should want.  I find it interesting how often blatantly self-interested people (frequently leveraging political tools, instead of physical or financial resources, to garner somewhat different benefits) decry the pursuit of self interest among others.

My apologies if I'm straying too far from the academic theories of Economics (and it the realm of "politics"), but one of the seminal insights of Friedrich Hayek, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, was well summarized in the following quotation: "Profit is the signal which tells us what we must do in order to serve people we do not know. By pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond the range of personal conception."  Again, I'm not suggesting that the pursuit of profit is the answer to all questions, but until I am appointed Benevolent Dictator, market forces remain one of the best resource-allocating "voting machines" we've got ;-)


Re: Today in athletics run amok - jayasena - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 06:58 AM)OutsiderFan link Wrote:The issue is basically that when this is done (funding is provided by a few with money, and it isn't a shared public sacrifice), you essentially are selling to the highest bidders.  The implications in the UF example might be that the best talent the CS program produces will be pushed to the donors' preferences, like perhaps the companies they own.  Or research might be done on things that aren't going to best serve the citizens.

I'm not sure this is all that different from where things are already headed at most universities as far as research directions and student access are concerned. For example, both Stanford's and Cal's EE/CS/EECS departments have various affiliate programs, retreats etc. where companies that (partially) fund high-profile research programs get to influence research directions, priority access to graduate students (most students from these projects seem to end up at those companies upon graduation) etc. Short of indentured servitude, it's hard to envision how things could get much worse in those aspects.

I do agree with Roberton3 -- this will, however, be a big negative on faculty recruiting. I can't imagine a department entirely reliant on its own devices to secure every bit of of its research funding, and even money for teaching assistants, being an attractive place to be for young faculty. And there will likely be concerns about undue external influence on tenure decisions, what faculty members may or may not do on sabbaticals etc.

This development is particularly disturbing in the current environment where there appears to be an exodus of CS and EE faculty members (including some very-well-established ones) to industry. Moves like this one from UF could make new graduates think twice about a career in academia in general and make matters worse for all academic institutions. Who would want to go into a tenure track position with this sort of uncertainty hanging over your research efforts?

Re: Today in athletics run amok - jayasena - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 09:19 AM)LuckE2Bhere link Wrote:Clearly government has had a successful role in driving technological advances (such as the development of the internet, and the space program, which generated "astronomical" returns on investments in basic science, at least in the mid-20th century), but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a decent economist who could argue with a straight face that governments tend to be better venture capitalists than the "free markets" (which don't really exist in the modern era).  Without getting into a rat-hole debate, many would argue that "governmental investment" often crowds-out (or at least delays) private investment, with the classic example being "if the government had funded and prescribed the development of the cell phone, we'd all still be carrying 20 pound briefcase phones instead of iPhones!".

LuckE2Bhere, if what you want from academia is "research" that could potentially be productized in 2-4 years, private/commercial sources are absolutely who you'd want as your sugar daddies. No question. But if you want to do basic research with a time horizon approaching a decade or more, there's no real alternative to government funding (and its various agencies). And academia *has* to do the long-term stuff or no one else will (in case you haven't noticed, we can no longer rely on the likes of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC since the focus on short-term returns has essentially made those sorts of industrial research organizations all but extinct).

Re: Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 11:20 AM)garvin link Wrote:I think you're mixing up cause and effect, comnambule. Why would companies spend a lot of money on long-term research when they can socialize the cost onto taxpayers? Professional sports teams do the same thing with stadiums, arguing that they "can't" pay for their own ballparks -- even though until the 1960s, they mostly did -- when all they really mean is, they don't want to and have figured out that local governments will pick up the tab if asked to do so.

I think somnambule is correct--the best examples of long-term research being led by the private sector belong to entities like Bell Labs and PARC, both of which were funded by monopolists in entrenched industries. There are very few monopolists in the U.S. these days with an interest in such R&D--maybe Google is the only example today.

But research is a classic public good, and private companies will underinvest because they reason they can capture the benefits from elsewhere, as your own logic earlier in the thread demonstrates. You think UF can cut its CS program because other states and other colleges can provide CS grads just fine; that may be true at the margin but the more universities follow such logic, it becomes an obvious problem. (Meanwhile, there probably is a dearth of CS grads in this country, as the rapidly escalating salaries in Silicon Valley demonstrate perfectly well. Anecdotally, the number of hospital business folk I've heard complaining about a lack of IT people for various health IT initiatives is very high.)

Re: Today in athletics run amok - LuckE2Bhere - 04-23-2012

Pretty sure that I never said anything about UF cutting it's CS program, and I suspect that the Justice Department would strongly dispute your assertion that PARC was "funded by (a) monopolist."  You may want to read the article on today's WSJ, explaining the recent e-book "price-fixing" civil suit against Apple and various book publishers, which illustrates just how little even certain members of Congress seam to know about anti-trust law.  To the degree that Bell Labs benefited from AT&T's monopoly, I would remind you that it was the government the effectively gave them that monopoly. 

But all of that is besides the point.  Please re-read my post.  The government certainly can create a "public good" by supporting basic research (and building certain bridges, etc.).  My point was, in large part, that for every internet success-story the government may produce, there are dozens of ethanol-like misdirected resource stories.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 01:10 PM)LuckE2Bhere link Wrote:But all of that is besides the point.  Please re-read my post.  The government certainly can create a "public good" by supporting basic research (and building certain bridges, etc.).  My point was, in large part, that for every internet success-story the government may produce, there are dozens of ethanol-like misdirected resource stories.

I was responding to garvin, not you. While you might not have been talking about the CS program, it was where the thread started. If that's not what you want to discuss, that's fine.

Anyway, two points: one, funding education is a pretty fundamental public good--in this case, CS. Second, it seems to me that there's a pretty sensible case to be made that the value of 1 Internet > Dozens of Ethanol-like misdirected resource stories. It's certainly not obvious that the reverse is true.



Re: Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 01:20 PM)garvin link Wrote:If Florida's computer science department is A) truly pulling in lots of students, sending them off to lucrative careers in an underpopulated profession, and not needlessly duplicating the activities of other Florida schools, WIM, does it seem likely to you it would B) take actions that would abolish or hopelessly cripple that department? It doesn't to me, any more than I would have expected the 59ers to shut down their football or basketball programs when they were talking about cutting teams. I maintain that either A) or B) is not true. And I think this is just one more example of the total hysteria whipped up over each and every cut in public spending that's ever suggested anywhere in America.

I have no idea. I rarely dismiss incompetence out of hand as an explanation--as your example of the 59ers quite well proves.

Knowing what we do of the average university, I would guess there's quite a bit of academic bloat somewhere that should be cut before getting involved with cutting a department in a field that will likely define the future.

Your point about public cuts may or may not be true but certainly is beyond the scope of this argument. I suspect I wouldn't be as bloodthirsty as you in cutting various government expenditures, but there are quite a few things I'd be interested in cutting in a me-as-dictator world.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - jayasena - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 11:20 AM)garvin link Wrote:I think you're mixing up cause and effect, comnambule. Why would companies spend a lot of money on long-term research when they can socialize the cost onto taxpayers? Professional sports teams do the same thing with stadiums, arguing that they "can't" pay for their own ballparks -- even though until the 1960s, they mostly did -- when all they really mean is, they don't want to and have figured out that local governments will pick up the tab if asked to do so.

Garvin, I'd agree with you in a (perfect?) world where corporations acted to maximize long-term success. But we all know that's not the case -- investors today (and it appears, especially US investors) reward short-term results over all else and executive compensation is heavily geared towards delivering that. So I'm not really sure corporate behavior would change all that much if there was no government support for long-term research.

Clever misspelling of my handle, BTW  :)

Re: Today in athletics run amok - LuckE2Bhere - 04-23-2012

I clearly misunderstood the target of your response, WIM; and I'm guilty of severe understatement in the 1 Internet vs. Dozens of Ethanol... comparisons (bad rhetorical form to concede the greatest example ever for the opposing side of the argument, and my Dozens could easily have been Thousands!).

In my own experience, public funding of education has been both a "good" (e.g., in the semi-rural areas where I grew up) and a clearly inferior alternative (to my private college education at Stanford).  Living the Bay Area, and reflecting on what's happening at our local elementary, middle-, and high-schools, while watching what's happening to the UC system vs. the now far-LESS-expensive (to most families) privately funded Stanford/Princeton/Harvard model... I'd again question your stated assumption.  Ever see Waiting for Superman?  That's a heck of a lot closer to the reality that the kids of many of my friends and neighbors now face, and this is a relatively wealthy area!  Of course, if you're a teacher who gets tenure after 4 years of marginal performance, never really has to develop another syllabus again, and is given a cushy (and effectively fraudulently accounted for) 8% risk-free return in their government/taxpayer-guaranteed retirement account, when long-term treasuries are yielding 2-3%, you may may be right about public funding for education being "good"!?!

Re: Today in athletics run amok - jayasena - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 01:10 PM)LuckE2Bhere link Wrote:But all of that is besides the point.  Please re-read my post.  The government certainly can create a "public good" by supporting basic research (and building certain bridges, etc.).  My point was, in large part, that for every internet success-story the government may produce, there are dozens of ethanol-like misdirected resource stories.

Personally, i would argue the internet is *worth* dozens of ethanol-like failures. C'mon, admit it -- the Cardboard alone is worth it!

And that rate of success is not unique to the government -- private ventures fund hundreds of failed companies for every blockbuster like Google or Facebook. And that's after the government has paid for the really risky stuff the companies build on.

Re: Today in athletics run amok - LuckE2Bhere - 04-23-2012

Again, I was not trying to suggest a specifically calculated ratio there  ;)  Pretty confident that my Dozens was a gross understatement, and it's also fair to say that the government doesn't deserve anywhere near full credit for the internet as we know it today (but Al Gore does!)  :D

Re: Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-23-2012

(04-23-2012, 02:12 PM)LuckE2Bhere link Wrote:I clearly misunderstood the target of your response, WIM; and I'm guilty of severe understatement in the 1 Internet vs. Dozens of Ethanol... comparisons (bad rhetorical form to concede the greatest example ever for the opposing side of the argument, and my Dozens could easily have been Thousands!).

In my own experience, public funding of education has been both a "good" (e.g., in the semi-rural areas where I grew up) and a clearly inferior alternative (to my private college education at Stanford).  Living the Bay Area, and reflecting on what's happening at our local elementary, middle-, and high-schools, while watching what's happening to the UC system vs. the now far-LESS-expensive (to most families) privately funded Stanford/Princeton/Harvard model... I'd again question your stated assumption.  Ever see Waiting for Superman?  That's a heck of a lot closer to the reality that the kids of many of my friends and neighbors now face, and this is a relatively wealthy area!  Of course, if you're a teacher who gets tenure after 4 years of marginal performance, never really has to develop another syllabus again, and is given a cushy (and effectively fraudulently accounted for) 8% risk-free return in their government/taxpayer-guaranteed retirement account, when long-term treasuries are yielding 2-3%, you may may be right about public funding for education being "good"!?!

Sure, we can debate the exact permutation the educational system takes. I'm open to voucher experiments in K-12 education, or aggressively-sought reform. But the government funding is the bedrock.

(Of course, while you can say thousands of ethanols, government also gets to talk about more benefits than the internet. GPS, basic satellite tech, radar...to name just a few.)

Re: Today in athletics run amok - washingtonismoney - 04-23-2012

Some interesting speculation about the situation:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/04/does-not-compute.html