parsimo2010 5 hours ago

I don’t know Borcherds, so this isn’t intended to sound mean to him, but he could pay his TAs or RAs to do hula hoops naked in public for 40 hours a week and it wouldn’t affect him. He’s a high profile mathematician and the worst thing is that next year’s grant money is a little less and he can’t pay for as much naked hula hooping spectacle.

Entire math departments at multiple lower profile schools will close their doors before he has any actual concern about his future as an academic.

But your point is correct for other professors, much less secure in their positions, who have similar problems with AI and actually do have to concern themselves about using their TAs and RAs productively.

▲

contubernio 4 hours ago | parent [-]

He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors. If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.

▲

parsimo2010 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If Borcherds accepts TAs then they work for him. The point was that he can do practically whatever he wants and doesn't have to worry about it harming him.

Thanks for explaining to me how the academic system I work in functions. Just like most managers don't literally pay their employees, the company does. The university pays TAs through funds from their various revenue streams, including endowment, tuition, grants to the university, and through indirect costs collected from research grants to researchers, probably including Borcherds own grants. So really a lot of different things pay the TAs, the university is just the clearing house.

▲

mathisfun123 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> He doesn't pay TAs. The university does. They work for the university, not for individual professors.

faculty research overhead pays for department TAs. that's why departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts.

> If you have no idea how teaching works in US universities, probably better not to comment on it.

define:irony

	▲	sam1714 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>faculty research overhead pays for department TAs The majority comes from tuition budgets, which are assigned per credit-unit. This also pays for faculty salaries. Math is heavily dependent on tuition because they get little overhead. Life sciences is buying millions of dollars of equipment, chemicals, animals, lab staff that incur overhead, none in math. >departments with rich professors maintain their TAs even through budget cuts In fact the University of California does not get to keep any overhead. It goes right back into the State of California General Fund and the CA Legislature, as part of the budgeting process, decides where it goes (obviously considering where it came from). During a budget squeeze, overhead can be diverted elsewhere. Because of this, for a number of years, it was unknown whether the research enterprise at the University of California was actually covering its overhead costs or operating at a loss.