Once you eliminate the requirement that the manager be a practicing scientist, the roles will become filled with people who like managing, and are good at politics, rather than doing science. I’m surprised this is controversial. There is a reason the chair of academic departments is almost always a rotating prof in the department, rather than a permanent administrator. (Note: “was once a professor” is not considered sufficient to prevent this. Rather, profs understand that serving as chair for a couple years before rotating back into research is an unpleasant but necessary duty.)
We see this with doctors too. As the US medical system consolidates, and private practices are squeezed to a tiny and tinier fraction of docs, slowly but surely all the docs become employees of hospitals and the people in charge are MBA-types. Some of them have MDs, and once practiced medicine, but they specialize in management and they don’t come back.
You can of course argue that the downside is worth the benefits. But the existence and size of the downside are pretty clear from history, and need to be addressed in such a system.
“Career politician” is something of a slur. It seems widely accepted (though maybe you dispute?) that folks who specialize in politics certainly become better at winning politics (“more effective”) but that also this selects for politicians who are less honest or otherwise not well aligned with their constituents.
Tech startups still led by their technical CEO are somehow better than those where they have been replaced with a “career CEO”. Obviously there are selection effects, but the career CEOs are generally believed to be more short-term- and power-focused.
People have tried to fix these problems by putting constraints on managers (either through norms/stigmas about “non-technical” managers or explicit requirements that managers must, e.g., have a PhD). And probably these have helped some (although they tend to get Goodhardted, e.g., people who get MDs in order to run medical companies without any desire to practice medicine). And certainly there are times when technical people are bad managers and do more damage than their knowledge can possibly make up for.
But like, this tension between technical knowledge and specializing in management (or grant evaluation) seems like the crux of the issue that must be addressed head-on in any theorizing about the problem.
Once you eliminate the requirement that the manager be a practicing scientist, the roles will become filled with people who like managing, and are good at politics, rather than doing science. I’m surprised this is controversial. There is a reason the chair of academic departments is almost always a rotating prof in the department, rather than a permanent administrator. (Note: “was once a professor” is not considered sufficient to prevent this. Rather, profs understand that serving as chair for a couple years before rotating back into research is an unpleasant but necessary duty.)
We see this with doctors too. As the US medical system consolidates, and private practices are squeezed to a tiny and tinier fraction of docs, slowly but surely all the docs become employees of hospitals and the people in charge are MBA-types. Some of them have MDs, and once practiced medicine, but they specialize in management and they don’t come back.
You can of course argue that the downside is worth the benefits. But the existence and size of the downside are pretty clear from history, and need to be addressed in such a system.
Other examples:
“Career politician” is something of a slur. It seems widely accepted (though maybe you dispute?) that folks who specialize in politics certainly become better at winning politics (“more effective”) but that also this selects for politicians who are less honest or otherwise not well aligned with their constituents.
Tech startups still led by their technical CEO are somehow better than those where they have been replaced with a “career CEO”. Obviously there are selection effects, but the career CEOs are generally believed to be more short-term- and power-focused.
People have tried to fix these problems by putting constraints on managers (either through norms/stigmas about “non-technical” managers or explicit requirements that managers must, e.g., have a PhD). And probably these have helped some (although they tend to get Goodhardted, e.g., people who get MDs in order to run medical companies without any desire to practice medicine). And certainly there are times when technical people are bad managers and do more damage than their knowledge can possibly make up for.
But like, this tension between technical knowledge and specializing in management (or grant evaluation) seems like the crux of the issue that must be addressed head-on in any theorizing about the problem.