Agree particularly with your point about treatment of graduate students and the systematic devaluation and reduction of their skills.
Chiming in to add that not only do graduate students often have sufficient knowledge to participate in lab direction and administration, they often have different skills or knowledge that are still valuable to the lab which a professor or senior researchers may not have (e.g. digital outreach and science communication, which undergraduate research assistants are the most reliable, how to use certain equipment, etc)
That's a good point. I think the faculty role is often more one of continuity than maintained technical skills. My advisor does not really code anymore, nor does he work in the lab, nor does he remember all of the technical details. What he does know is why something is the way that it is because he was doing the work to develop it a decade ago. That's a valuable thing, but the extent to which that, along with grant writing and teaching skills, is highly overvalued relative to the worker's skills is rarely discussed.
Agree particularly with your point about treatment of graduate students and the systematic devaluation and reduction of their skills.
Chiming in to add that not only do graduate students often have sufficient knowledge to participate in lab direction and administration, they often have different skills or knowledge that are still valuable to the lab which a professor or senior researchers may not have (e.g. digital outreach and science communication, which undergraduate research assistants are the most reliable, how to use certain equipment, etc)
That's a good point. I think the faculty role is often more one of continuity than maintained technical skills. My advisor does not really code anymore, nor does he work in the lab, nor does he remember all of the technical details. What he does know is why something is the way that it is because he was doing the work to develop it a decade ago. That's a valuable thing, but the extent to which that, along with grant writing and teaching skills, is highly overvalued relative to the worker's skills is rarely discussed.
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