Could science leave the university?
mindingthecampus.org
Could science leave the university?
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Re: Could science leave the university?
#2If you want to do science and publish, you need something academia and possibly government. Pretty much all commercial science is closed source. And we’ve run short of English dukes paying for interesting people to come and work.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#3One thing that might be a problem here, is the ongoing oversupply of advanced degrees. This creates a ready supply of replacement faculty whenever needed. As science faculty leave the university, the university has the option of easily replacing them one-by-one, probably at lower cost, and are left with no need to hire the new scientists' organization. The research quality might drop, but the university's reputation would paste over the difference for a while at least.
Or, the individual scientists' reputations are enough to pull along the grants when they go.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#4Actually, that’s perilously close to the situation facing academics today. Contingent (also called adjunct) faculty are responsible for more and more collegiate instruction. Indeed, tenured professors are a shrinking proportion of the university’s teaching personnel.
Does this mean that academics have suffered from universities emphasis on leaving scientists to do science, instead of focusing on teaching?
Re: Could science leave the university?
#5If you want to do science and publish , you need something academia and possibly government. Pretty much all commercial science is closed source. And we’ve run short of English dukes paying for interesting people to come and work.
Some funding happens through the university, but an increasingly large part of it is gathered through external grants, most often financed through the government. My understanding is that the author argue that when external grants make up most of the funding, universities are just overhead for the scientists. The scientists will still be funded by the government or other grant agencies, but not be employed by a university. In other words, a different way of organizing research.
I don't say I necessarily agree with that position. it would have large implications on how advanced degrees are given, which is part of why the government pay for research in addition to the science output. There for sure are other things that must be handled differently in society as well, but that's the argument as I understand it. To some extent government labs as well as private research organizations to some extent do research outside of universities already, but most science happens inside universities and is combined with education.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#6[dead]
Re: Could science leave the university?
#7Someone just needs to create an institution that does nothing but verify the research/experiments of others.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#8Someone just needs to create an institution that does nothing but verify the research/experiments of others.
The question is who would pay for that. If the research results look commercially viable it might be better to just try them out in the market. Medical and pharmaceutical might be the exception because of risk and regulation.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#9The academic establishment is obsessed with _invention_ not making ideas _accessible_.
We have an 'intellectual property' obsessed society. But if existing ideas were more accessible, less cloaked in esoteric jargon, the next steps would seem not "original" but more self-evident to many. We would have a lot of obvious, parallel invention.
Read scientific writing. It's very dense. Papers are very inscrutable. This creates some extremely niche subdomains where the same 5-10 peer reviewers decide what's considered valid research. We treat science like arcane magic. The incentives of academia (tenure, hierarchy, status) only amplify the arcana. And those stuck in their nichiest of domains don't get exposed to new ideas.
Re: Could science leave the university?
#10Someone just needs to create an institution that does nothing but verify the research/experiments of others.
I often remark that it's so easy to fail to replicate any moderately complex experiment, so you really have to do a great job to be sure that it's actually invalid. Whether it's the chemistry, equipment, or animals (even yeast) involved there are so many variables that need to be controlled only an expert can do it. If you think that the Methodology and experimental setup will (or even could) be sufficient, you're in for a rude surprise.
Now there's now so much low hanging fruit, that it might be possible for a few labs to just look at the most outrageous published experimental claims for replication. Especially, anything published in a prestigious journal or groups with lots of influence could be carefully examined, but of course you have to do a great job to get your negative results published... it's also worth mentioning that the reputational risks of doing this are not small. If you're already being pushed out of academia and love working for peanuts though?