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Could science leave the university?

mindingthecampus.org

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Re: Could science leave the university?

#11

Post by kurthr »

golemotron wrote: post #8
JakeAl wrote: post #7

Someone 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.

I question even this case, because Pharma seem perfectly happy to push through drugs with unproven effectiveness. See the Aduhelm scandal (which has expanded to the entire Beta-Amyloid research angle). It wouldn't be so bad (see the Vitamin Industrial Complex), if they weren't paid for by insurance (ie everyone).

Re: Could science leave the university?

#12

Post by jleyank »

alephnil wrote: post #5
jleyank wrote: post #2

If 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 unive…

A whole lot of science goes on in Pharma and Biotech, but the paper doesn't appear until the project fails or, perhaps, after the patent is granted and things are "safe". And I'm sure some things are held as trade secrets. They were in computational modeling so I assume they're handled the same way in "real" chemistry.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#13

Post by hospitalJail »

jleyank wrote: post #2

If 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.

What do you mean? I have a website and I publish 3 or 4 times a year.

Sure I had to do marketing/outreach to get a following, but I have PhDs in my field reading my side-work I'm producing in the evenings. This stuff is science, without all the fluff and grander. At the end of the day, my readers do go out and test my claims, isn't that more science than academia's replication crisis?

I do something that is nearly free to study, which is possibly why it works. No LHC in my basement.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#14

Post by lacy_tinpot »

spfzero wrote: post #3

One 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…

There can't be an oversupply of advanced degrees. Rather if there is an "oversupply" it means that we can't adequately absorb the intellectual capacity of the population. This in itself is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#15

Post by generalizations »

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

The 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 cre…

> 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.

This matches my experience - once you buckle down and learn the jargon, then when you read the papers you realize that the concepts are rarely complex. But if you write a paper that's not complicated, people might see that you haven't come up with anything impressive! And the emperor has no clothes. So you, and everyone around you, succumbs to their inferiority complex and hides their ideas behind inscrutable jargon.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#16

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

alephnil wrote: post #5
jleyank wrote: post #2

If 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 unive…

A university department is a research community, which is much more valuable than just some bureaucratic overhead.

A group of professors, postdocs and grad students regularly interacting with one another, attending talks by visiting researchers, going to journal club every week to discuss new papers, etc. will be much more intellectually productive, in general, than the same set of people dispersed and trying to work by themselves.

Of course, the university does also perform bureaucratic functions, like running payroll, making sure the grant money is used on what it's supposed to be used on, and very importantly, organizing classes for undergraduate and graduate students. However, the university is also an intellectual community.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#17

Post by hospitalJail »

golemotron wrote: post #8
JakeAl wrote: post #7

Someone 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.

Easy: Create and organization, crowd fund it. You can knock out a few studies for free/low cost.

Hard: Can we form an intellectual union for this(professionals/10%ers)? Protects us from the mob and the ruling class + we can collect dues for things that are incredibly important like this.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#18

Post by el_oni »

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

The 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 cre…

I've commented on a similar topic before about knowing who the reviewers were based on their comments and papers they recomend we cited.

But as for the papers being inscruitable, i think part of that is just that the domain has it's own language, and assumed knowledge. I don't have to explain why i'm using the gibbs equation to calcualte free energy, or why i'm using hess's law. I just do it. The only things that need explaination are the novel applications of techniques.

When it comes to explaining those foundational concepts we need to pickup a text book or a popular science book. Speaking of, one of the things that makes me a little sad is how few popular science books there are around chemistry. There is loads about biology and physics, and even some around maths. Not a lot with chem.

Re: Could science leave the university?

#19

Post by contemporary343 »

This all ignores a basic financial reality underlying 'hard-money' academic positions: we are paid 9-month salaries that come from core funds (ie: teaching, paid for by tuition, government funds, etc.). Yes, bringing grants matters, but given that grant $ have not really changed in decades, it is a huge relief to not have to fund one's own salary (beyond 3 summer months). During dry spells, students can be supported on TAships or fellowships here and there, and if you relatively low-cost experiments, small internal grants can tide you by. This is the real reason you'd have trouble with this model. You'd then need grant $ to directly pay 100% of faculty salaries. Unless you can solve this problem I don't see scientists leaving universities.

The big exception is of course medical schools/ medical research, where faculty positions are largely soft money (some minimal base salary is usually covered).

Re: Could science leave the university?

#20

Post by throwaway5752 »

This is a marvelous example of how political influence in the United States works.

Mind the Campus is an umbrella group of a conservative lobbying group - a 501(c)(3) - called the National Association of Scholars (NAS) https://www.nas.org/about-us. See https://www.mindingthecampus.org/about/ to confirm the relationship. You can see details of NAS's lobbying programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Schola.... It is in turn funded by major foundations (Scaife, Olin, Bradley) that fund multiple, coordinating advocacy organizations to achieve policy outcomes.

Nothing is wrong with this, but it is pretty classic technique to create independent sounding subsidiaries like this for different influence effects, on different audiences.

This is not to say that the article is wrong, it's just to provide context for readers who may not know it's a piece from a conservative lobbying group. It part of a broader, coordinated strategy and is crafted to influence a specific policy outcome.

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