“The point of a University is to give a civilization what it needs ; not what businessmen want .” Dijkstra never missed.
No business I worked for values what modern universities are producing.
Universities are failing to boost economic growth
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Re: Universities are failing to boost economic growth
#32Universities exist to educate young people and set them on the path to lifelong growth. This shift to being a cheaper place for industrial research is a nauseating aberration. There is nothing wrong with applied research, having practical goals in mind, or spinning off research findings. When they become the objective, we get the reproducibility and integrity crises that reach and remain on the HN front page every da…
As of now, American universities seem to exist chiefly to support an enormously bloated, parasitic administration at the cost of young peoples' heavy debt and precarious working arrangements of junior faculty. That is a nauseating aberration to me.
The generations before mine paid taxes so that I could attend a superb public University for very little money. But, about the time I entered that University, tax cut fever took root. A few years later, the costs started to climb through the roof and the incentives changed. My generation didn't fight hard enough or if we did, we lost the battle. Public anything is now poison in the US and I don't think it will improve in my lifetime. It will probably get even worse.
Re: Universities are failing to boost economic growth
#33We licensed IP from a Uni. It was so basic that we had to do all the development work losing our investors in the process.
That's kind of expected! A relevant perspective from looking at this is the Technological Readiness Level concept ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level ) - you'd expect university research to bring new ideas up to TRL4 or perhaps TRL5, but going from that to TRL8-9 so that it's ready for buyers is the development-heavy part of R&D that should be done in the industry (or perhaps in academia if fun…
Yes and no. Most universities are not equipped/funded to go from TRL2 to TRL 4 or 5. Many great ideas end up in drawers because of that. That's when startups step in but they need to be funded as well. However, at least they aim for commercialization - academia not so much.