[dingo454]

I started to work as a staff member of a local research center mostly doing foundational research (genetics, life sciences), publicly founded so no conflict of interests. At some point, the founding body (the local administration) decided that general research wasn't cool anymore, and was thought to be a waste of money. They should only found "targeted research", an idea which sounds good in theory, but in practice is a sure way to destroy research at it's core. The first result is that any researcher that wasn't working on something mandated from above had either to shift (destroying his work) or leave. New positions would only be open to work on targeted projects.

The net result was a massive loss of bright researchers, massive churn and the death of pretty much any promising research endeavor (it's hard to do great research on a 2 years contract already, but doing so without infrastructure...).

The administration also started to push aggressively for this idea that we should try to apply for patents in anything that seems even vaguely applicable, and in order to keep the financing going the center had to sign a contract that "guarantees an increased in throughput of 2% every year", where the throughput is measured in pubblications. Again, this requires no explanation for whoever has worked in research, but for the others: it's impossible: it just promotes lower and lower-quality of output in order to meet the criteria, until it will bust.

This also gives an idea how the center and the local administration fail to understand how research work on a basic principle.

The local group has started to apply aggressively for more and more EU grants (which are the only one that can provide vaguely sustainable research), which in turn resulted in staff doing less research and much more grant writing. We now have staff whose purpose is doing just that.

Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.

[mschuster91]

> Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.

It is closely related to a shift in the definition of "what purpose should academia serve?"

Basically, old-school academia had the government pay a lot of money to universities to do general research and educate students to be researchers, and then the military paid more money for research that could be usable for military purposes (encryption, rocketry, nuclear). Training of new employees was paid for by the companies themselves (e.g. apprenticeships).

Nowadays, governments have massively cut general research budgets (leaving universities and research to the mercy of grantors aka the free market), the military is running its own show (aka the MIC sucks in enormous amounts of money and puts it into private coffers), and companies have outsourced training and vetting of new employees to universities and the payment for all of that to the students in form of student loans, which means that universities are no longer primarily a place of research but of schooling.

It's a real disgrace what happened over the last decades, and the Western world will pay badly for this since China does not follow this turbo-capitalist ideology.

[Nav_Panel]

This is also something addressed in Lyotard's book "Postmodern Condition"; the federal funding was more of the "end" than the "beginning", in the sense that it was when the purpose of the university became "output", rather than something else.

He presents two alternatives for "what is the purpose of academia?" that date back to the 19th century and earlier. On the one hand, is the "German" approach, of "the great encyclopedia of knowledge", where the universities steward research for its own sake, to discover truths about the world. The other hand is the "French" approach, where the goal of the university was to produce well-rounded, educated citizens. He argues that both of these goals are effectively obsolete, and what now matters is "performativity", i.e. producing "value".

My sense is that the immense military funding signals the initial shift, especially since the fundamental nature of the university changed so much as a result of mass admissions after the GI bill. No longer was it a sort of "special" place for intellectuals; now everybody goes to college, so these older, more "romantic" goals become problematized.

[amcoastal]

Not sure why this is being downvoted. If someone has a point against this opinion, I'm interested to hear it.

[kortilla]

It’s a nice story but it doesn’t make any sense. Corporations didn’t force universities to do anything. Quite the opposite.

Universities realized that they had a blank check in the form of student loans. Enticing students to study philosophy at $40k a year is a little difficult when there are no job prospects to pay back that loan.

So how do you get students to pay obscene tuition? Make the product appear to have good ROI. This is when universities started altering core curriculums and created new degrees to cover more applied topics that are useful for employment.

Businesses actually don’t care that much about college education (in SWE hiring it’s only relevant when the candidate has approximately no experience). This tide of shitty, expensive university was entirely brought on by the universities wanting to sustain obscene tuition growth.

This has nothing to do with businesses dumping training onto universities. This is purely greedy universities pretending they are a blessed training path to a good job to justify a price.

[mschuster91]

Probably because HN generally leans towards a "small government", libertarian, capitalist point of view whereas I'm advocating for a strong government, social-democrat position.

[Retric]

No, it’s trying to justify these changes. Universities have become bloated and optimized to suck as much value from outside funding sources as possible. The fundamental question is if their not paying for research, why exactly should they own anything?

This is especially true for students, which are paying money to go somewhere and then suddenly also need to give up their IP.

[throwaway0a5e]

>This is especially true for students, which are paying money

And before anyone says "stipend" I'd like to point out that someone who could work in industry but is instead spending an additional couple years doing research is incurring a heck of an opportunity cost.

[cycomanic]

If you make research funding essentially only available through competitive grants, then obviously universities are applying for those. So yes they are applying for outside funding, who else is going to do fundamental research?

Also regarding IP, I'm not sure about the US, but in all the countries I've worked in students retain their IP. In fact looking at some online sources this applies also to the US.

It has recently become popular here on HN to bash universities, but at least keep it factual.

[monetus]

(Not the person you were responding to) I'm curious what countries you have had experience with? Direct praise of the university programs you had may be due?

My favorite audio language, pure data, was created after IRCAM kept the IP for max/msp - if I recall correctly. This seemed to motivate the author, miller puckette, as he seemed to form an ethos of accessibility. Now pure data is supposed to have a ~25 year support cycle along with mit/bsd licensing. Ableton, a german company, bought max/msp after a few decades of it being on its own.