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by imadethis 1289 days ago
I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
3 comments

Oversupply. I hate to be a heretic against the orthodoxy, but viable academia needs to be startup- and business-focused on delivering useful, productizable impact rather than pure research. (Stanford Med School is like this, as are some other departments.) Publishing is still perishable if it doesn't result in concrete utility.

Google Translate's live camera font changing.. was Word Lens and was a Stanford thesis before that.

Lytro field camera... was Stanford research.

Impossible Burger... was Stanford GMO heme.

Google... Stanford.

Cisco...

VMware...

HP...

Nike, TSMC, Trader Joe's, Netflix, PayPal, Nvidia, Varian, Charles Schwab, Atari, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, ..

^ It's no coincidence: it's mindset, talent, support, and connections that comprise a superorganism / ecosystem.
Various non tenure track positions at entry level colleges, with no research.
and therein lies the quandry that sinno exposed.