[DannyBee]

You have this impression of universities that i don't believe has been true for at least 100 years, if not more.

Research professors at schools have been mostly funded by either commercial or military interests for a very long time now. Even in non-direct cases, universities have "tech transfer" offices that are commercializing stuff, and continued funding often depends on that.

If you are going to claim this model is bad and that it produces bad results, you are going to have to offer at least a little evidence that the models that existed before this, worked, and were better for humanity.

I might agree with the second part in some ways, but I dont' think they supported anywhere near the amount or level of research that occurs now.

Research is definitely more goal directed than it used to be, but this is not totally good or totally bad, it's just "different".

[cscheid]

The Bayh-Dole act is less than 100 years old, but it is in my view one of the major causes of the phenomenon you describe.

(It should also be, incidentally, taught as one of the great examples of unintended consequences: by all accounts it was designed to increase the independence of universities by letting them keep the monies they got from commercialization. Then somewhere along the way policy-makers realized Bayh-Dole was a great excuse to encourage universities to do tech transfer. And now essentially every grant that doesn't have some tech transfer proposal is almost automatically in trouble when compared against those that do.)