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 university. In other words, a different way of organizing research.
I don't say I necessarily agree with that position. it would have large implications on how advanced degrees are given, which is part of why the government pay for research in addition to the science output. There for sure are other things that must be handled differently in society as well, but that's the argument as I understand it. To some extent government labs as well as private research organizations to some extent do research outside of universities already, but most science happens inside universities and is combined with education.
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.
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.
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.
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 would paste over the difference for a while at least.
Or, the individual scientists' reputations are enough to pull along the grants when they go.
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.
Why should that be a problem? But it doesn't even need to be true. If the quality of the advanced degree drops sufficiently, there's no problem, except one of academic credibility.
> we can't adequately absorb the intellectual capacity of the population
Think that's been true for a long time, yank any early 20th-century factory worker out of their job, you'll find a human intellect not being fully utilized. In fact just use a contemporary worker and the same thing is true. We can't all be getting grants to study something, society has to create some extra wealth first.
Actually, that’s perilously close to the situation facing academics today. Contingent (also called adjunct) faculty are responsible for more and more collegiate instruction. Indeed, tenured professors are a shrinking proportion of the university’s teaching personnel.
Does this mean that academics have suffered from universities emphasis on leaving scientists to do science, instead of focusing on teaching?
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).
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.
I often remark that it's so easy to fail to replicate any moderately complex experiment, so you really have to do a great job to be sure that it's actually invalid. Whether it's the chemistry, equipment, or animals (even yeast) involved there are so many variables that need to be controlled only an expert can do it. If you think that the Methodology and experimental setup will (or even could) be sufficient, you're in for a rude surprise.
Now there's now so much low hanging fruit, that it might be possible for a few labs to just look at the most outrageous published experimental claims for replication. Especially, anything published in a prestigious journal or groups with lots of influence could be carefully examined, but of course you have to do a great job to get your negative results published... it's also worth mentioning that the reputational risks of doing this are not small. If you're already being pushed out of academia and love working for peanuts though?
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 creates some extremely niche subdomains where the same 5-10 peer reviewers decide what's considered valid research. We treat science like arcane magic. The incentives of academia (tenure, hierarchy, status) only amplify the arcana. And those stuck in their nichiest of domains don't get exposed to new ideas.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Of course it is all way more complicated than “evil blood sucking admin” vs “noble scientist”.
1. Administrators have their own “owners”: namely federal and state funders, certification and evaluation authorities. All can make and break a research institution.
2. Many administrators are or have been researchers. They are not unaware of these core problems.
3. I agree that administrative bloat is very real. The typical excuse us “but look at all the new regulatory mandates.”
I live next door to a federal lab. They do not have a teaching mission but they appear to have even more byzantine administrative oversight than we do. In fact, our university research is nimble and light in comparison.
This piece misses the realities of funding and labor for top-tier science.
Labor: Graduate students are inexpensive and doing the work for love. Without them, science becomes extremely expensive (and more effective, but not more-effective enough to, apparently, be worth the price of staff scientists).
Funding: Good luck getting the NSF to fund your proposal at actual market rate, especially if you don't intend to educate any graduate students.
There is a lot of societal value in basic science, but the returns happen on decadal and multi-decadal scales. Few non-governmental partners, other than philanthropic former scientists or science philanthropists (thank you, Keck and Simons Foundations!) have the vision and commitment to reap and sow scientific progress.
Science has always been free to leave the university, and it often does, but the lack of self-emergent long-term science institutions (Where's the private NIST, LHC, LIGO, or Webb?) suggests that it's a tough road to travel. When there's enough near-term promise, as in quantum-computing or genomic sequencing, industry can leap in and drive things forward.
This is conservative lobbying spam. The umbrella group producing this document is called the "National Academy of Scholars" (NAS), which publishes articles about "globalists" and is funded by conservative donors (see https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/annual...).
Annoyingly, the National Academy of Scholars was named in a way that collides in the namespace with the (actually reputable) National Academy of Sciences (publishers of PNAS).
You may not like who funded the article, but it still makes valid points about the limitations of science research being so heavily connected to the mouse-maze that is college academics.
As opposed to the mouse-maze that is corporate finance?
BTW, private companies have also been doing science for decades. Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC? Battelle Labs? SpaceX? Tesla?
What we've learned is what kinds of research is best conducted by what kind of entity - commercial or private. We don't need the fallacy of this false dichotomy.
I think we should push for the other direction: let's get the unnecessary administrators out of universities. In particular, let's make schools show that greater than k% of their budget goes to actual instruction in order to be eligible to receive federal student loan dollars (and the threshold should rise over time).
It's still really silly to me that schools push towards having a lot of instruction (their core product!) done by adjuncts whose contracts may or may not be renewed for any term, but they have so many administrators and non-instruction staff who are full time with pretty great job security.
Your analysis leaves out the third big activity at universities: research. The core product of most schools (the top ones at least) is not instruction but papers and grant proposals. You are right on administrators though.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] threadI don't say I necessarily agree with that position. it would have large implications on how advanced degrees are given, which is part of why the government pay for research in addition to the science output. There for sure are other things that must be handled differently in society as well, but that's the argument as I understand it. To some extent government labs as well as private research organizations to some extent do research outside of universities already, but most science happens inside universities and is combined with education.
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.
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.
Or, the individual scientists' reputations are enough to pull along the grants when they go.
Think that's been true for a long time, yank any early 20th-century factory worker out of their job, you'll find a human intellect not being fully utilized. In fact just use a contemporary worker and the same thing is true. We can't all be getting grants to study something, society has to create some extra wealth first.
Does this mean that academics have suffered from universities emphasis on leaving scientists to do science, instead of focusing on teaching?
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.
Now there's now so much low hanging fruit, that it might be possible for a few labs to just look at the most outrageous published experimental claims for replication. Especially, anything published in a prestigious journal or groups with lots of influence could be carefully examined, but of course you have to do a great job to get your negative results published... it's also worth mentioning that the reputational risks of doing this are not small. If you're already being pushed out of academia and love working for peanuts though?
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 creates some extremely niche subdomains where the same 5-10 peer reviewers decide what's considered valid research. We treat science like arcane magic. The incentives of academia (tenure, hierarchy, status) only amplify the arcana. And those stuck in their nichiest of domains don't get exposed to new ideas.
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.
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.
The big exception is of course medical schools/ medical research, where faculty positions are largely soft money (some minimal base salary is usually covered).
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.
1. Administrators have their own “owners”: namely federal and state funders, certification and evaluation authorities. All can make and break a research institution.
2. Many administrators are or have been researchers. They are not unaware of these core problems.
3. I agree that administrative bloat is very real. The typical excuse us “but look at all the new regulatory mandates.”
I live next door to a federal lab. They do not have a teaching mission but they appear to have even more byzantine administrative oversight than we do. In fact, our university research is nimble and light in comparison.
Labor: Graduate students are inexpensive and doing the work for love. Without them, science becomes extremely expensive (and more effective, but not more-effective enough to, apparently, be worth the price of staff scientists).
Funding: Good luck getting the NSF to fund your proposal at actual market rate, especially if you don't intend to educate any graduate students.
There is a lot of societal value in basic science, but the returns happen on decadal and multi-decadal scales. Few non-governmental partners, other than philanthropic former scientists or science philanthropists (thank you, Keck and Simons Foundations!) have the vision and commitment to reap and sow scientific progress.
Science has always been free to leave the university, and it often does, but the lack of self-emergent long-term science institutions (Where's the private NIST, LHC, LIGO, or Webb?) suggests that it's a tough road to travel. When there's enough near-term promise, as in quantum-computing or genomic sequencing, industry can leap in and drive things forward.
Annoyingly, the National Academy of Scholars was named in a way that collides in the namespace with the (actually reputable) National Academy of Sciences (publishers of PNAS).
BTW, private companies have also been doing science for decades. Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC? Battelle Labs? SpaceX? Tesla?
What we've learned is what kinds of research is best conducted by what kind of entity - commercial or private. We don't need the fallacy of this false dichotomy.
It's still really silly to me that schools push towards having a lot of instruction (their core product!) done by adjuncts whose contracts may or may not be renewed for any term, but they have so many administrators and non-instruction staff who are full time with pretty great job security.