Bain:The financially sustainable university

There are some tired old canards here.

The main job of the technology transfer office seems to be, in a lot of places, preventing graduate students walking out the door with their inventions and developing it.

So often I have seen faculty members who have lost a year or more thanks to fights with the technology transfer office which has no appreciation at all for the risk/reward aspects of technology and imagines that it could get (say) Microsoft to buy the rights for something for a big fixed fee and some royalty and then wind up putting it on the shelf after it fails to get 20 random "best and brightest" people to turn it into a product or even reproduce the result.

Also I have close experience with University IT and I can say there have always been scattered centers of incredible incompetence in University there have also been centers of excellence which survived despite the system. Those have been systematically squeezed out by centralization efforts while managing to reproduce the incompetence plus a lot of overhead spending, scandals, lower pay, worker burnout, etc.

After this policy which predictably creates failure now they will reproduce the incompetence in some foreign land and then once the locals learn to cringe at certain accents, move the jobs to some other country which the locals won't recognized, etc.