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Comment by goodwinb | Hacker News Reader

Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect?

They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money.

I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor.

What business model in the future should universities follow?

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The model already exist: school vs. universities.

It is just---and this is just my opinion---that as human knowledge became bigger and bigger, what the people at the edge, pushing the envelope do, is further and further from what a 1st year undergraduate does.

Basically we would need another school in the middle for what is a BA/BSci for example, and use univeristy (and university professors) for masters and phds.

As for your example of hard core research professor, the problem is that at one point the number of professors who know a subject become very very small, and hence it's important to put the student directly in contact with those who are expert in the field. Alas it doesn't always work. But for very high levels (masters and phds) that's the only way it can be.

As a counter argument, from the wikipedia article on Richard Feynman:

Feynman gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood.

Right, but the school v. university model is breaking down for more than one reason. The problem has two edges. Just when you want, because of the expanding boundaries of knowledge, increasingly well-prepared undergraduates, you get the opposite. US universities typically have to teach a depressingly unchallenging hodgepodge of general education courses and remedial courses because students get fucked by the high-school system and because everyone and his brother these days simply must to go to college, no matter how dumb the brother is. A society that depends on universities to teach basic English composition, to take the most egregious example, is like ... well, I can't think of anything that's quite that ridiculous, but it's a massive waste of resources. But it's also a problem that no one wants to solve: It relieves high schools of the burden of actually teaching anything. It's lucrative for the universities, which just throw cheap grad students at the problem. And the four-year continuation of secondary education that the University has become for many is a nice (if hugely expensive, but who gives a fuck) way to keep down unemployment. End of Rant.

I couldn't agree more. I attended a small liberal arts college and feel that I learned a lot from dedicated professors who did little, if any, research. And then I was a graduate student at a university where teaching was considered a chore by professors who wanted to spend their time in the laboratory. At the very least, there should be a greater demarcation between undergraduate professors (who should be teachers) and graduate professors (who should be researchers). As to your business model question, one start would be to make research more grant-contingent. This already happens in hard sciences, but could be applied more to humanities as well.

Yes. University level teaching needs to be done by academics, otherwise it wouldn't be university level, but it doesn't have to be done in universities.

Or, to put it another way, the problem is not that academics do research, it's that no-one else has read and understands the relevant literature to be able to teach up-to-date at that level.

Why not create a university that gets good academics who can also teach (train them if necessary) and pays them good money to do the teaching well. They would continue to do research somewhere else. That somewhere else would be a university with grad students, but no under-grads, and it would pay on the basis of research alone, with no internal teaching.

The idea is that the experts pass on their knowledge, gained from research, to the students. Sure there are a large number of people who can teach, say, Calculus 1, but there are dramatically fewer who can teach the higher level courses. This is one of the attractions of top universities -- you have the leading experts in the fields teaching their specialities. Thus it isn't clear to me that teaching and research should be separated at the highest level. At the University of Phoenix level, yes, it makes sense.

The merger of research and teaching is a public good, for multiple reasons. One, it makes it easier for teachers to spend some time doing. (naturally apprenticeship programs could serve the same goal) Two, it makes the public bankroll research they might not otherwise see the importance of (having very poor understanding of how progress works.)

I don't think you understand what a public good is. A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not.

Further, research subsidizes teaching at most research universities, not the other way around. Universities take almost half of the NSF's budget in the form of "overhead", most of which is subsidizing teaching and general university waste.

There is also a major harm - most people are not good at both research and teaching. By merging teaching with research, you force people to perform two tasks, only one of which they are well suited for. The job "professor" is about as nonsensical as "ninja developer"; if we merged assassination and development, the result would be pasty white nerds getting shot by bodyguards and sneaky Japanese guys providing endless material for DailyWTF.

>A public good is a good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludible. Published research fits this criteria. Teaching does not.

As I said, the merger of the two is a public good. It makes research a fundamental part of our notion of learning, and it makes undirected research possible.

I'm firmly in the teachers should do, and doers should teach camp. Society as a whole is better off if there is cross-pollination between these two fields. If you can only do, no one will benefit from your knowledge. If you can only teach, what exactly are you teaching? So teaching is not 'waste.' Industry would do well to allocate significant resources to teaching, and in fact they do. Government has more freedom to think long-term and focus on fostering more researchers at the expense of present gains. If you had your way, it would create significant gains in the next ten years, but out 20-30 years, there would be a significant drop off.

In fact, there's evidence we're already experiencing this drop-off, due to declining school funding, both at the university and k-12 level.

Undirected research is quite possible outside the university system. Perhaps you've heard of Bell Labs? When the government still subsidized them [1], they did plenty of undirected research. In the university system, about 50% of the money the government has earmarked for research is actually used for that purpose. At Bell Labs, the number was close to 100%.

Most grant supported research groups do plenty of undirected research, and the NSF rarely objects when a project makes discoveries not listed in the grant proposal.

You are telling me that (roughly) doubling the amount of money devoted to research will harm research? I really don't understand the mechanism by which that would happen.

"If you can only do, no one will benefit from your knowledge."

Let me be very precise, since you seem to want to misinterpret what I wrote.

A researcher's skill set: generating new knowledge and spreading it to other researchers, and eventually practitioners. This is done through published papers, presentations at conferences, conversation and source code. Generating new knowledge is the primary skill here - other researchers will usually go to great effort to understand it.

A teacher's skill set: understanding existing knowledge and spreading it to people with no background in a classroom setting. The primary skill is motivation and understand people very different from you (e.g., premeds who hate math rather than other math Ph.D.s), and maintaining discipline. The goal is to convey existing knowledge, so creating new knowledge (the primary skill of a researcher) is more or less irrelevant.

There are not that many people who have both of these skill sets. I only had the researcher's skill set, and I know many people with the teacher's skill set.

Also, by "waste", I was referring to general university waste - overpaid and under worked administrators, duplicate offices, etc. If you ever work at a university, you will realize how wasteful they are.

[1] I believe the system was that every dollar AT&T lost at Bell Labs was deducted from their tax bill.

>You are telling me that (roughly) doubling the amount of money devoted to research will harm research? I really don't understand the mechanism by which that would happen.

Again, because you are taking that money away from education. Good education is a fundamental part of good research. They don't need to be in the same building, but they do need to have the same people involved, if only that the researcher was at some point educated.

>There are not that many people who have both of these skill sets. I only had the researcher's skill set, and I know many people with the teacher's skill set.

It doesn't matter. You should try to teach anyway. If you're any good at what you do your experience will be worth something to the people you teach. You experience is in many ways more valuable in teaching 30 students for a year than it is applying that experience. Education is a multiplier, not simply additive.

Obviously, you need both. But trying to do each in a vacuum is short-sighted.

I'm confused - first you wanted education to subsidize research. Wouldn't that have been taking money away from education, back when you believed that was the status quo? It seems as if your fundamental assumption is that the status quo must be correct.

In any case, yes, I agree with you that most researchers will need to have some sort of undergrad education. I don't see any reason why that education should be provided by researchers - cheap adjunct professors seem to do a reasonably good job at it.

(I do agree that a PhD program will need to be taught by researchers, since it is basically just an apprenticeship.)

As for teaching, my experience was worth considerably less to my students than a better ability to explain simple concepts would have been. The fact that I developed a nice outgoing wave filter for the Schrodinger equation did not help my fashion business student who barely knew algebra. It didn't even help the top 2-3 students who were breezing through my class, who might (possibly) have understood the concept of a PDE, or at least nodded along as if they did.

What might have helped them was someone who (like them) struggled with calculus, mastered it, and knew where the difficult points were. It also might have helped to have someone who could get to know students, understand how they learn best, and then tailor the lessons to suit them. Or someone who can look at a sea of blank faces and determine when they are confused. Unfortunately, that person wasn't me. I know a number of people who are that person, but only a small fraction of them have published anything beyond their PhD thesis.

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