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Comment by ElViajero | Hacker News Reader

I understand that there is a historical expectations that Universities should provide education and be a role model for society. But, as far as I know, in the USA universities are just another business.

The USA should stop being surprised each time that a company rises prices of a live-saving treatment or starts a patent troll company. Some of this kind of problems are exclusively a USA problem and do not exist in other developed parts of the world.

Why is that?

My 2 cents are that you need is to create rules for a fair game. As a society you should regulate how companies behave, what is permitted and what is not. You elect your government make it work for you. It is not always easy, as there are many interests, but it is possible.

For the USA citizens that may read this, you know better your country. What is your opinion?

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> For the USA citizens that may read this, you know better your country. What is your opinion?

I left academia because it was clear to me that professors were rapidly becoming commoditized by the administrators.

First, it was the students (both grad and undergrad), then the adjunct faculty, and then the tenure track/tenured faculty.

I don’t know for sure (esp. about the early years), but it seemed to me like this trend started in the 80s, gathered steam and the 90s, and hit its stride in the 00s.

IMHO, this is the byproduct of the white collarization (administrationization) of as much of US society as possible, especially notable in education and medicine (where the doctors have been commoditized by the admins). I personally think that so much of this is make-work for a society that should be moving towards post-work, but US society has culturally ingrained work ethic guilt that makes equality and leisure things that are not aggressively sought after consistently throughout society. The end result is administrators who essentially make work for each other while providing much less societal value than is justified by their cost while actively devaluing the “real” work done by those around them.

This patent stuff is just a continuation of the power grab of the university administrators.

I think you have a very good point. I can also see this through my career. Everytime there is some restructuring more power ends up in the hand of administrators. In particular you can see that systems are generally build to reduce administration workload (because they work regular 9-5) at the cost of more work for academics (because their work hours are not counted) .

I am not sure you're correct about the cause though. My theory is it's a side effect of trying to have quantifiable outcomes everywhere, which essentially requires more admin.

> The end result is administrators who essentially make work for each other while providing much less societal value than is justified by their cost while actively devaluing the “real” work done by those around them.

I wonder if this is inevitable -- the administrative staff's purpose is administration and it wants to do more of it -- or if there's a way to prevent that at the institutional level.

One thing would be giving irrevocable rights and powers to professors at public universities, a lot of countries do that but I'm not sure how well it works against "administrationization."

It does seem like putting the researchers in charge might help starve the cancerous administrative class, but maybe you have to start your own university in order to implement this?

> I wonder if this is inevitable -- the administrative staff's purpose is administration and it wants to do more of it -- or if there's a way to prevent that at the institutional level.

The iron law of bureaucracy seems to apply. Maybe the only option is to tear down institutions every so often and replace them with new ones.

> One thing would be giving irrevocable rights and powers to professors at public universities, a lot of countries do that but I'm not sure how well it works against "administrationization."

Maybe it works for a while, but you only have to look at the steady erosion of tenure in UK universities to see how this fails. In the US there seems to be a more subtle approach of pushing tenure dates later and later in the career path, so that gradually more and more of what were once professors are now adjuncts and grad students.

Cheers for Ralph Miliband, the smart Marxist: http://on.ft.com/1hCbCiC. Pre managerialism, he predicted its rise.

Also Burnham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visible_Hand

>but US society has culturally ingrained work ethic guilt that makes equality and leisure things that are not aggressively sought after consistently throughout society.

Here's a picture of that thing: https://i.imgur.com/GYlzOhQ.jpg

Credit: Android Jones

America's biggest problem are the Too Big to Fail™ + Too Big To Prosecute™ banks and their Fed. By controlling the currency supply, and through it the economy, they control the country. It's ultimately behind every systemic economic problem people face. It's designed that way as what amounts to a byzantine pyramid scheme.

When they fucked up and crashed the economy, who got bailed out? The citizens and taxpayers or the country's real owners?

The joke goes in Canada they apologize in America they sue.

The issue is the patent system itself. It’s needs to be reformed as right now it’s very much an arms race for defense and exploitation.

I kind of like china’s approach of lax ip enforcement. Goes a long way to encourage R&D.

Or just make parents enforceable for 5-10 years total. The current 20+ years is too longs these days given the recent increased pace of innovation.

Ideally there should be more nuance in patent durations. 20 years for a new steam turbine design seems entirely reasonable. 20 years for a new electronic gadget like an improved LED seems too long.

But any way to get different patent durations would probably be gamed and/or unfair, so maybe just reducing the patent duration to 10 years is the best approach.

Our political system is dysfunctional. So even if some people realize problems with the rules, corporations and other entities will lobby so as to continue profiteering. In addition, US culture really values making money and forming profitable businesses, and people have been conditioned to view any attack on businesses as an attack on the "free market" (even though, e.g., patents are the opposite of free). So, if you talk about, for example, reforming patents, people talk about how you are ending innovative (read profitable) businesses.

> USA universities are just another business

The vast majority of US colleges accept government grants and don’t pay taxes. So it is reasonable to hold them to a higher standard than a normal business.

> So it is reasonable to hold them to a higher standard than a normal business.

One important practical difference is that Academia doesn't pay its individual contributors even close to market rate.

When I started my PhD, I had seven job offers. Five were PhD programs, and the pay ranged from $25K to $40K or so (but the $25K option paid better than the $40K option because of CoL). The other two were in finance and tech, and paid $200K and $150K respectively.

I wouldn't ever have taken a PhD job if I didn't own the IP I generated.

1. Citizens United.

2. A populace that is so beaten down, and slaves to the wealthy/corporations, they can't afford to effectively rally against the system.

3. A populace that still is under the delusion that the American way is the best way. Greed is good. I don't think I ever met a young person whom didn't believe they would make it big one day, on their own. (The rich kids always leave out dad's empathic help received up into their 30's when giving that "Horatio Algiers" speech. The only people I see making the American dream are from wealthy families? (Gavin Neusome, whom I really like, and went to school with, would probally be homeless, or a drug addict if not for that caring, wealthy family. He had some big stumbling blocks family took care of growing up. I know members of his family. I know how much help he got while finding his calling in his 20's to 30's. Now he's living the American dream. Again--he's a good guy, and he knows what it's like to have problems. I think that why he's a practical liberal politician?)

4. Spirituality, morality, and ethics are something that used to be admired, now it's just for suckers.

5. I am kinda proud of our legal system some months? I imagine that will slowly change over the years though. The Senate has filled 1 Federal Judge seat since Biden took office. Under Trump, McConnel was to ordered to fill vacant seats like a drive though at an In and Out Burger, after a cannabis rally.

6. America used to be better, and most Americans still believe it's a great country. (I would happily move to a Scandinavian, or certain European countries if I was younger. Hell--Canada, and Australia look ok? Any country that truly helps it's poor is fine with me.)

How does he both know what's it's like to have problems, and have had his parents pay his way out of all his problems?

The difference is that in many cases, universities are a business that's also subsidized by the government, which makes it even easier for them to engage in monopolistic behavior.

At least in the case of drug markets it is not necessarily a matter of too much or little regulation but rather a matter of bad vs good regulations:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...

In the famous case of epipens it is true that a complete absence of price control is a problem, but the price spike was also made possible by the de facto epipens manifacturing monopoly granted by the FDA.

In this case there are heavy regulation regarding entering a market AND few regulations inside the market.

EDIT: changed insulin to epipens to match the article

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 was a mistake.

Intellectual Slavery laws are bad, and are disastrous as we move further into the Information Age and we need to repeal them http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendmen...

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