Could science leave the university?
mindingthecampus.org
mindingthecampus.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?