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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

> said Dogan Gursoy, one of the study’s authors and the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University

The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.

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> I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor

Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y

It seems there's also a "Coca Cola distinguished professor of marketing" and a "Yahoo! chair of information systems technology" too.

It's gross

While I imagine it just means they sponsored the academic institution, likely a good thing, but there's something unshakeably "idiocracy"-flavored dystopian about fast food product placement on professors.

It turns from Idiocracy-flavored comedy-dystopian into bona fide dystopian rather quickly once you dig into what a multinational corporation does around and besides the product they're recognized for. "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management" may sound funny, but if I ever heard about McDonald's Professor of Genetics, or Disney's Professor of Applied Robotics, I'd start getting worried.

(In other words, "Continuum" vibes. An underrated Canadian sci-fi show featuring "Corporate Congress" and a bunch of luxury brands of today turning into serious industrial/energy/medical players under 50 years from now.)

> Disney's Professor of Applied Robotics

Disney's robotics are legit though, they do a lot of work and research in that area

I think they had a skunkworks spin-off out in a Connecticut suburb working on hyper-feminine, hyper-realistic androids at some point.

That's precisely my point. Disney may still be mostly a kids' brand, but I bet their robotics department would hold its own if corporate decided to enter heavy industry or military robotics markets. The brand may seem like a joke, but the expertise isn't.

I think the reply was to point out that people respect disney robotics. I bet more people know about disney robotics than boston dynamics.

I think it is a "you"-thing thinking others also devalue disney because "kid movies" or some other property. There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds. Or marketing by coke.

Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.

> Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.

Maybe it's' indeed a "me" problem, but I only vaguely know about "imagineering" thing via HN; it's not something I think I'd stumbled on otherwise. As far as I can tell, for most people I know, Disney is the kids programming producer that often makes stuff adults enjoy just as much, if not more, than kids, plus the company that took over Star Wars. A subset of them is also aware that the House of Mouse has a scary legal department.

> There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds.

McDonald's must be a powerhouse in logistics and process engineering - and in case of the latter, it's not a big leap from making food to making drugs or advanced materials. I know a little bit about adjacent fields from the software side; the food processing plant and a chemical manufacturing plant use pretty much the same tools and processes.

A couple of years ago the University of Cape Town had a property called the "Shell Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building".

But nowadays only the weathered shadows on the facade remain where the letters "Shell" once were mounted.

Western Australia announced a "Greentech Hub" for environmental technology and innovation, sponsored by Chevron [0].

Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.

As usual, nothing has been heard from the Greentech Hub since it was announced by the relevant minister almost a year ago. Which is fine, because the entire point of the thing was to have it announced by the relevant minister.

It's all very Yes Minister / Utopia, and we all see straight through it.

[0] https://startupnews.com.au/news/minister-dawson-announces-ne...

> Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations.

The catastrophic levels of human deaths resulting from food shortages and supply chain disruption (and basically everything supporting civilization) would surely lower global CO2 emissions!

Y'see, I have more faith in human ingenuity than this. We'd cope. Yes, there'd be a bunch of deaths and life might get a little less pleasant. But we'd cope. We'd find something else to fill the gap, and get everything back to a new normal.

> Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.

Yea, but that would just make some other player take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in green tech.

Presumably one would shut them down by making their cost externalizations illegal, not by specifically dismantling the single company.

Ok but what if I said: we shouldn't arrest cartel hitmen, because that would just make some other murderer take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in nonviolent conflict management?

Believe it or not, law enforcement agencies actually do that, more or less every day, in every country. There is value in having crime organised, predictable, somewhat circumscribed, and controlled by people you can communicate with and influence to a degree.

Real life is rarely binary.

I think you meant "towards marketing claiming green tech".

And to think Australia was basically the first major country to try to introduce a carbon tax back in the Julia Gillard days. Now, it looks more like the last major country still resisting any change, no matter how small, to the oil-fueled economy, by spinning words and actions to the extreme in order to look "green" while splurging in oil like Texans gushers in the early 1900's.

Aren’t fossil fuels from plants and good for plant life ? I mean plants breath in co2 and out o2. Higher co2 levels could probably turn deserts green.

Coca-Cola Professor of Marketing seems fitting though - Coca-Cola is probably one of the most capable marketing organizations the planet has ever seen.

In sports this happens all the time. I guess it was only a matter of time before it hit education and professors.

Ex.

The Poulan/Weedeater Independence Bowl

Guaranteed Rate Field

Smoothie King Center

And my fav: Bargain Booze Stadium

These are all things not people

Sports teams are named by and/or owned by brands too.

And that brand naming also sounds terrible. Candlestick Park or Comesky Park is a way better name than Levi's Stadium or Gauranteed Rate Field, for eff's sake.

Entire leagues as well.

The Barclay Card English Premier League comes to mind.

There was a post a TechCrunch article posted here a couple of months ago referring to the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT. This probably happens in other fields too, but every time I've seen one of these brand-deal titles has been in an AI related article.

It really does read like a line from Idiocracy.

I can imagine the silk gowns being covered in brand logos.

The ridiculousness lies entirely on the US having sponsored professors.

Historically lots of academics were sponsored by the nobility, right? Say what you will about Taco Bell, I’ll take their sponsorship over a bunch of pretentious thugs and hereditary gangsters.

> pretentious thugs

Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.

There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation

Going out on a limb and say that’s not a majority opinion.

Possibly, people romanticize the gangsters of the last century already, and they don’t even have the benefit of a thousand years of propaganda.

He just happens to prefer Taco shaped diagrams.

Taco Bell is not nobility. Nobility = warriors

1000 years of English aristocracy disagrees: nobility = landowners

Not an especially precise or traditional equality.

Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.

On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.

The English aristocracy might have disagreed 1000 years ago, but nobody cares what they thought because the French (Normans, mostly) would shortly prune those noble family trees quite aggressively.

Endowed professorships are common globally.

They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.

Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.

Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.

Can you give any example of an academic title being defaced by an ad placement? I doubt there was any "Zorba's Olive Oil Philosopher" in Plato's Academy.

UC San Diego was the first convenient list of endowed positions I found, but it's hardly unique:

ASML Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies

Callaway Golf Chair in Structural Mechanics

Chugai Pharmaceutical Chair in Cancer

Ericsson Chair in Wireless Communications Access Techniques

Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Embedded Microsystems

Etc, etc.

Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie at Basel.

Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG-Professur für Distributed Ledger Technology/Fintech

Cambridge had a BP Professor of Chemistry until 2019 when BP stopped paying.

Their price list is online: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/endowin...

Are three examples sufficient? Taco Bell is a more ethical and apt supporter of higher education than BP, Credit Suisse, or Roche, lol.

Thanks, this is all completely new to me!

That’s only because you don’t recognize the old brand names/people, not because the phenomenon is new.

So you can't give an example then?

Ah, HN rate limiting.

A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.

Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.

Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie

No wonder Diogenes was looking for an honest man

‘It is difficult for a man to see something when his salary depends on it’ - Plato, probably. (/s)

Considering most European countries have universal healthcare the pharmaceutical industry is just an arm of the government.

That's not how any of this works. Even the UK, which does do direct provision, doesn't have state pharma manufacturing. Most European countries have a sort of hybrid approach of universal insurance but private regulated providers.

Novo Nordisk is not part of the state of Denmark.

In the future, every university chair is sponsored by Taco Bell.

And you get graded on a Bell curve

The Doritos® Locos Taco curve.

Except when they visit Europe for a conference, in which case it is Pizza Hut, because Taco Bell is not as well-established there.

Who eats there in Europe? Its mcdonalds of pizzas, the worst quality on the market, in this case a product that has little in common even in appearance with traditional pizza, more like hearthy focaccia. Less good, less healthy.

Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.

> the worst quality on the market

not a big fan of Pizza Hut, but believe me: there's much worse.

> Its mcdonalds of pizzas

A massive commercial success, with tens of thousands of restaurants worldwide and hundreds of thousands of employees?

Yeah, I know all this, but my question still stands - who apart from desperate with lack of other choice would ever decide to eat there? I get they end up with tons of customers, just that either people I know are ashamed of going there to even mention it (way more than mcdonalds) or I just don't know anybody who ever went there.

Folks I know end up in MCDs all the time when partying, not much else open around midnight, even kebabs close at 10-10:30pm where I live.

At least in my area, Pizza Hut's target market is families.

They're not trying to be the kind of posh place you'd go for an important business meeting, or with a date you wanted to impress. It's a bit more raucous - if your kids are a bit excitable they won't be spoiling the experience for the other diners.

The food quality is fine - it's not haute cuisine but it's easy to make pizza taste great because it's packed with great tasting melted cheese and pepperoni and tomato sauce.

If you don't know any people who go there it's probably because you don't know many people organising birthday parties for 13 year olds.

They are referencing the 1993 movie Demolition Man

And every politician sponsored by Carls Junior

"Study authors should avoid the term 'Taco Bell'. It's turning off readers."

I'm not sure if it's worse than 'AI distinguished professor' though.

The academic path is tempting for many. The myth is that you get to spend all day in research and working with ideas. The truth is, a huge amount of time is spent writing grants and funding proposals. It's a whole industry and researchers and scientists at well-known institutions are expected to bring in a steady stream of funding, including funding their own positions. Historically that has been through foundations and government sources (which are massive). It's entirely unsurprising that brands have gotten involved.

The Taco Bell professorship is an endowed chair, not something you apply for. It’s paid for by Taco Bell as a gift to the university, then the university awards it as part of a recruitment (or retention) process for senior professors. It means the professor gets a nice salary and research stipend that is independent from the rest of the school, and can live the life of research and thinking.

It is a different path through the same system. Your description is the exact language that Yum! Brands, Inc. is hoping people will use. It softens the crass branding of academic projects and positions the effort as altruistic. The American academic environment is filled with these obfuscations.

What do you think is being obfuscated? It’s normal to give money so you can name stuff.

A chair he holds since the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

Excellent reference.

Extra ironic that Costco HQ is in WA as well. Feels like we’re one step away from Costco University where distinguished Taco Bell professors would dole out their wisdom about AI.

Publish mas

Imagine the family gatherings. "How's our little distinguished Taco Bell professor?"

Jokes aside, one does not get to pick their academic sponsors or reject funding, and no offence intended to the guy's obvious expertise.

It reminds me of the 100 Thieves Totino's Fortnite training room.

I mean it worked. Read this comment, was hungry, decided to order some tacos. Didn't even have to click the link. lol

Also Taco Bell Distinguished Professor at.. WSU. yup that tracks

Wait until you see the cross promotion: the Dogan Super QuesadillAI.

In Australia we have a saying like "they got their driving license in a Wheaties packet". Wheaties being a breakfast cereal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaties

It's not a compliment. ;)

So a "Taco Bell professor" sounds like a similar kind of thing, except it's real.

"Distinguished" makes the difference. ;)

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