The missing piece to changing the university culture (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The missing piece to changing the university culture (2013)

nature.com

26 points001sky4 comments

The main insight is that it is possible to create a mutually beneficial situation whereby you leverage the expertise of grad students and post-docs to help business while simultaneously allowing those same academics to get a taste for realistic alternatives to the increasingly brutish environment of academia.

I'm of two minds on this development. On one hand, I think it is great to offer alternatives to the increasing toxicity of academia, and I would have enjoyed engaging in such a program when I was a PhD student. On the other hand, I'd like to see proposals on how to fix the toxicity itself.

That is, the increasing businessification of academia (e.g. profs do battle in the time-sink brutal competition for grant money to secure tenure) is troubling and there have been many articles that discourage PhDs from going down that track, because you will not end up doing much research, or you will be largely beholden to chasing money, which disincentivizes basic research not certain to pay off.

Are there any proposals on how to reform academia itself? Such that it returns to more of an engine for basic research and a place for creative thinkers to create fundamental knowledge, instead of a pressure-cooker for grant money (which may be tied to military/business interests instead of those of humanity at large).

This is an ongoing discussion between my girlfriend (a grad student) and myself. I'm of the mind that the one of most valuable changes that could be made is to tie a school's accreditation (or more accurately, a given department's) to their tenure-track:phd ratio. If every school were required to maintain something approaching 1:1 in those numbers, the disproportion of phd's to open positions across the industry would eventually level out. likewise tying accreditation to a maximum ratio of adjunct faculty would force schools to increase tenure positions. Finally, grad students should unionize. In the grad student level, schools hold far too much power over student's careers with no moderating influences. Given the amount grad schools depend on their own students for duties ranging from teaching to research, this is unacceptable, and unionization is historically one of the few effective means of balancing the scales.

Have you thought this through? Approaching a 1:1 tenure-track-PhD ratio is not desirable. Universities can't just raise the number of faculty without a big increase in permanent funding. The other option would be to drastically lower the number of PhD positions, and then you can watch how your country slowly fades into irrelevance compared to the research that other countries are doing.

Exactly. They'd have to reduce the number of grad students admitted, which is exactly what should happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com