
Bain:The financially sustainable university - rbcgerard
http://www.bain.com/sustainable-university/interactive.asp
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PaulHoule
There are some tired old canards here.

The main job of the technology transfer office seems to be, in a lot of
places, preventing graduate students walking out the door with their
inventions and developing it.

So often I have seen faculty members who have lost a year or more thanks to
fights with the technology transfer office which has no appreciation at all
for the risk/reward aspects of technology and imagines that it could get (say)
Microsoft to buy the rights for something for a big fixed fee and some royalty
and then wind up putting it on the shelf after it fails to get 20 random "best
and brightest" people to turn it into a product or even reproduce the result.

Also I have close experience with University IT and I can say there have
always been scattered centers of incredible incompetence in University there
have also been centers of excellence which survived despite the system. Those
have been systematically squeezed out by centralization efforts while managing
to reproduce the incompetence plus a lot of overhead spending, scandals, lower
pay, worker burnout, etc.

After this policy which predictably creates failure now they will reproduce
the incompetence in some foreign land and then once the locals learn to cringe
at certain accents, move the jobs to some other country which the locals won't
recognized, etc.

