
Why do professors deplore enterprise?  - makimaki
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-professors-deplore-enterprise.html
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hotpockets
The philosophies are very different. You have:

1\. Low hanging fruit (business) vs. high hanging fruit (science). Businesses
can not pursue leads which may only have long time payoffs.

2\. Only leads with visible benefit are pursued by business. Whereas science
believes that discoveries may have benefits far beyond any visible benefit.

Thus if a society ditches research without any immediate benefits academics
believe society would advance much slower.

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psyklic
This is understandable of course. Go to any nonprofit or charity, and I'm sure
that most workers there will justify their job choice as humanitarian,
compared to for-profits. Academia is similar.

In reality though, many professors (particularly in engineering and CS) think
highly of industry (most students end up there), and many professors have even
started companies of their own.

To view students as impressionable is doing them a disservice. Students are
free-thinking adults. To consider that "liberal" professors (whose political
stance rarely if at all enters the classroom) could drastically affect their
views is absurd.

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furyg3
I'm going through this crisis as we speak.

I was lured to IT during/after high school, and it seemed ridiculous to go to
college at that time. Eventually I was persuaded to take classes after work,
and managed to knock out most of the degree (PoliSci) alongside my full time
job. I had an opportunity to do some consulting work for an NGO in Amsterdam
while studying there, so I took it. Changed my life.

Now I'm finishing a Masters (back in Holland) and trying to decide what to do.
IT work makes me happy in that I have a high sense of confidence about my
work, and of course it pays well. But something's missing. A cushy IT manager
position doesn't bother me... but remaining there in 20 years does.

Making the leap to some vague non-profit job is also scary as hell, but sexy
from some sort of greater-good point of view. Unlike my IT capacities, the
tools I gained from university are (mostly) soft skills that aren't directly
applicable to specific job functions.

I've shared these thoughts with many professors and industry mentors, and one
thing I will say is that many of them view the world as pretty polarized
between "Enterprise" and "Altruism".

For my sake I'm hoping it isn't really so.

~~~
MaysonL
Try looking for a think tank (perhaps in the energy or environmental sector)
with a technical emphasis (Rocky Mountain Institute springs to mind as an
example) where you could combine your skills with your aspirations.

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indiejade
What an interesting question. Well, as the post mentions, we have three
sectors: public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit).

Does a society need all three to thrive? Yes. Government is the entity
entrusted with creating the currency. Private business is entrusted with
assigning value to that currency, creating "wealth" through competition.
Efficient enterprises create wealth better than inefficient ones.

And out of it all, the social sector is . . . well, I can't quite figure out
what the social sector is supposed to accomplish, but people do like causes.
Most "causes," if they're able to claim fulfillment of a goal that the public
sector could but doesn't, seem to revel in the fact that they're doing for
society what government could/should do, all the while claiming to lack the
motivations of the private/business sectors.

~~~
Retric
I think the non-profit sector provides a relief valve and helps keep society
honest. Non-profit like Open Source Software can channel peoples desire to fix
problems without fighting the rest of society. Government has a lot of power,
but it is highly susceptible to outside influences and everyone wants to spend
other peoples money. At the same time they don't force the customers to pay
for the service which limits how corporations could get involved.

PS: Consider the three types of news organizations and how they fit into our
society. Or blood banks, you can't pay people for blood or you get diseased
donors, you don't want to force people to donate and you don't need that much,
so you just ask people to help and it works fairly well.

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gaius
This article explains it:
<http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html>

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time_management
First of all, most of them don't. A lot of them consult or run businesses on
the side.

Second, it's the moneymen in administration who decided to run academia as a
business, destroying it. The moneymen in charge of the universities have
managed to jack tuition up 7% per year while cutting tenure-track
professorships to such a degree that academia is no longer a viable career.

In general, I think professors object to 1950s-style hierarchical
corporations, which are inhospitable environments for intelligent, creative
people. And they object to the moneymen who are ruining their lives, and
gutting academia, for the very-short-term benefit of the university profit
margins (never mind that they're supposed to be non-profit). I don't think, by
and large, they have any opposition to their students going to work at
startups.

~~~
rw
Additionally, professor wages are among the most compressed. At my university,
it is often cheaper to keep on professors who are old enough to retire,
instead of hiring fresh talent.

~~~
RK
I think there is also an incredible amount of competition for the junior
faculty positions as well. One of my friends, who recently started a physics
post-doc at Caltech is convinced that he will have to eventually go into the
private sector to support his family, since there are so few faculty job
possibilities and he can't be a post-doc forever. Luckily for him, he has
computing and finance work experience from before he was in grad school.

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known
Professors prefer

1\. Distribution of Wealth rather than Creation of Wealth

2\. Socialism aka Preventing Race to The Bottom

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blasdel
Well for starters you could at least use your buzzwords grammatically --
'enterprise' as a singular, article-less noun makes no fucking sense. It's
acceptable as an adjective, or as a mass noun if pluralized.

What should be the collective noun? How about an _incompetence_ of
enterprises?

