

The missing piece to changing the university culture (2013) - 001sky
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html

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jal278
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).

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karmajunkie
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.

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andreasvc
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.

