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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Two important roles that universities successfully fulfilled in the past, still could, but don't:

  • The Liberal Arts College. Elite formation based on a combination of rigorous study of difficult subjects and directed socialisation with other young elites. The original reason why this stopped happening was grade inflation, but to bring it back you also need to fix wokestupid, and to end the rampant dishonesty about young elites imagining themselves as self-made meritocratic strivers. Potential gains: a more cohesive elite that knows important things and has a stronger sense of noblesse oblige.
  • The Research University. The type of curiosity-driven research which is too high-risk for professional (government or corporate) labs without tenure and too remote from practical application for VC-funded startups. Getting this back means fixing publish-or-perish incentives and the PhD overproduction which enables them. Potential gain: the base of pure science that makes spectacular applications low-hanging fruit.

wokestupid

Come on, that’s just lazy.

Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.

I don’t fully understand the incentives. Grad students remain cheaper than full-time employees; employing them on tangential research is a popular way to scout talent. It also interfaces into the reputation games of publishing, trendsetting, and attracting new students. Combine all these, and you get institutions which compete to be known for their pure science.

I have no idea what percentage of university research falls under this umbrella. My school probably had fuel for both media narratives somewhere on campus. But it is a lot closer to the ideal of a Research University than you might expect from a random state school.

Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.

I agree with you that there are plenty of people doing good research in hard science departments - in my foolish youth I wanted to join them* and I still have both the PhD and the physical and emotional scars of getting it. But even in the noughties, most of the good university scientists I worked with were complaining that the incentives were increasingly borked and were driving them towards running their research groups like Fordist paper-factories. There is a lot of useful work that can be done in Fordist paper-factories (the research group next to mine were generating multiple drug leads a year using sweated grad student and postdoc labour), but it is the comparative advantage of government and commercial labs, not universities.

The story I was told by my mentors was that in some unspecified pre-lapsarian golden age the academic career structure had given all scientists the level of academic freedom that (for example) Watson and Crick used to discover DNA even though Bragg would have preferred Crick to work on haemoglobin, but that this was no longer the case and the only way to get that level of research flexibility was to join one of a small number of special institutions like the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (the famous LMB, aka the "Nobel Prize factory"). Based on what people are saying online things have got significantly worse since then.

* Solid state physics - the area I worked in (although not the specific problem I was working on) was widely considered cool-but-useless at the time, but is now being used by multiple commercial fusion startups.