Comment by bigstrat2003
3 days ago
I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.
You can disagree but that doesn't change anything. Most major universities are research institutions that also teach people, and hopefully bring up some through the ranks to further research/academia/human knowledge.
Without research there would be nothing new to teach, Without research diseases wouldn't be cured. A lot of amazing things we have came from universities.
Medical research is a profit center for many universities, not a cost center. They get funded by grants from external entities like the NIH and get to skim off the top of each grant for overhead. As one outsized example, my alma mater got $583MM in NIH grants in one year. I'm not saying universities don't fund research from their own coffers, but it's important to understand how much funding comes from the government and from other sources.
I wasn't addressing that. I was solely addressing the idea that universities were teaching centers that do research ancillary. A lot of them would consider that backwards. They're research institutions that also teach.
> I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university
Cool. This isn't how the word works in practice. More importantly, it isn't how the trustees of the people who gave those universities the money asked for it to be used. (Nor the government or the granting agencies.)
> if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more
Again, cool. This isn't true in reality. Research universities famously put research first, which is why they can attract top faculty.