Comment by mixdup
1 year ago
>It’s not that technology isn’t revered; far from it. It’s just that “stopping Hitler,” “beating the Soviets,” and grand visions for society have been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses
Universities are tripping over themselves to create commercialization departments and every other faculty member in departments that can make money (like CS) has a private company on the side. Weird that when these things hit, though, the money never comes back to the schools
The academic entrepreneur phenomenon is an absolute sink, but it exists for a reason and ought to wake people up,
Universities put a lot of pressure on faculty to win grants, and take 60-70% of the proceedings for “overhead”, which is supposed to fund less sellable research and provide job security but is, in practice, wasted.
You have to be a fundraiser and a seller if you want to make tenure, but if people are forced to basically put up with private sector expectations, can you fault them when they decide to give themselves private sector pay?