As a young researcher, my peers and I already noticed the "customer-ification" of academia. Taxpayers are investigating in academia, either via tuition fees or research grants, and expect to see returns: Either more jobs, more competitive national economy or a better life.

So far so good. Unfortunately, too much "customer-ification" leads to job insecurity for more junior academic members and kills "moonshots". However, without "customer-ification" the system ends up with dinasors that do research "for fun" on taxpayer's money, with no real return.

Now, I'm unsure how much "customer-ification" is healthy. I would argue that both too little and too much hurt. I was fortunate enough to see some of my more junior peers striving with "just the right" amount: They managed to get themselves on R&D boards of companies, yet do research on fundamental theories. Think "to truly make airbags reliable, we need a theory on controlling non-linear systems of type X".

I'm not sure what happened in the case debated here, but I genuinely hope that the departments that are under thread have some evidence for their usefulness (e.g. public outreach for medieval literature, joint-articles for pure math).

Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.

I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.

This is not relevant to the UK. Faculty do not get paid anywhere near this. They do not get paid lawyer or doctor money either, for the UK. Economics faculty who move from the UK to the US will come close to doubling their salary, as a lower bound.

(Additionally I don’t know if it applies here, but often that money to build buildings is with conditions- ie.”you have to use this money to build a building a name it after me”.)

You don't have a string of low-paid abusive post-docs, research scientist positions, and what not. And assistant prof'ing is fun, not publish-or-perish and grant writing; you do research and write (papers, not massive numbers of grant applications). Unless you mess up, you make tenure.

The flip side is you get paid a third of industry.

That pretty much describes academia when my advisor got a job.

As you pointed out, $60k bring competition down a lot. At that point, you're no longer competing with hedge funds and FAANG. And it brings job supply up; if you pay $60k, at current funding rates, you'll have no shortage of jobs.

With that sane system, which we DID once have, lots of people factually DID take that path. The calculus isn't hard:

1) Hate my life 40 hours per week at FAANG/hedge fund/etc. so I can afford to do what I love

2) Drive a beat-up old subcompact and spend 80 hours per week doing what I love with a guaranteed (low-paying, stable) job for the rest of my life.

It's not rocket science. Lots of people pick #2. I don't much care if I have $200/plate food, a mansion, business class flights, and a sports car. I'm okay with McD's salads, cooking, camping trips, and a bicycle (I DO care about financial stress -- risk of losing a mortgage -- but stability takes that away). Splitting time between intellectual pursuits and family? That's awesome. Doing it in a community of like-minded people? Even more so. Lots of people made that same choice before elite academia became big $$$, and my math friends who bring in $1 million/year at hedge funds did so because they couldn't find academic jobs.

Think of it this way: You know that nerd who spends their days building Lego sets? There are plenty of nerds who want to code up open source, explore the secrets of physics, doing theoretical math, or working out new models for government. All you need to do is provide stability and room to focus. If you give tenured positions which cover basic housing, food, and clothing, and give a sane process to get there, you'll have no shortage of candidates.

And now the German version of this tale:

You finish high school with 18/19 get your master's degree with 23/24. Then you get a PhD position but because it's tied to a three-year project with third-party funding, you're also expected to do project work that does not contribute to your thesis at all. You're only starting out in the business, though, so you're happy to help!

Then, three years later, the project is finished but your thesis is nowhere near that. Now, choose your own adventure:

1) Luckily, your supervisor can hire you using his own budget. That's nice, almost no strings attached. Now you can really focus on finishing up your thesis.

2) Luckily, there's another project that has just started and that you can work on now. You're a bit unsure, though: when the first project was up, no-one thanked you for your work, your supervisor was just surprised about the state of your thesis. Should you do that again? What's more, the new project has nothing to do with the old project, let alone with the topic of your thesis. Because you really have no other option, you agree to do it - still better than nothing.

Which brings us to the next option:

3) Your supervisor unfortunately has no funds to extend your contract. But since you've already invested so much work and you like the idea of a PhD, you apply for unemployment support through the government and hope that you can finish everything within a year. Later, you're gonna call this period an "independently funded research scholarship" on you CV.

But all good things come to an end: finally, after much hardship, you graduate! Wow!

And you even find a post-doc position in some other town! Great. You don't mind a change of scenery! Now you're rolling!

And you're good at your job. You feel good. Get lots of papers accepted.

But your contract ends after two years. Luckily, there is another post-doc position in some other town! Great! You're not so keen on moving again but hey, your new partner doesn't mind a change of scenery.

And you're still pretty good at your job. You kind of start feeling a bit disillusioned with your field though: it seems like all the research published these days is just application-driven -- not what once pulled you to the field. Oh, well, at least your job pays the rent.

But your contract ends after two years. You consider applying for professor positions because in Germany, there is no middle ground really. But you have your doubts: are you really good enough? Besides, both you and your partner hate the idea of moving yet again: you just made new friends. But what can you do?

None of your applications for a professor position go anywhere. So you go for a third post-doc. The move was really not that bad, as you were able to sell most of the old furniture. The new supervisor is great and you feel energized with a rediscovered love for the field.

You don't get as many papers out as before even though you try. But somehow, you don't have as much time for actual research anymore, as you find yourself more and more tied up in administratrivia. You work long hours but only half of it is actually dedicated to research, and it shows in your output. Nevertheless, you like the working environment.

But then your contract ends after two years. Your supervisor would love to keep you, he even has enough money in his budget for at least five years. But oh! Damn. There is a law in Germany that six years after your PhD, you cannot be hired on university budget anymore, unless it's a permanent position. And, well, sorry, the bad news is: universities don't hire on permanent contracts. Faculty, that is, they don't hire faculty - except professors. Administration, sure, they're permanent. Facility management, sure, they're permanent. Just the people doing the core task of a university (teaching and researching), sorry, no.

You give a professor position one last try because there just happens to be an opening that sounds like it was just made for you. You fit it perfectly. And so do 9 others. But there's only one position. You're all pretty much equally qualified, so who's going to get it? Will it be you?

It doesn't matter because it's clear that nine folks will not get it.

Nine people who's dream it has always been to be in research, who have invested a lot in making this dream a reality, who are completely qualified and very experienced will now have to go and do something else... while a new generation of young, blue-eyed, PhD students are ready for the same journey.

Because there is very little mobility into academia, MANY people land on the wrong side of the pond. You can't try industry and go back. One more difference is that colleges once wanted people with decades industry experience, and many older people saw going back to teach young'uns as a way of giving back.

It's not just older people. If you're in industry, and want to pursue a good idea for 5 years where you don't have elbowroom, or in academia and want to try to commercialize something, you break your academic track. It's possible with tenure, but I find many tenured academics distinctly underimpressive by the point they've gone through decades of abuse to get there....

- "I never wrote a patent and I turned out great. Why should we bother giving an innovation course to our PhD students?" - "This person had a 10-year break in their academic career. I can't evaluate them."

So it's not only that there is a lack of mobility between industry and academia, rather this gap is actively fueled.

Removing this requirement would allow competition (even from independent researchers in coffee shops).

Good luck trying to change this!

1)https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-for-s... 2) https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-relig...

EDIT: In terms of financing, how much money do you really need? If you are self sufficient in terms of owning the property, endowment income and growing vegetables and selling beer/yoghurt etc., is that not enough? Would the modern academic type be interested at all in essentially living in a commune/monastery where some amount of time is dedicated to cleaning/maintenance/carpentry/agriculture?

Universities are hard due to accreditation, but starting a not-for-profit is quick and easy.

In the USA the NIH is 3-4x the budget of the NSF

I know a handful of faculty at top universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc). At least one did a year at a FAANG company prior to starting so it isn't like they don't know better. They are paid well enough and don't need 400k salaries. They love their research topic and love the freedom to work on the topics they care most about. They love mentoring students specifically. They don't care about software engineering as a discipline and would rather spend time learning other things. They (most of them) like teaching. They like being part of a research community.

And most -- not all but most -- new faculty hires cheat in some way to get there, at the elites (at the very least, overselling results, but often intentionally p-hunting, stealing credit, and similar).

Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.

Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.

Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.

When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...

The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.

Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.

Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.

However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe?

Like in many things in life, copying someone else's successful model is by no means a guarantee that you're going to be successful too. Why? Because your circumstances are usually completely different from whatever you're copying.

DeepMind?

They certainly didn't pick it for the food ;)

I think if you look at where the researchers are, Europe does really well. As per usual though, this is poorly commercialised.

This would seem to militate against a notion that Europe doesn't do AI.

Now, Europe definitely doesn't commercialise AI well, but that's a different point.

As for the 90%, agree, that's where I found that number. But do the exercise of listing all the major technological advances you can think of that mattered on the XX century, and I think you will likely end up close to that.

In any event, I think this is all getting rather silly. I was simply making the point that historically science in the US has benefited tremendously from having a large number of capable people that were trained within a different system. Where they were born is absolutely irrelevant. A certain W. von Braun was indeed an American, as were his 'major technological advances' that many in the US are rightly proud of, but he was very much a product of German science (I hope you don't find this point controversial).

In Mathematics the big highlights of the XX century: the Hilbert Program, the Bourbaki group, computability,the FLT solution were mainly made outside the US.

First satellite? First man in space? USSR

Europe was a big contributor to the first computers: Colossus, Zuse's Z2.

The Germans were pioneers in rocketry and ballistics as it is sadly very well known by the rest of the work.

In Biology: Watson, Crick, Monod,Ian Wilmut,Maynar-Smith made fantastic and foundational contributions

Medicine? Antibiotics,discovery of tetanus vaccine, immunological agents, vitamins, all made outside of the US.

That's not to say that American has not make fantastic contributions, The Apollo program, the invention of the transistor, the invention of the Internet are highlights of American ingenuity and glorious gifts to the rest of the world.

But pretending that all good science is made only in the US and the rest of the world in some sort of scientific backwater is just a sad indictment of the American educational system that formed you.

By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.

Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.

Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.

The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.