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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

All of this outrage just stems from a confusion over the point of private research universities.

The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...

State universities, yes, those are supposed to educate people. But not Ivy League schools. Their purpose is to produce new knowledge.

The authors of the OP article then conflate two discussions: (1) Should private research universities focus on education instead of research? (I would give that a resounding no.) (2) Are the private research universities actually producing useful knowledge? (Here, I would be somewhat negative, but probably not for the trite reasons cited by the authors.)

Those are completely different questions, especially since one is empirical and one is normative. And it is a hallmark of poor editorializing to try to address both an empirical question and a normative question in the same small space.

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Um, really ignorant question here, but what book on reasoning can I read to be able to see through arguments and debates like you just did? I want to learn about empirical and normative questions, etc.

Boy, it's hard to answer such a flattering comment without letting it get to your head and sounding like a pompous jerk!

I'll give the same advice I give as a teaching grad student to undergrads who think us grad students are incredibly smart: it only takes a tiny amount of knowledge or training for someone to have that you don't for them to seem so much smarter. Don't be fooled. As a grad student enslaved by a university, I have become quite familiar with all the arguments about the purpose and place of research vs. teaching.

Anyways, this confusion between normative and empirical claims is extremely common; once you become aware of the difference, you see it everywhere. The easiest way to familiarize yourself with this and related ideas is to take a introductory course on moral philosophy or read an introductory textbook. Unfortunately, even if I thought the book I used in college was all that great (it was OK), I forgot the name of it. The material is fairly universal at the introductory level, though, so any decent book would do.

This book got me started: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/?vi...

As a student about to start on the honours portion of my degree, I find solace in analytic philosophy (as opposed to those damn ethical/post-modern philosophers).

Start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Then why do they have undergraduates? Surely, they could produce more knowledge if they eliminated that distraction from their mission entirely.

That question is somewhat addressed in Sean Carroll's post that I linked to:

> If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. Sure, some would complain that they enjoy teaching, that it keeps them fresh, or that students can be useful as research assistants. But those are reasons why the students are useful to the faculty; they are not assertions that the purpose of the institution is to educate students for their own sakes.

>Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.

Honestly, once you realize that private research universities use undergraduates as a source of money, all sorts of seemingly strange behaviors by the university become simple. Why does Princeton allow so many academically unqualified students in to play sports? Alumni donations. Why does it charge $40k+ per year (albeit with financial aid) if it really wanted to attract the absolute best students (since it doesn't actually need the money)? Because the students aren't important and, heck, might as well pay for a couple more buildings.

A few places do this, or so nearly do it that they might as well; in sciences, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies comes to mind. In the humanities, a lot of Yale senior profs only need to teach three classes per academic year and can get a semester off every third year. That's not quite the same as getting rid of undergrads, but it's close.

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