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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

I am always concerned by the idea that universities simply exist to hand out education. Most of the science, software, technology, etc. that is being used by all these companies with people obsessed with disrupting education has been developed, in part, by research laboratories at universities. It sort of feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I always wonder how much the "disrupter" knows about the university when they ignore all the things universities do besides hand out undergraduate degrees.

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This sort of assumes that research can only happen at - or in partnership with - a university doesn't it? Those two activities (research and learning/certification) do not have to be tied together.

Indeed, just because the research university has been a successful model doesn’t mean others aren’t possible, like RAND, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, SRI International or the Max Planck Society.

All of whom were staffed by people heavily credentialed by universities, and who published in the same journals their University colleagues did?

That strikes me as exactly the same model, but without the teaching aspect?

The research university, but without teaching, is about as different from the research university as a horseless carriage is from a horse and carriage.

I disagree. The crux of the university - faculty mentoring junior researchers (aka phd students) remains in both setups (and in industry research labs). The undergrads at research universities seem to be lower on the priority list

Normal people think of the primary purpose of a university as educating undergraduates. If the only education going on in a research institute is apprenticeship as a researcher, possibly with some directly relevant technical courses this is so far from most people’s experience of a university as to be a different thing. Professional academics may disagree but if an institution goes from encompassing a broad section of society to a narrow one, from educating and doing research to doing research and education only as necessary to that and from providing a space for maturation and relaxation before adult life to being a professional workplace that’s a pretty drastic change.

A research university is a lot closer to a non research university than it is to a research institute.

They're both on a spectrum.

Medical school faculty, especially in soft-money positions, might never set foot in a classroom. Some of them will even have labs that are almost entirely postdocs and technicians. This doesn't seem wildly different from a research institute to me. If anything, the funding is probably less stable too, since you're on your own.

Well, look at the Institute for Advance Studies in Princeton, and its siblings.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Institutes_for_Advanced_S...

I suspect we're looking at the exceptions here, not the rule.

RAND--born at the beginning of the atomic era RAND was and still can be seen as an extension of the federal government that also does work for other clients. Project Air Force, RAND's first and still biggest component is the civilian counterpart to "tell the Air Force when they're plans are stupid".

Bell Labs-- incubated at AT&T which enjoyed a near century long state granted monopoly in exchange for defense work and building out the national telephone infrastructure

Those kind of environments happened only because those companies had near-monopoly like status that protected research activity from the need to commercialize. Most corporate research labs aren't going to do anything that won't lead to some kind of revenue generation 3-5 years down the line. Gov'ts can invest in the long-term

For undergrad and professional education (which is the majority of higher education) that would work, but IMHO people who aren't doing proper research in their respective fields aren't really capable of providing high quality education on the graduate level because they'd get out of touch with the advanced topics of the field, so at least there integration makes sense.

It would be a concern 30 years ago. But nowadays the training part of education can be separated from other intellectual pursuits because the sharing and debating of ideas has become so easy. You needed to be in a university to be even aware of conference debates - not anymore. If anything you 're more likely to enjoy conference lectures in video. And there are tons of ways for scientists to interact nowadays. Some academics use twitter as a continuous conference.

There is definitely a level of irreverence towards academic standards from this kind of technologists but this is a good thing.

Yeah, I agree. Having access to Twitter is basically the same things as going to Harvard.

I m talking about conferences. And i m serious

One of the root sources of US research productivity per dollar is that so much of it is done by graduate research assistants who are much cheaper than comparable employees in industry.

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