Silicon Valley Is Wrong about Federal University Funding
theahura.substack.com
theahura.substack.com
Modern universities are more like a national research labs than colleges. Killing them would handicap America for generations.
We absolutely should separate the two. We'd be much better off with research-first institutions, like PARC and Bell Labs, than with the academia institutions we've dragged research into, and that would leave education free to figure out how to adapt to modern technology, where you can learn more in a weekend binge of someone's YouTube channel, with some help from a pertinent online forum, than you would in a semester-long class that can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.
We already do have different kinds of organizations. We have "research universities" (R1 or R2) that give out PhDs and are somewhat like you describe. And then we have Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) that focus more on education.
The risk you can run into is that dedicated education institutions can fall behind current trends, especially in fast-moving areas like tech. Sometimes the best educators are those that "practice what they preach", and you begin to lose that if you stick them in classrooms all day.
On the other hand, some of the best researchers are terrible teachers, especially those who don't really care about it and just want to focus on bringing in funding.
I think the split you have could work, however there must be a lot of incentive for cross-pollination of some sort, or else the teaching side isn't preparing students enough for the research (or industry) side.
Research should be done by smart people. Smart people coalesce in places of higher learning. Therefore research should be done in places of higher learning.
And, just as an additional aside, universities benefit from being separate from the profit motive of PARC and Bell, which allows much longer range research (e.g. everything happening in biology). Its not like those other labs dont exist -- the whole premise of the article (assuming you got past the subtitle) is that all of those researchers end up in private industry and that makes america ridiculously wealthy.
I think you could make the case that education is somehow worse off because of this dichotomy, but I don't believe it. The undergrad education system is more or less untouched by federal research (which is where the 'weekend binge' angle would actually be relevant -- unless youre saying 'weekend binge' is relevant for phd work???). And the PhD system is where the research happens, so its a good thing that they are learning how to do research by researching.
Publish-or-perish is bad but an independent thing, created by bad incentives in how grants are doled out and not related to education at all.