30 ms·
Eric Schmidt is working to launch a university
- thaumasiotes 6y agoHuh. As the page loads for me, the headline is also the entirety of the content. Though it is longer than presented here. The rest is "...and funnel tech workers into government work". The news is summarizing itself now!
- dhosek 6y agoThe formatting at businessinsider is often pretty crummy. There is a whole article after the picture and some bullet points.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoNo there isn't, not for me.
- plumeria 6y agoTry this link: http://archive.vn/jFoU3 http://archive.vn/jFoU3
- vsskanth 6y agoI've always wondered why mega billionaires from this era such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg etc. haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc. - all started by monopolists from the previous era. I guess Eric Schmidt would be the first one
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6y agoIt's a federal commission that Schmidt co-chairs. >haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc. I assume the answer is that they generally find that it makes a lot more sense to give oodles of cash to their alma mater or some favored school to get your name on a building and/or really beef up a department than to try to found a new school which would likely take decades to establish any sort of reputation.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoIn other words, he's not spending his money, he's spending our money. (Although that might make sense given the mission.)
- vsskanth 6y agoYeah, but if you were Jeff Bezos why would you settle for a name on a building or a department, over Bezos University ?
- ghaff 6y agoI'm sure there is no shortage of universities which would rename themselves to Bezos U for enough money. It's not even a particularly radical notion. I don't know any examples of entire universities but Cornell's Business School renamed itself after a very large donation and MIT's new computing school is named after a very large donor.
- bluedevil2k 6y agoDuke wasn't founded by James Duke, it renamed itself from Trinity College after his donation.
- hpkuarg 6y agoAnd technically named after his father.
- bluedevil2k 6y ago
- agustif 6y agoXavier Niel is a billionaire from France built Free Telecom (big telco in france) and has 42.fr school, whichisnot a unibut kinda?
- tasogare 6y agoTrue. But yes, it’s not an university. I also doesn’t deliver any kind of state recognized degree (IIRC), which can be a problem for visa applications.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoA big part of that was that there were simply far less universities in the mid-late 1800s than there are now, so there was a demand - this is particularly true for the West Coast. Likewise, both Cornell and MIT, though private and philanthropist-funded, were also land grant universities, and part of a deliberate policy (starting with Lincoln) to increase the number of US universities, along with providing a more "practical" baccalaureate. In general the post-Civil War era in the US was a period of significant educational reform and expansion at all levels.
- vsskanth 6y agodon't you think the demand still exists today ? the economy seems to be in ever increasing need of a highly skilled workforce, in addition to reskilling existing ones.
- ghaff 6y agoYou could argue that we could use better schools or schools that have more of a focus on subjects needed by a modern workforce. But there's no real shortage of colleges and universities. Yes, existing universities come with lots of legacy entanglements (which can be good as well as bad) but for the most part you're probably better off investing in those schools than tearing down and starting from scratch on a prairie somewhere.
- brlewis 6y agoWhen a school rejects qualified applicants because there are too many, doesn't that indicate a shortage of that kind of school?
- pvarangot 6y agoMaybe because Stanford, Duke, Cornell, etc... still serve them well. It's not that they don't have huge influences into how those institutions work.
- vsskanth 6y agoWell there's utility and then there's legacy.
- rmetzler 6y agoHasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP founded the Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany in 1998. It’s not a full fledged university, but a part of the university of Potsdam. A lot of the alumni work for SAP.
- calbear81 6y agoWhat about Draper University in San Mateo?
- surajrmal 6y agoIt's not accredited, and for good reason.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bluedevil2k 6y agoI agree with you big-time on this. Many of these guys are concerned about "their legacy" and also philanthropy. Why not create a top university named after themselves that seeks to be at the forefront of technology/medicine/biotech (whatever they choose). Better yet, as some have suggested, why not donate enough to a university to rename it after themselves and take it over, adjust the curriculum to the desired goal, hire the experts in the fields to teach and study, and see results 5-10-15 years down the line. As a nice bonus, why not turn it into a basketball powerhouse school too, something to help brand the school, like Duke or Stanford. Something MIT is missing.
- throwaway_USD 6y agoEver hear of Trump University? Granted he isn't a "mega billionaire"...and turns out it wasn't a University at all, in fact it was shut down and resulted in lawsuits Trump settled for $25M.
- yreg 6y agoGeorge Soros built Central European University[0], focused on promotion of (liberalist) open societies. Hungarian PM recently kicked them out of Hungary, so it moved to Vienna. [0] - https://www.ceu.edu/ https://www.ceu.edu/
- zwaps 6y agoIn Turkey, the best private universities (that are also up there as best universities in the country) are still held by the corresponding company holdings, i.e. Koc and Sabanci. By contrast, in Germany there are no universally notable private universities at all (save for some business schools).
- thephyber 6y agoWe got a Trump University. Does that count? /s Not to point out the obvious, but 2 of your examples never bothered to stay in undergrad university long enough to get a degree and they managed to succeed beyond all of their contemporaries. Perhaps it says something about our current university system/paradigm that the current wealthy have chosen not to support this route. Or maybe it says more about the Gilded Age robber barons that they chose this route (in addition to the large inheritance fortunes they left). Marc Andreessen's "Build Stuff" article[1] pointed at the lack of university capacity in the USA (I doubt this is accurate[2]), but leveling up the average university to be closer to the top tier universities would certainly help or at least justify the current cost of university. [1] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/ [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-college-students-are-there-in-the-United-States https://www.quora.com/How-many-college-students-are-there-in...
- akhilcacharya 6y agoOverall I liked the Build Stuff article, but the idea that there's a lack of capacity is incredibly silly. It's not difficult to get into a Cal State school, UC Merced or my alma mater for instance.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoYes, we need more medical schools for example. We have way more students interested in medicine than available spots in school/residencies.
- WalterBright 6y agoMedical school seats are controlled by the AMA, in order to keep doctor pay up.
- throwaway5752 6y agoThat's a bit reductionist in terms of Cornell's history.
- hindsightbias 6y agoOlin is pretty recent but came from an older trust, less than 1/2 a billion I think.
- randomdata 6y agoThe present day mega billionaires have spent their careers building/funding the technologies to make universities obsolete.
- setpatchaddress 6y agoI can't help but think ARPA is a better model than what sounds like a government-controlled vocational school for script kiddies.
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoThe article doesn't mention it, but given the current crisis and the huge move to remote education underway currently it would be interesting if this had an approach that took that into account.
- hprotagonist 6y agocool, give it a century or so to get used to itself and we'll see how we've done.
- x87678r 6y ago> funnel tech workers into government work Government work doesn't pay well, so it will never be as prestigious as Stanford or MIT. EDIT - previous title had the headline part where it said it will "rival Stanford and MIT"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- H8crilA 6y agoYou know that Silicon Valley was originally created as a government project? Government sponsored research and enterprises.
- jbay808 6y agoI don't think this is in conflict with the GP's point.
- jonwachob91 6y agoNot everything in the world can be measured by pay. Sure, an FBI Criminal Profiler earns a tiny fraction of what a google dev earns. But one can take serial killers off the street, and the other just makes ads more annoying. A Social Worker earns almost nothing, but they get to help the most needy of people get the help they need. A FB engineer earns 10x the pay, but just makes ads more annoying. A teacher earns almost nothing, but they get to teach the next generation of society. An Amazon engineer earns 10x the pay, but just finds ways to sell you more stuff you don't need. No one goes into government work b/c the pay, they do it for reasons they find more important.
- 082349872349872 6y agoOn a tangent: when he was young, Schmidt worked (alongside a young Wadler) on the Poplar functional language. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-81-11_Real_Programming_in_Functional_Languages.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-81-11_Re...
- ghaff 6y agoIt reads to me more like Schmidt is proposing the government set up its own "US Digital Academy" so that they don't have to compete with MIT and Stanford. (I assume the model would be something like free or low tuition in exchange for a requirement to work for the government for x years upon graduation.)
- nogabebop23 6y agoIf so they can build on established offerings like officer training programs that many countries have: get a free education at a military or civillian university in exchange for x years of service. The future of military engagements is likely to be heavily related to cyberspace, so you can enlist someone without the threat of field duty, which is likely far more attractive to many young people.
- Rafuino 6y agoThe Scholarship for Service program already exists in the US. https://www.sfs.opm.gov/ https://www.sfs.opm.gov/
- neilk 6y agoI think you're probably closer to the truth there. Even if it isn't an ISA university, my first guess is that it's a way of laundering government funding to create an institution under private control. (This is how most great universities get their start anyway, it's nothing new). I'm sure ES also has a vision for a modern university that has merit, but I'd be skeptical if it was about more free inquiry and public service - probably more alignment with industry. Google execs often couch their plans with claims about how it's going to be good for the world, especially partnerships with the government. For instance, the takeover of Moffett field to provide a place for the founders to park their jets, as well as space for the new Google HQ.
- ghaff 6y ago>I'm sure ES also has a vision for a modern university that has merit, I don't disagree with any of your points. Cornell Tech in NYC is arguably an example of reimagining things with at least a somewhat clean sheet of paper but I haven't studied it in any detail. One thing that is probably be clear is that there's too much stovepiping in universities in general. MIT's new interdisciplinary Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is another example of trying to bring more disciplines under one roof.
- Alkhwarizmi 6y agoFunny how the article just references only those two universities, when in fact the man himself attended Princeton and Berkeley. Glad to see which schools are viewed as the Ivory Towers of the uneducated mass.
- bigpumpkin 6y agoThe question isn't whether it will rival Stanford and MIT, because it never will with a one year program. The question is whether it could incrementally attract more talent into the industry.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- curiousllama 6y agoThis will fail not because it's a bad idea, but because the government will reject it. Contrary to popular belief, established universities do a very effective job of preparing tech talent for government jobs. The issues, which Schmidt seems to miss, are twofold: (1) the government, with few exceptions, is a TERRIBLE place to build effective tech skills. Slow, heavily outsourced, bureaucratic beyond belief, and low paid, there is very little creativity and variety in which to build unique technology, and no reward for the BS. (2) Current universities already prepare tech workers well. In some cases, there are even joint CS-Public Policy degrees (e.g., MSCAPP at UofC). Those engineers with policy expertise just don't want to work for the government. I know; I was one of them, and I could not for the life of me find a policy tech job that paid even HALF what tech companies would pay me. Schmidt should focus on building "the department of innovative technology" and pay engineers appropriately.
- Upvoter33 6y ago"(1) the government, with few exceptions, is a TERRIBLE place to build effective tech skills. Slow, heavily outsourced, bureaucratic beyond belief, and low paid, there is very little creativity and variety in which to build unique technology, and no reward for the BS." Strong claim; links or citations to back it up? (Not necessarily doubting you, but it sounds a bit like a right-wing talking point, and hence I ask) You're right about pay problems, though. With public sector jobs, you have to do it for the calling, not the bottom-line cash (imho).
- bpodgursky 6y agoI think the null hypothesis is more useful here; assume that NOWHERE builds tech skills until otherwise demonstrated. What you see: a bunch of tech startups founded by ex-Google, ex-FB, ex-Amazon employees. What you never see: hot tech startups founded by ex-government bureaucrats At very best/worst, you get beltway contractors who have "skills" at extracting money from the government. Those contractor firms NEVER end up selling back to private industry, because they have nothing to offer. I think that this is one of those cases where "citation needed" is a way to avoid the blindingly obvious truth of the statement. No, we haven't done a controlled experiment on the government vs private enterprise in skill creation. Sometimes you have to use common sense and obvious experience.
- Jtsummers 6y agoInteresting. I don't see the point, though. The issue with the US government and software is not a lack of talent (within the country, or even within the government itself). But a poor structuring and assigning of responsibilities and a severely risk-averse culture, paired with the overreaction of a risk-accepting culture occasionally showing up and fucking it all. There is, or will be, sufficient talent in the US to maintain and develop government software systems. Flat out, people keep going into CS and software engineering degree programs. Programming itself is ludicrously accessible compared to nearly any other technical discipline because the cost of entry is about $200 and time. The problems that actually need to be resolved: 1. Government employees (contrary to popular opinion) are grossly underpaid for their expertise. This leads many of the best to leave and go to private industry and/or government contractors. Those who remain are truly civic minded, or zombies. Moving away from GS helps here (pay for time in grade), but the alternatives are also severely abused. NSPS paid people for changing positions, so there was a ton of job hopping before it was canceled. Expertise wasn't really cultivated, only the same stupid culture of bouncing between jobs you find in parts of private industry. AcqDemo is somewhat better, but in implementation lost all its potential value. Still better than GS, but only barely. 2. In-house development shops are typically made to compete for contracts in the same way as private companies. This creates some interesting conflicts within the organizations. And a ton of the in-house software development efforts are spent on maintenance, not developing new systems. So a different kind of expertise shows up, but not the expertise needed when truly novel projects start up. 3. The people in charge of the IT and software development efforts are usually inexperienced with IT and software development. They're either straight out of college EEs (CS people are at a disadvantage in many government shops) or career civil servant bureaucrats. The latter rely on those same inexperienced EEs. This leads to an incredibly advantage for contractors to push program offices around because they can come off as reliable experts, until you've been burned a few times. But hit a couple milestones and the civil servant in charge is already promoted out of that position and a new one is left holding the bag when shit hits the fan. 4. Risk averse IT severely restricts development environments even when software is made in-house. This leads to incredible slowdowns and often automation is impossible due to having to develop and test on multiple test/dev network enclaves that are separated even from each other. An example is the typical CCB (configuration control board) process which is a monthly (at best) meeting where, mostly, managers decide what new things can be installed on the network. You want an updated version of VS or GCC? Gotta wait a month. You want to use a common library? Gotta wait a month. And that's on top of the delays imposed by security scans (a manual process, that could be automated if it's necessary). 5. Risk accepting IT goes too far the other way as a reactionary response to the risk averse culture that held them back. Their fuck ups lead to the people in (4) being able to justify their positions and cement their culture. You have to improve the approach to IT, the staffing of the acquisition offices to have competent individuals in the appropriate fields, not just successful (from a promotion perspective) bureaucrats, and probably increase pay across the board for technical people.
- Upvoter33 6y ago"Palo Alto-based Stanford University ... and MIT have historically been the primary talent pools for the tech industry" This is far from true. If you look at the total workforce in tech, the majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc., etc. MIT and Stanford have had amazing great people, but they are far from the "primary" source of talent. (yes, a bit of an aside, but it rankles)
- curiousllama 6y agoAgreed - University of Maryland is a huge tech feeder to public sector orgs, believe it or not.
- vmception 6y agoAll the DC area computer science programs feed right into the NSA and defense. Which is funny because Silicon Valley companies won't think candidates from those schools are that interesting, while simultaneously thinking that the intelligence and defense has better programmers. People are people.
- Shebanator 6y agoWho in Silicon Valley thinks that? I've never heard anyone say it in my 30+ years here (until now).
- pb7 6y agoVery odd statement indeed. I have never heard anything even remotely corroborating this. In fact (highly anecdotally, take it as entertainment at best), I have read that public opinion holds NSA's technical capabilities in high esteem but in reality, the talent is vastly below that of the top consumer tech companies because most tech employees would never contribute to the type of work the government does.
- 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tehabe 6y agoI remember a story that Leland Stanford asked what is needed to found a university and the answer was 200 million dollars. What they didn't tell him, that it also takes 200 hundred years. Universities are a longterm project, if a university is good or not, is something you don't really realise while you are there but when you are finished and try to use your knowledge.
- ghaff 6y agoI'll give you an example. MIT was founded in 1861. OK. Sorta bad timing. (Two days after it was chartered, the Civil War broke out.) But even after it got going and moved to its Cambridge campus in 1916 (significantly funded by George Eastman--as in Eastman Kodak), it didn't really become known as a premier institution until WWII.
- pvg 6y agoStanford isn't 200 years old, neither is Berkeley. Many UC campuses are a lot younger, UCSC was founded in 1965.
- ghaff 6y agoEven in the East a lot of universities aren't that old. A lot of well known institutions postdate the Civil War and those aren't 200 years old yet.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoyears alone mean nothing too. See example: https://www.centre.edu/bicentennial/ https://www.centre.edu/bicentennial/
- duxup 6y agoThe federal government pay cap in 2019 was $166,500.... These folks are going to go to this university that is better than Stanford and MIT (let's assume this mammoth task happens) and then eschew working for big tech paychecks in favor of working for the government?
- kxyvr 6y agoThat is not entirely true, but the devil is in the details. As an example, the Federal government employs thousands of physicians at the VA and, depending on specialty, they are paid significantly more than this. Last time I checked, they capped out at $400k: https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2020/PhysicianDentist/PayTables_20200216.pdf https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2020/PhysicianDentist/PayTables_... Anyway, the point is that the federal government can and does pay significantly more than the GS pay scale to people who are federal employees and enjoy federal pensions. Whether or not the feds will choose to pay that to those who work in technology remains to be seen.
- duxup 6y agoI remember a couple departments (including the NSA) complaining about the federal cap when it came to some IT projects, so I'm not sure it is a sure deal to get past that cap. The VA is a whole other land of bureaucracy that plays by its own rules.
- kxyvr 6y agoOh, I very much agree and they were most certainly capped at that organization. It's a major problem because and I very much agree with your original comment that there are better options now working for big tech. I guess my point above is that feds can fix this if they truly wanted to. There's precedent for them hiring people for far more money than the regular GS rate when they need to. It would be impossible to hire a surgeon for $160k, but they need them, so they pay more. At the moment, the government doesn't feel they need to pay more, so they don't. I hope someday that will change and think it's important to educate and lobby the federal government to help them understand this and change their policy.
- codekansas 6y agoThe naming, "US Digital Service Academy", seems to suggest that it will be tied to the US Digital Service - which would be great. I think that might be the only government organization that I would actually be excited about working for. Side note, I really hope the tour-of-duty model becomes more popular with techies, and more encouraged by employers. I can see it having numerous bidirectional benefits
- hinkley 6y agoMaybe I'm just a bitter pessimist, but I don't relish the idea of Schmidt telling more people how to think.
- Animats 6y agoWho's supposed to fund this? Is Schmidt putting up the money himself? Is this to be a real college, with accreditation, or something like "Singularity University" or Udacity or DeVry?
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoI believe it is supposed to be a real college. I've seen it mentioned a few other places informally and that was the impression I got.
- sdinsn 6y ago> Who's supposed to fund this? The government- Schmidt is making a recommendation to Congress. > Is this to be a real college, with accreditation Yes
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoPeter Thiel was thinking about starting a university at some point too. He decided not to because it was too hard. Seems like it could be a great idea though. Government at all levels in the US has a lot of problems and getting smart, reform-minded people into it would hopefully help correcting that.
- jb775 6y ago> would ideally produce graduates imbued with a sense of government duty. I'm not sure this is the best selling point to attract a young & diverse student body, given current world events.
- pmorici 6y agoMaybe this article is missing some important details but I don't see how having a special university is going to help the problem of getting more technical talent into government work. There are already tons of government scholarship programs with strings attached in the form of post graduation service requirements and other hiring funnels that bring in new graduates. The government's problem isn't hiring new grads it's keeping those people once they get a few years experience. The biggest drain is probably government contracting companies who often offer literally twice the salary for the same work. Combine that with the soul sucking aspects that you would find at any large company and you have the perfect recipe for not being able to recruit and retain qualified mid career people. It's hard to imagine how any amount of indoctrination in the ideals of public service at a special school will overcome those things without something else changing.
- habosa 6y agoEric is one of the most accomplished leaders in tech but also one of the most overconfident and out of touch. So this could really go either way.
- zazerbayev 6y agoI think this is a great idea. You must ask yourself why the government is able to retain word-class managers and jurists despite stiff competition from the private sector. James Comey was an executive at the world's largest hedge fund, why did he quit for a government job where he was making 100x less? Any federal judge could've made a fortune in corporate law, why didn't they choose to? Because there is a sense of prestige and national duty about their posts. Creating a similar status for technologists in government would go a long way towards recruiting and retaining top talent. If we want to convince people that being a government engineer is worthwhile and respected, starting with students seems reasonable.
- zjaffee 6y agoI think it's more complicated than that, all of these roles come with substantial amounts of near unilateral executive power that can impact the way the country is run for decades to come. Even all of the existing US government tech posts like the USDS and 18F are ultimately there purely to service the needs of a bureaucratic agency and their particular management. For a technology specific role to have the same level of prestige as someone on the federal bench or leading the FBI, they'd need to be giving them unilateral regulatory powers over the broader technology industry in the country.
- math_and_stuff 6y agoSounds a lot like the Defense Innovation Board and National Security Commission on AI.
- wslack 6y agoI'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of government. The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law, running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires investment and taking risks.
- 6y ago
- nickgrosvenor 6y agoGood for him
- selfishgene 6y agoMy favorite quote is at the end: "Per the report, the Digital Service Academy would serve as a third reservoir for the best and brightest technology workers, but one that would ideally produce graduates imbued with a sense of government duty." ... because places like MIT and Stanford sure as hell don't! It looks like Schmidt just wants the next generation of students to forgo their dreams of starting the next Google. I think a better idea to help this country stay competitive is for companies like Google to stop offshoring their operations ... and pay their goddamn taxes like the rest of us. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/31/21044662/google-end-tax-loophole-double-irish-dutch-sandwich-2020 https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/31/21044662/google-end-tax-... https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-facebook-amazon-apple-netflix-microsoft/ https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-faceboo...
- dumbfoundded 6y agoI can't speak for Stanford but MIT is extremely closely tied with the federal government. The Lincoln Lab for instance gets ~$1B/year from the Defense Department. The only reason MIT became a well known institution at all is because of its ties to the military.
- selfishgene 6y agoMIT became a rich institution because of its ties to the military. Lincoln Laboratory is often called a "PhD graveyard" for good reason: it's where reject academics who were denied tenure go to die.
- sebastianconcpt 6y ago1. What guarantees does it offer for ideology neutrality? 2. What guarantees does it offer for the diversity of ideas? 3. What guarantees does it offer for excluding censorship of the expression of thought as a measurable true defense of freedom of thought and expression?
- sebastianconcpt 6y agoWhat would be valid reasons for the previous comment to be just silently downvoted?
- stupendousyappi 6y agoThe biggest challenge in recruiting technical talent to the government is the GS payscale. This program is being recommended to Congress, so I assume it's an attempt to indirectly increase compensation by offering free tuition to people who commit to government employment- it also is likely attempting to target college age kids, who could accept government payscales more easily than someone who already works in the private sector and has gotten used to higher compensation. Schmidt is no dummy, and I expect that this would work, but it's still a hack around the fundamental problem of IT compensation scales that are roughly 50% of private sector levels. A more straightforward solution would be to just create a new payscale (say, the Executive Technical Service) for IT professionals and other technical domains where federal compensation lags the private sector. The Senior Executive Service (the payscale for senior leadership like department and agency executives, including most political appointees) has about 8000 members- if you gave this system twice as many people and paid them all $100k more than the GS system would, you'd increase the federal budget by about $1.6 billion a year, or 0.04% of the 2019 budget, almost all of which you'd recover anyway by replacing IT contractors who generally cost the government between $250k and $350k each a year. Unfortunately, this solution would really piss off the big federal contractors, who would heavily lobby against it, which is why it doesn't happen even though more reasonable payscales have been found for federal doctors and lawyers.
- thephyber 6y agoThe elephant in the room when talking about making government work more like startups: We don't allow governments to fail (easily) but startups fail frequently and we acknowledge that both bankruptcy and team failure leads to knowledge that is rare to gather without actually experiencing the failure. I'm not advocating for anything in particular except to acknowledge this fact.
- WalterBright 6y ago> one that would ideally produce graduates imbued with a sense of government duty. I wonder how they plan to do that.
- j45 6y agoThis likely will prove to be much bigger news than many anticipate today.