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Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome. It's a hard but necessary chall

Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome. It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.

ip26 3y ago
I agree, the funding model would have to be different. I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  Yes, there are many different purposes of a modern university. There are plenty of non-R1 universities that focus more on education. No model is "better", but it might be more or less appropriate for different students or professors depending on their goals.
- mlsu 3y ago
  Well, no, I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about research. I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them. Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    That's been done dozens of times, we just call them corporate labs instead of universities. And it works fine. There's no reason to care about the university as an institutional form, they just suck in so many ways that are all resolved by proper companies.
brutusborn 3y ago
Isn’t constant evaluation the problem? If you don’t have to churn out papers to meet evaluation requirements then most of the perverse incentives disappear. It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]

ip26 3y ago

I agree, the funding model would have to be different. I think there may actually some schools that already do it, but you don’t hear about them much because the research-funded model ultimately drives prestige. A school that just provides a really great education is simply less likely to be famous.

etrautmann 3y ago
Yes, there are many different purposes of a modern university. There are plenty of non-R1 universities that focus more on education. No model is "better", but it might be more or less appropriate for different students or professors depending on their goals.
mlsu 3y ago
Well, no, I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about research. I'm saying, can we create a research university that would displace Harvard, MIT, etc. by allowing our brightest researchers to actually do fundamental research instead of churn out incremental grants? Even the smartest people (who are, without a doubt, at MIT and such places) seem to have a hard time just actually pursuing research. Especially research that is not legible to the byzantine bureaucracy of Academia (tm). Increasingly it seems that it's despite these institutions that good research gets done, not because of them. Teaching is another matter as well and is certainly related. The most learning I ever did was at community college. I'd really like to know why we keep tolerating a system of research and teaching in which researchers can't research and teachers cannot teach.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  That's been done dozens of times, we just call them corporate labs instead of universities. And it works fine. There's no reason to care about the university as an institutional form, they just suck in so many ways that are all resolved by proper companies.

brutusborn 3y ago

Isn’t constant evaluation the problem? If you don’t have to churn out papers to meet evaluation requirements then most of the perverse incentives disappear. It sounds like the best institutions hire great teams and just let them be. Check up on them to ensure some progress, but don’t make artitrary requirements like “>3 papers in a journal with impact factor > [arbitrary cutoff]