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Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D. A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare

Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D. A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.

impendia 14y ago
Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities. Also, the IAS does things like have "special years" devoted to a particular topic, and then a ton of professors in that area take their sabbatical that year to go to IAS for a year. It would be difficult for a university to do that.
- microarchitect 14y ago
  Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities. Fair enough, but they also have much "better" researchers than most other universities. My hypothesis is that if you tried to scale the IAS model to researchers outside the top 1%, it would be less successful. I suspect the reason for this is that cross-pollination of ideas that you get from working with other researchers and graduate students, combined with the clarity of expression and understanding you're forced to acquire when teaching undergraduates is the reason why research universities have been so successful in advancing human knowledge. This isn't to say there is no place for other types of research institutions. However, I am skeptical of unsupported claims that there are "better" means of advancing human knowledge that are structured very differently from a research university.
simonster 14y ago
There is also evidence that your graduate students do better research if they teach. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract

impendia 14y ago

Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities. Also, the IAS does things like have "special years" devoted to a particular topic, and then a ton of professors in that area take their sabbatical that year to go to IAS for a year. It would be difficult for a university to do that.

microarchitect 14y ago
Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities. Fair enough, but they also have much "better" researchers than most other universities. My hypothesis is that if you tried to scale the IAS model to researchers outside the top 1%, it would be less successful. I suspect the reason for this is that cross-pollination of ideas that you get from working with other researchers and graduate students, combined with the clarity of expression and understanding you're forced to acquire when teaching undergraduates is the reason why research universities have been so successful in advancing human knowledge. This isn't to say there is no place for other types of research institutions. However, I am skeptical of unsupported claims that there are "better" means of advancing human knowledge that are structured very differently from a research university.

simonster 14y ago

There is also evidence that your graduate students do better research if they teach. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract