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A few things: 1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to hap
by wsxcde 13y ago
A few things:
1. The universities do have a legitimate right to the work of grad students. They provide the facilities and the environment for this work to happen. And this is not just paying the electric bills and some of the stipends. It includes teaching the right courses, inviting leading researchers to speak thereby enabling the creation of new knowledge, helping conduct research conferences and so forth. It's only fair that they earn some money off the work that the grad students and faculty do.
2. Universities have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property. This is why they will almost always licence the IP back to the inventors for reasonable terms if the inventors want to start a company with their work. Just owning IP isn't very useful to universities, they want to earn royalties.
3. It's the current climate of academic funding being extremely hard to find that is forcing universities to look for newer revenue streams. If you are frustrated with their behavior, at least a part of the blame goes to our anti-intellectual Zeitgeist which regards academic teaching and research with extreme mistrust.
- araes 13y agoA significant additional problem is that universities are operating more and more like for-profit businesses and less like actual non-profits, even though they are provided vast ranges of legal opportunities and labor sources unavailable in most of the private sector. In the last decade, education and tuition costs at places like UC have often quadrupled or more, and many times that money is going to administration and licensing salaries rather than what they're supposed to be doing - educating students. All with guaranteed loans and significant write downs.