The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

Im split minded about this.

On the one hand, academia has been taking sides for a long time.

On the other, there are elements that should be non-controversial.

I wish academia were more rigorous about not taking sides. I feel like they’ve been injecting their own ideology unnecessarily for a while.

Am I supposed to ignore that?

The best approach is some kind of grand bargain, and carefully considered compromise.

I have experience in academia. I’ve heard how they talk. They see their mission as transforming society.

There are exceptions, but even the exceptions are under pressure to conform.

It’s hard to address two problems at once. And I feel there are two legitimate problems: an overly ideological academy, and the need for both support and independence.

Solving one problem is hard enough. Solving both is impossible. So we will probably go back and forth for a while.

My default is to look at foreign countries. But I don’t see anywhere else that’s solved these problems.

Okay but when people in the academy do bring up the difficulty of settling on objective, ideology-free truths people get even touchier (like try bringing up critical theory to someone who supports these NSF cuts and see how far you get). I think you have to accept certain things being settled when you’re performing public rhetoric.

It's definitely sad. I'm all for the government investing in large ROI type projects and the majority of scientific research is in that category. It's doubly sad when the government is breaking up companies similar to what it did with Bell Labs.

Many things are both flawed and worth of preservation.

As the apocryphal Churchill quote goes, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

The same may be true for science.

>as clean air or safe roads

Its really on the nose when these two examples has been anything but fundamental. There are many people out there that don't believe these things are worth working towards.

In lieu of a thorough argument I'll post this old clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcQIoh3FQQ

It is basically true but also devastating to admit that “pro-education” is an ideology. “We should fulfill some basic requirements for a functional society,” and other hardcore extremist positions…

Let me be clear: it shouldn't be about sides or ideologies, but recently in some places it has been blatantly about ideologies, promoted by one side while they were in power, and this has enraged the base of the other side, who have brought their side into power, and they approve of their side applying maximum ideological fuckery, possibly dooming us all.

And I'm fine with it. We've got trillions of dollars worth of companies that do very little but leech off of the rest of us and utilize the vast wealth they've accumulated to degrade our society in order to perpetuate their own existence.

nuclear destruction of civilization vs. not, it's all just sides and ideology. maybe humanity doesn't deserve to exist and we should be pushing for nuclear annihilation. There's two sides and both should be discussed and honored with equal value to society!

> Let me be clear: This is precisely about sides and ideologies.

How so? It is, I suppose, pushing an ideology that everyone should support education, research, clean air, and safe roads, but any belief in some sort of universal good must rely on an ideology, if only circularly on the ideology that there is such a thing as a universal good.

No. It is about spiteful ignorance vs science and rationality.

Your post is greyed out currently, which is a shame. I think you’ve sarcastically described a tech company here, like as a joke, right? The post is a good joke, I’m surprised people missed it.

I dropped out of college after a semester. I also didn't see the value in it. Because I was a stupid kid. Twenty years later its one of my biggest regrets. We don't need more self righteous "founders", convinced they know everything.

> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.

In your computer science classes? What/where were you studying?

I would love to see a list of those lies. I may have picked them up at university too and could be naively believing them myself.

> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.

If you were smarter than all of your professors you either went to a very bad college or you are experiencing something like Dunning Kruger

> it feels a little good

Revanchism typically does, but it's a highly destructive path. Hope you're enjoying the high now, the lows could be quite ugly.

Acting out always feels good. But we resist those kinds of behaviors for good reason.

Before we gang up and downvote for the last statement, it's absolutely worth recognizing that the majority of the voting public (Or at least their candidates) seem to have made 2024 an indictment against these kinds of policies. Even I, a staunch dem, have to admit that the alleged purity statements got a little too close to being real.

On one research grant I led for NASA, the grant reviewer asked me to count the number of minority students on the team, from their picture displayed on one of my slides. That's just the kind of information I didn't gather because I was trying to run a research task and had employed the entire lab a professor led.

That's fine, but we should also recognize how weird it is.

I think it has less to do with DEI and more to do with "what is this doing for the US, rather than the world as a whole?"

Accumulation of scientific knowledge is a positive externality, and the current administration doesn't care about benefits to other countries. Or costs to other countries, for negative externalities as from CO2.

What possibly could feel good about entering a new dark age?

What DEI initatives do you mean?

The rhetoric - both from those starting DEI intiatives in the last few years and from the reactionaries acts as if it's world changing. But 99% of DEI is BS like rainbow branding or 1hr click through trainings.

None of that warrents this kind of reaction. In fact, it's just a pretext for rightwing leadership to do things it wants to do for other reasons.

"As long as it hurts the people that irritate me slightly (based on things that Fox News told me but which I don't have any firsthand experience with), I don't care if I'm hurting myself with the same action. It's too satisfying to hurt those other people. Taste their tears. Strike back!"

Authoritarian regimes tend to build power precisely that way - making it "feel a little good". They're hurting the people you don't like... at first. It's the whole point of that "first they came for the Jews/commies/unions" poem.

The "feels pretty bad" bit comes much later.

We in computer science departments are very happy to send our students to industry, whether or not they bother finishing their degree.

The article lists a bunch of old-timers, like Page and Brin. Right now, everyone is talking about the "$100M offers" from Meta, for people who completed (or dropped out) of their computer science PhDs.

What does "not standing for industry" mean to you?

Academia provides the benefits listed in the article. The relationship is pretty clear.

Applications to graduate school typically surge during times of economic downturns when industry is on its back foot. So...yes?

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/feb/17/rise-appli... (16 years ago) and more recently https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-12/grad-scho...

It bugs me that this is down-voted so much. I love education, academia, research etc. but it is clear to me that so much elite education hates factory farming, mining, manufacturing etc. It's good for independent voices to critique problems in these areas. But at some point you need to stand up and say these things have problems but our modern world needs them.

I see it in my elite educated children. The more productive (and I mean literally in terms of producing something) they look down on it. The ideal job is academia, government, politics, or the arts. I know I am over-generalizing, but its like college teaches them you are Satan if you work for an oil company or Monsanto and a saint if you work for the EPA or FDA. Both are flawed but you also need both.

I'm in industry, academia is similarly standing up for industry all the time, in addition to feeding us all the basic science that we turn into products.

Academic labs are often very eager to partner with industry to bring things to market. At least from my view in cancer. Especially the NCI is very impactful in making sure that discovery makes it to patients as quickly as possible.

What does this mean?

The article points out that industry benefits from academic funding.

Are you implying that a) academia does not benefit from industry or b) if industry’s survival were threatened academia would not care?

Academia benefits hugely from industry and would/does stand to protect those benefits.

Already does. Many PIs use their lab and facilities to spin out patents and startups. In either case it is where industry finds the trained talent they rely on to make money.

> Would academia likewise stand for industry?

Yes, but academia doesn't have the money to be of help for the industry.

> research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.

Where is this myth coming from?

> without acknowledging that research universities have billions of dollars in buffers.

Endowments are "buffers" the same way one's equity in the home they live in is a buffer. Liquidating either is a sign of distress and will lead to worse outcomes. So they are less of a buffer, and more of a last resort.

> Mostly developed to the same extent

This is mostly a software engineering forum, but no... most actually important industries and scientific work, unlike building webapps or video games, work the same way as software.

John Doe straight of high school can go and make a photo sharing app with his laptop, but he is not going to be getting the same type of experience with non-trival research in his garage as at a research university.

To actually get to the point where people had laptops required years of largely academic research and creating markets which were almost entirely academic. Just like with vaccination, people forget the time when a young person (who wasn't named Bill Gates) could get experience on an actual computer was at a university.

I’m not an expert in academic financing, but how much money from NSF research grants went towards building nice dorms?

I went to an inexpensive state college and the infrastructure was horrible. I would guess that things like dorms are largely paid for from tuition. How much is tuition at the state college in your city?

Nvidia spent over $100M last year on ads & marketing itself, and it's an ongoing expenditure. The state college built those great-looking dorms once and sends pictures of them every year to prospective students, so they have ongoing marketing value, in addition to their normal utility. Think of it this way: those dorms are the college-equivalent of CUDA; and how much has Nvidia invested in CUDA?

Dorms are paid for by students. They have improved over the past 30 years due to market pressure.

Many of them are built and operated by private for profit companies that lease the land from the university and cooperate on programming and campus life.

It’s more complicated than you’re implying. University capital expenditures are rational decisions when they’re competing for a national pool of students backed by cheap debt. Parents care about the student success initiatives, students care about the multibillion dollar rec center. Given the way the current higher ed market is structured, the bloated administration and vanity dorms are thus actually revenue positive. They attract top students, especially from out of state, and with them a fat stream of tuition revenue. Just cutting their funding from the top, without looking at the other half of their revenue generation, is missing the point entirely.

So one houses humans nicely, the other houses humans horribly - and you support the horrible option?

>Meanwhile, the local NVIDIA office operates out of a building that looks decidedly unremarkable, even shabby by comparison.

And where do those NVIDIA employees live? In a van down by the river? Dorms are residential and need amenities, much like the pools and three car garages of those NVIDIA employees.

Even then, plenty of universities have old, decaying, buildings and run-down labs. I could just as easily point to the other bespoke and "remarkably luxurious-architecturally grand, stylish, and visibly well-funded" NVIDIA buildings. It seems like you have a grudge and any show of spending for a university is reason to criticize it.

I'm all for reform, but this vengeful callous destruction of science is not reform. It is revenge.