Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor
From: kurt@tc.fluke.com (Kurt Guntheroth)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: University Education and Industry Needs
Message-ID: <1226@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 16 Dec 87 01:11:49 GMT
Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Lines: 45
Approved: taylor@hplabs

Every time I hear this I freak out.   "The industry should take
much more financial responsibility for [university-level] education and with
even less control over the decision making and planning."

I agree that Industry must become financially involved in university level
education if they want the kind of workers capable of making critical
advances in technology.  What makes me crazy is the notion that they should
not have any control over the education.

OK, I know about acedemic freedom.  If you are a Professor of English or
History, or some subject susceptable to political contraversy, you need your
sponsers to keep hands off.  But what about technical subjects like computer
science?  Industry has neither the desire nor the abiity to suppress laws of
nature.  If a manufacturer had a monopoly on technology, then improvements
in the technology would still be desirable to them.  If companies competed,
than research suppressed at one university would be carried out at another.
Thus acedemicians have no justification in cries for so-called acedemic
freedome in technical areas.

If my company endows a university with a million dollars, why shouldn't they
get to direct, at least in a general sense, the form of research done with
that money.  Apparently this is poison to a great many acedemicians, but on
what grounds?  It is groundless to claim that only professors know best what
avenues of research will be fruitful, or that only undirected, basic
research leads to knowledge.  Companies endowing universities don't want
them to do narrowly targeted research.  Universities are too leaky to make
them safe places to carry out product engineering.  Companies only want to
encourage research that is in areas which may be especially beneficial to
their industry.

Why is this idea dangerous?  Is it only dangerous to professors, who have
traded big salaries for a totally unstructured environment?  Is it just that
they are used to being very big fish in a pond full of easily pushed-around
undergrads, and suddenly somebody comes by who might potentially be able to
tell them what to do?  Is there indeed something about PhD's at a university
which makes them more insightful or imaginative than PhD's in Industry?

I throw down the gauntlet.  I'd like to see somebody professorial pick it up
and tell me WHY.  Why should industry give more money and resign all control?  

Kurt Guntheroth

[My opinions are my own.  They are less polite than the opinions of my
employer, John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., which contributes to university 
education without expecting or getting measureable return from it.]