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.]