Oron Peled <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> The basic division used to be: > * Academy: does basic research, is funded by public (taxes) > and the results are published and available to the > public. Also funded by tuition payments, and privately, partly by industry. > * Industry: Implements what looks promising and fund development > by reaping the results of implementation. Partly funded by taxes (through government orders), publishes some results, gets Nobel prizes... > The problem now is that every day the situation is more like: > * Academy: still funded by public (taxes) and grants, but the results > are sold to the Industry to get more money. What do you mean? The funding sources are the same as always. The only "sold to the industry" that comes to my mind is private ventures run by academic staff, but that has always existed. Yes, a person can do more than 2 jobs, and university professors have always done consulting for industry and created their own companies while holding their university positions. Industry people from time to time get to teach at the universities. Both situations are beneficial to industry and academia alike (and Shlomi, who has vented his frustration with the ivory tower types at the technion more than once, will have to agree ;-). In case you don't know, public grant money normally has strings attached: results must be published, data must be made available to the research community (usually with a bit of delay to give the principal investigators a head start, which is only fair), the staff have to devote so many man-hours to the project, etc. One cannot get a grant, do nothing for the project, and go work full time for ABC Inc. You can get a grant and break the contract, but that will be the last grant you'll ever get. Governments have longer emmories than industries, even. The only thing that is left is the salary of tenured staff. Even that can be reduced if one's (open) research lags behind (UC Berkeley is the best known example) or if one works outside of the academic institution (TAU and most of the Israeli universities). Yes, in Israel and in most of the Western world a tenured professor can do (virtually) nothing and still draw his/her salary. This has been the case since tenure was invented. However, it is practically immaterial in terms of research as we know that most of the actual research work is done by postdocs and graduate students anyway. > * Industry: hold monopoly "rights" both to the implementation and > to the ideas. The only thing that is new is the overly broad application of patents. This has nothing to do with the "academia vs. industry". Universities have been guilty of abusing overly broad patents recently, just like industry (the IP of the results of academic research belongs to the university, not to the researcher, just like in industry). I can give examples from the fields I worked in. > This new model has several flaws: > 1. The public pays double price. Both to keep the academic system in place > and than to buy the fruits of its research. > 2. More importantly, as academic institutions are striving to make > more money by selling their discoveries, What are you talking about? -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] "IBM is a pretty big company." [W. Gates] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
