Graduate programs look down at students who don't take a hairshirt
approach and then encourage these students to protest every little government
cut. Recently, academicians were heard thumbing their noses at venture
capitalists, arguing they would no longer need them because federal funding
was planned to drastically increase. At the same time, universities resist
any commercial discipline in their work habits precisely because if these
students got wif of how much their professors were making from consulting and
licensing, they would rebel. This is why universities want systems based on
grants, licensing and consulting and not on venturing and collaboration - as
someone in the 1970s once said about India "It's not that capitalism doesn't
exist, but you have to buy capitalism, which you can't do if you are poor."
A culture of paranoia predominates in the post-Manhattan-Project
scientific world where no researcher shares even the slightest data or
information with his colleagues or institution. A student would learn more
from working in an identical project in industry than for a professor or by
taking a course in the subject - because faculty are so paranoid and
possessive about their knowledge. Ultimately, the grubmint deserves
responsibility because its system of grants helped create this racketeering
monstrosity. And this is the incubator which keeps leftism festering even as
communism throughout the world has collapsed.
For example, every so often the NSF and its cousins announce that we
are in a dangerous shortage of PhDs and the spigot of graduate students
reopens to slave in the labs only to be dropped at will for not groveling
sufficiently. Do we forget the adminitions of James' "PhD Octopus"?
Moreover, professors detest American-born graduate students because American
students actually expect professors to answer their questions and
curiosities, while foreign students behave like frightened rabbits, who laugh
at "Americans". The result is that American students feel an inferiority
about being American and become transformed into lifelong America-haters. And
a lot of funding programs have been designed to obtain results which conform
to the same ideology which propogates such grants - for example, one
researcher questioning global warming was told that without the resultant
alarmism, grants in that field would not be forthcoming. And universities
themselves extract substantial fees for each grant, often using the results
of such fees for lobbying. Lobbyists have even extracted fees for getting
SBIR grants, but have requested payment be concealed by listing the lobbyists
as executives in the resulting venture. (Meanwhile,SBIR grants aren't awarded
by any business criteria, only by the usual inbred clique of scientists.)
Isn't it ironic that a university whose faculty berate American
industry for short-termism demand annualised returns from its miniscule
endowed internal venture fund and yet this same university is one of the
nation's leading receipients of licensing revenues. Isn't it ironic that the
universities who do the very best in the nation with regards to licencing
revenes (but maintain Vietnam-era bans on faculty "commercialism") are the
same universities whose presidents resigned nearly a decade ago due to
federal grant irregularities? (Furthermore, disciplines such as medicine are
overly populated and biased by those who chose them to avoid combat or
because they found military research distasteful.) What is especially
pernicious about these grants addicts is that they turn to international
agencies and eventually foreign governments, rather than private industry, to
support their habit.
The solution would be to follow 1987 Reagan proposals for privatising
the NIH and combine them with the blueprints for the Bobby Inman Sematech
research consortium and have privatised formerly-government foundations
become research consortia that allows firms to collaborate in funding
research and buying results. Moreover, grants should become increasingly
conditional on matching private funding. For example, a professor just hired
might be able to get all his funding from the government, but there should be
a graduated scale requiring the professor to obtain two thirds of funding
from private sources by the time tenure is attained and almost all funding
privately by the time full professorship is attained. And we might also look
to the way the Whitaker foundation has funded bioengineering programs around
the country, by providing matching grants with highly incentivised criteria -
which has shown that incentives do work wonders even in academia.