▲ | tpoacher 2 days ago | |
I wouldn't say this is the case, though it probably looks like this at a superficial level, and is a trendy soundbyte that seems to have gotten a life of its own lately. Plus a lot of what you call 'industry' is in fact driven by universities, e.g. via collaborations or spin-out companies. Deepmind, e.g., a notable example when people point to Google as a research lead in the field, was effectively almost exclusively driven by Oxford academics through their university positions (at least in the beginning, I haven't kept up). The bigger problem is universities (are forced to?) behave like corporations more and more as opposed to academic institutions, in order to survive silly politics (national and not) but without having the requisite corporate infrastructure and corresponding personnel. Instead, all jobs are offloaded to academics, and made part of their "progress and development report" or whatnot as the main driving factor. Which then dilutes the quality of both teaching and research, cuts down on creative time and replaces it with mountains of bureaucracy and counterproductive deadlines, forces people to cut corners just to keep up with it all, and eventually burns them out. Example: we have recently been asked to enter a cleaning rota for the office, because management fired the cleaners. And I think it's ridiculous and a sign of things to come, but I do it anyway. I don't know if refusing to clean will somehow find its way on your probation record as "not good academic citizenship", but it's not something I'll refuse to do anyway because I know everyone's in the same boat and I don't want to cause trouble for my team. But, then this behaviour gets normalised, and honestly, at this point academics might as well start mowing the lawn and cleaning the toilets too. But academia still has better structures / people built around attacking the more 'creative', less profit-driven problems, whereas industry is has different incentives, which seriously constrains where that research can go in its own way. And a lot of the time, when you look under the hood, industry claims are little more than hot air trying to get a quick buck, or they're the last little brick building on years of academic work and then going full PR and taking all the credit; whereas academia does things "slow" and steady for a reason. |