Thoughts On “Naomi Schaefer Riley: Academia’s Crisis of Irrelevance”
Mr Hall: Methinks your bias against corporate research is personal and a bit naive. Remember, the transistor was developed by Bell Labs. Much types of research methods the current innovation that runs our technology businesses came from Xerox, IBM, TI, Intel, Apple and Microsoft. The internet was not a creation of university research but of the US Defense Department. Telecommunication interconnectivity was not a result of university research, but came from companies like Cisco. I could go on, but you get the idea. The primary area where university driven research has been important is in healthcare. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of university research that is funded by outside entities (eg, government and corporations), but the research is not open ended. It is directed to achieve the goals of the funding organization. The university researchers are still working at the direction of others. The only well known pure scientific research that is top of mind for me is the particle physics experiments being conducted at CERN in Switzerland which is not true university research but is funded by 20 European governments.
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