<p>xiggi:</p>
<p>where is it written that PA supporters are “blinded” by its impact. Heck, isn’t it more likely that PA supporters (inlcuding me) like the PA BECAUSE of its impact of raising up the publics. After all, Hawkette’s data points correlate well (almost) with the wealth of the incoming student body.</p>
<p>hawkette writes:
</p>
<p>Who do they think is teaching these students?</p>
<p>If they dismiss higher education as a “sideshow” and the “GREAT MAJORITY” of businesses (and please, do share your source on that–you make it sound like you have access to some business survey that allows you to make quantitative allusions such as this) do not care about what academics believe about undergraduate education, it really raises a question about why they don’t just scoop prospective employees up out of high school and spend a coupla months teaching them the “real world” relevant, things-businesses-care-about stuff they need to know. </p>
<p>Is college just a big expensive babysitting service, where businesses wait for students to get mature enough to be reliable employees, meanwhile hoping those crazy, irrelevant, nonproductive, clueless, uninformed faculty don’t screw them up too much?</p>
<p>What you wrote is a pretty damning assessment of the relationship between “business” and higher education. I can’t reconcile that with the value that corporate america appears to place on a college degree.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually it’s in non-technical fields, especially in the humanities, that faculty scholarship and the undergraduate experience are most intimately connected. Look, I was a philosophy major in college. I was privileged to be able to study philosophy from the intro level on up in small, intimate classes taught by some of the foremost academic philosophers of their day, the people who were at the cutting edge of new developments in the field. I could have studied the same stuff at a step removed, taught by someone who was more of a teaching specialist and less of a scholar. Which was the better experience? I think without question being taught first-hand by the people who were there on the front lines, actually doing the work. They were better interpreters of their own work than anyone else. They knew the ins and outs of the current debates in the field better than anyone except their peers on other top philosophy faculties. And this, mind you, was at a large public university, the University of Michigan. When I went on to grad school at Princeton it was just a natural continuation of the work I had already begun as an undergrad, at a comparable level of intellectual rigor and with the same kind of daily grappling with the big, central, contemporary debates in the field, taught by philosophers of a similar caliber—peas in a pod, so to speak.</p>
<p>There’s a reason Oxbridge is Oxbridge and HYPS are HYPS. It starts with the universal and continuous excellence of their faculties. That’s what draws the resources, that’s what draws the students, that’s where the resources are wisely invested. </p>
<p>Now I’m not saying you can’t get an excellent undergrad education in philosophy at a small LAC. There are a number where you can. But it’s not because their faculty are teaching specialists. It’s because their faculty are also highly regarded scholars and cutting-edge thinkers in the field, and what they lack in numbers and diversity the compensate for adequately in intensity of contact among a few professors and a few students. They’re not teaching about philosophy that someone else is doing; they’re doing philosophy, engaging in the current intellectual debates in the field, and inviting their students into those debates, just as are the philosophers at Michigan, Princeton, and the other major research universities with top-ranking philosophy departments. </p>
<p>Brian Leiter, a philosopher and legal scholar at Chicago who publishes the widely cited “Philosophical Gourmet” ranking of philosophy programs, actually favors LACs for undergrad work in philosophy because of their favorable student-faculty ratios (although I personally think he mischaracterizes the situation at bigger schools like Michigan and Harvard: I never, not once, had any kind of instruction from a TA in a philosophy class at Michigan). But Leiter is very clear: if you’re looking to do undergraduate work in philosophy, you should look to a school that not only has a strong reputation for undergraduate teaching, but also one that has a “strong philosophy faculty,” which he defines as a faculty “doing philosophical work at the research university level.” He lists schools like Amherst, Reed, Wellesley, Barnard, Bates, Colby, Colgate, Davidson, Franklin & Marshall, Haverford, Mt. Holyoke, Oberlin, Occidental. Pomona, Smith, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wesleyan. An excellent list of LACs indeed, but excellent in this field precisely because the faculties at these schools are doing high-level research comparable to that being done on the faculties of the highest-ranked research universities in the field. (On a side note, Leiter also points out that if you do go to a bigger school, it’s much better to go to one with a top-ranked graduate program in the field, like Michigan or Harvard, where any grad students you’ll encounter will be the top grad students in the field, the ones who next year or the year following will be on the faculties of all those LACs; though again, I think he vastly overstates the role TAs play in teaching undergrads in this field—at least that was not my experience). </p>
<p>So bottom line, yes, I do think faculty research and the quality of the undergraduate experience are intimately connected and positively correlated, especially in non-technical fields like the humanities.</p>
<p>
Ummm…well, just to give you some anecdotal information contrary to this position, BP Energy invested $500 million to UIUC and Berkeley to create a partnership called the “Energy Biosciences Institute”…If BP had the staff to do the research in-house, they would. However, they chose to partner with academia, because:</p>
<p>"The proposal from UC Berkeley and its partners was selected in large part because these institutions have excellent track records of delivering Big Science large and complex developments predicated on both scientific breakthroughs and engineering applications that can be deployed in the real world, said BP Group Chief Executive John Browne.</p>
<p>BP needed the research out of Berkeley and UIUC to remain competitive.</p>
<p>"We are joining with some of the worlds best science and engineering talent to meet the worlds demand for low carbon energy. As part of that effort we will be working to improve and expand the production of clean, renewable energy through the integrated development of better crops, better processing technologies, and new biofuels.
[BP</a> Global - Press - BP Selects Strategic Partners For Energy Biosciences Institute](<a href=“http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7028142]BP”>http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7028142)</p>
<p>[Microsoft</a> Partners with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to Open Database Research Lab](<a href=“ITPro Today | Leading the Charge in Digital Transformation and IT”>ITPro Today | Leading the Charge in Digital Transformation and IT)</p>
<p>"So why did Microsoft choose to partner with UW-Madison’s Computer Science Department? Well, not only has the school produced some very well-known database experts, but also has made significant advances in the database industry in the past 30 years. For example, in 1984, the Gamma Parallel Database System Project ([The</a> Gamma Database Machine Project](<a href=“http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=627398]The”>http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=627398)) was launched by a UW-Madison research group, which happened to be run by DeWitt. According to Mattmiller, the project “produced most of the core technologies in commercial use today by companies such as IBM, NCR Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, Vertica, and Microsoft.”</p>
<p>There is plenty of quantitative data available to rank faculty beyond “faculty resources” which can just mean what some schools will overpay a big name who proved himself elsewhere to hang around and teach one class a semester. See the following</p>
<p>"Goldstein says he was happy at Wisconsin, but he knew last year that he had a window to go on the job market. As a father of two children, 8 and 10 years old, Goldstein wanted to advance his career with a move before his children were much older.</p>
<p>When administrators heard Goldstein might be looking elsewhere, they stepped up with rewards from the state-funded pot. Ranging from $5,000 to $15,000, the retention bonuses are just enough to let faculty know theyre valued, Goldstein says.</p>
<p>Everyone wants to be loved, right? And academics are as insecure as everyone else, he says.</p>
<p>The competition for Wisconsin faculty, however, remains fierce. And Goldstein says hes not Pollyannaish about the efforts other institutions are making to lure faculty, including offers that go beyond salary boosts. Indeed, private universities not only tempt faculty with bigger salaries, they often offer lighter teaching loads that public institutions simply cant provide.</p>
<p>What the privates are doing with teaching loads, we cant do financially and morally, says Goldstein, citing the unique teaching missions of public universities.</p>
<p>ucb,
BP and Microsoft are two of the biggest R&D spenders in the world and your examples actually support my contention that the role of academia is far less than that of private industry. For instance, in the case of the UCB-UIUC grant for $500 million, are you aware that this is part of an $8 billion R&D program that they are doing to find alternative energies? And that says nothing about their huge R&D efforts in the more traditional energy categories which I don’t believe the academic community plays much of a role with. </p>
<p>Similarly, Microsoft has 5-6 labs worldwide (although largest by far is in Redmond), but will sometimes partner with others (including universities) who might have a niche expertise. Microsoft knows that having a “Not Invented Here” mentality is stupid and thus they do all they can to invest in/partner with many groups that may be involved with technology that can be critical to their future. Spreading their bets is wise. </p>
<p>These partnering decisions are also smart financially as they keep the fixed costs lower and allow the flexibility to more effectively manage overhead in different market cycles. This is just intelligent corporate management of limited resources. </p>
<p>Barrons,
Your point on talented faculty members is well made as many of the bigger names, who would likely be scholarly leaders in their fields, may teach only 1-2 undergraduate classes a year. Such folks may do much to bolster the opinions of other academics about the prestige of said college’s programs, but it likely does little to enhance the academic experience of the average undergraduate student.</p>
<p>^^I find it very hard to believe that BP and Microsoft are sending 8 billion dollars on basic research.</p>
<p>From the financial statements on Morningstar.com, I looked up the R&D expenditures of Microsoft and BP to check the $8 billion figure you quoted.</p>
<p>Microsoft claims it spent about $7.1 billion in R&D for FY 2007.
BP spent a much smaller $756 million (about 10% of the Microsoft expenditure).</p>
<p>Microsoft does have its own research labs, but it also has numerous research partnerships with academia:
[About</a> Microsoft Research: Collaborative Institutes](<a href=“Microsoft Research – Emerging Technology, Computer, and Software Research”>Microsoft Research – Emerging Technology, Computer, and Software Research)</p>
<p>From the July 2008 issue of PC Magazine, they list “7 innovations that will change your life”, and the associated place said innovations are happening. (in order of appearance) First one is joint venture of John Hopkins and Deka. Second one is Berkeley. Third is Microsoft Research. Fourth is MIT Media Lab. Fifth is Carnegie Mellon. Sixth is Georgia Tech. Seventh one doesn’t specifically list any place, but the entire article is basically an interview with a guy at Georgia Tech that’s working on it.</p>
<p>Wha? The list doesn’t precisely correspond to the USNWR top 7 spots? :::going off to fan self and get smelling salts ::::::</p>
<p>Ya think butchokoy? ;-)</p>
<p>Come on now, fellas. It hardly matters where they send the money–one uninformed, clueless, nonproductive academic researcher is as useless as the next. It’s all just money flushed down the drain anyway–does it matter which academic toilet one uses?</p>