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Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research
GabrielF writes "Over the last few decades, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded some of the most successful computer science research projects in history, such as the Internet. However, according to the New York Times, DARPA has recently decided to significantly cut funding of open-ended computer science research projects in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results. Leading computer scientists, such as David Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and worried."
Disclosure: I'm a graduate student at a major research university, doing public research that happens to be funded in part by DARPA and the DoD. The research is long-term, but is in a field that will clearly have national security implications.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard).
Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.
At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.
At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).
I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).
The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships.
Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.
Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.
It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.