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Can High-Tech Academia Survive Silicon Valley's Talent Binge?
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon had one of the most capable robotics research centers in the world. Then, Uber hired away dozens of workers in a frantic push to jump start development of autonomous driving technology, which left CMU reeling. Now the NY Times asks whether such high-tech labs can continue to exist; Silicon Valley seems ready to flood such organizations with money whenever a vital new technology is almost ripe. "Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. When researchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; they usually can't publish what they discover — or even talk about it over drinks with former colleagues. ... [Also], the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, ''basic'' problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money."
Exactly. Universities are already churning out more PhDs than there are teaching positions, so it's not like they are lacking a pool of scientists to choose from.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The summary glosses over the character of CMU itself. CMU is a research focused, selective private university that operates in large part from public and private grants and research contracts. It is not a public land-grant university set up to provide education opportunity to the general population. Teaching is a responsibility, but obtaining grant funding, then producing marketable research to obtain more grant funding, is a much bigger priority.
In addition, CMU benefits from patents. Just because there is public funding for the research, does not prevent the faculty and university from patenting the technology developed on the research projects. So the "raid" of CMU by Uber will likely result in another windfall later to CMU from patent licenses.
Einstein was a patent clerk
No, he wasn't. He had a PhD and was already known as one of the top theoretical physicists in the world when the patent office hired him to be an expert witness (because nobody else at the office understood the patents being challenged, the first involved inertial navigation). He took the job to make some money while waiting for offers from the elite European universities.