Hogs at the Trough, or Pigs in Space
I find it interesting, no, amazing, how people can talk out of both sides of their mouths at once, producing cacophony rather than stereo. Education, we are told by the PSEC report, must be responsive to industry. The marketplace will create a demand, or an opportunity, for certain types of research and certain types of education. Educational institutions will then respond to the demand. It is a simple enough system, so simple, in fact, as to be diametrically opposed to reality in many, if not most, cases.
True innovation proceeds from basic research. Nobody from GE or NASA called up MIT or CalTech and said “Hey, why don’t you guys invent the transistor, or the microchip, or the laser? No, we don’t have a schmick what any of these things are, but give it some thought and get them built by next Tuesday.”
Most technological developments come from researchers — private, corporate or public — beavering away, often unnoticed, often on seeming dead ends, for years until that eureka moment arrives when they do manage to produce “sunshine from cucumbers,” in the form of the personal computer, or developing a promising cure for cancer from radio waves.
Many discoveries of physical laws, technological developments and social advances come from ideas considered preposterous by the established interests of their eras. If you don’t believe that, consider the cases of Copernicus, Galileo, Bohr, Einstein, Harvey, Jefferson, the founders of the European Union and the United Nations, and a vast host of others like them. Had they listened to the established interests of their eras we might all be ruled by absolute monarchs, heating our draughty homes with coal, lighting them with tallow candles, succumbing in droves to every minor disease that raised its head, and believing that the Sun orbits the Earth. Nobody in the whaling fleets told Abraham Gesner to distill kerosene from coal. Nobody in the kerosene industry pressed Edison to invent the light bulb. These and many other society-changing innovations responded to the possibilities of the marketplace, NOT to the demands of industry.
But now that we live in an age where, largely, industries are founded by financiers looking to make a fast dollar, rather than by independent inventors looking to market their discoveries, we find industry wishing to disregard the role of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and stick their own fingers directly into the pie. They confuse “industry” with “marketplace”. The two are not the same, not by any reasonable interpretation. Still, the industrialist’s position would be fine if they were attempting to found research departments within their own companies to pursue promising lines of research, but that isn’t the aim in the case of the PSEC report. Instead of industry risking its capital on research, it wants the taxpayer to bear all of the risk for the benefit of industry. The vision of hogs at the trough comes readily to mind.
What universities are supposed to do is educate and train students so that they can be advantageously employed, and be personally fulfilled, and provide a benefit to the rising generation of the society in which they live. By doing so universities remain relevant to the societies which they exist to serve. Education is a societal good, not an industrial product. What our short-sighted local industrialists seem to want universities to do is to disregard the long-term needs of society and to focus entirely on enabling short-term gains for industries and stockholders. When a government attempts to forward such a myopic agenda it has lost sight of exactly who elected them to office, and exactly what they are supposed to be doing while in office. Again, the vision of hogs at the trough comes to mind, or maybe Pigs in Space.
