“I think universities have become detached from society and from reality as well,” Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice says in a podcast interview. “People take for granted some of the innovations that have come out of universities.” True. Colleges also take for granted why we do research at universities in the first place. Change is needed.
The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence” contains a dog’s breakfast of demands—some reasonable, others likely free-speech violations. One commands that universities with endowments of more than $2 million per undergraduate “will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs,” although schools can still make rich kids pay. The deadline is Monday. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown and others have already said no to the whole thing.
The university model has other problems. Progress comes via surprises. But tenure, which was intended to protect academic freedom in the humanities but now often hinders it, has become standard including in hard sciences—which limits fresh, young talent and thereby constrains surprising new progress-pushing ideas.
Plus, the grant process has politicized science and can suppress new ideas and future surprises. Successful researchers are the ones great at applying for grants rather than at battling the status quo. It’s similar inside companies. Early Google AI researchers had to hide machine-learning servers because they were forbidden by the search folks.