Torn between two worlds(part 2)
Saturday, March 18th, 2006Emphasizing the duality nature of academia (Keeping the worst of both extremes, liberalism-communisim and conservatism-fascism) part 2, how "liberal" is the academia?
Thus far, the academia is seldom as liberal as most people would think. While the lab head dictates which direction to take for the future, he/she is ultimately bound by at least two levels of extreme conservatism. 1. Departmental policy on many assistant professors is rarely a liberal one. "You better be doing on some things that you know you’ll be able to produce a publication. And work on your own work and don’t dabble." This is the exact discouraging comment that I get from some very high level people. Where is my freedom to think outside of the box?? How can I NOT collaborate when I am a multidisciplinary type of researcher? Why do they fail to realize that one person cannot possibly comprehend the vast amount of knowledge in these disciplines? I think they’re out of date and these policies are no longer suited for the next generation of scientists. A multidisciplinary researcher is NOT a jack of all trade and expert of none, but a scientist with expertise in one area of science but understands well enough other disciplines to be able to initiate a dialogue and to communicate across fields and borrow ideas. One interesting I found while researching in mulitple fields is the tremendous amount of "re-inventing the wheel" events. I’d say either the academia change this policy or all the good people are left with no choice.
On a second level 2. NIH is backward in their thinking. It suppose to foster novel ideas and not hammering it until the 5th time the same grant has been submitted. Again coming back to the idea of free-thinking. While superficially we’re allowed to do "whatever we want," the second clause says "within the scope of NIH policy." There you go again, POLICY is mention as a virtual mind blocker, an invisible wall that binds and confine the possibilities of free minds. Under this scenario, a new assistant professor will NEVER get funded for doing novel research. It seems like the only way NIH will make any progress is when the evidence is so overwhelming that it’s already pointless to do the experiments. What’s the fun when you don’t take any risk? Afterall each experiment has a risk of failing, but as long as we stay truthful to our data, what’s to be afraid of? where is my reward for thinking freely?
Last point, while $$ is useful, it’s not everything the industry can offer, and certainly the academia is not dramatically underpaying its faculties, too. I actually think that the academia pays more in the long run. So it isn’t really about "See[ing] the Money."
Several things for sure differ between academia and the industry are the diference in their pace, reward models, and pragmatic attitude. While the academia is hemming and hawwing about whether it’s safe to move an inch, the industry definitely moves alot faster. Again~ timing is everything. Secondly, industry actually REWARDS collaborative efforts. Historically, a company that actually collaborates with oneone, and sometimes its own competitor, always wins out in the long run, whereas a company that tries to kill its competition, by either lowering cost to below the profit margin or other unscrupulous deeds, tend to lose big time. While we can argue both ways that this trait is good and bad, history has shown that any collaboration projects with more than $20+ million dollars on the line is always more productive to be carried out in the industry. Lastly, we need not to argue that some of the most useless and esoteric research are still being carried out TODAY (again, it depends on what your definition of priority research. Some people still think ADHD research is useless when it is already at 5% prevalence and going up higher every year)
In terms of freedom not exists outside of academia, I disagree. This is just a stereotype without too much basis and facts to back it up (see recent AAAS survey research).
