Unbundling the University, Part 1

My good friend Ben Reinhardt has written a long essay about the structure of the modern university, and whether it makes sense to fund universities for precommercial technological development. We’re reprinting Ben’s essay in several parts, so as to further the discussion about how best to promote scientific and technological advancement. See more of Ben’s work at Speculative Technologies.

Part 1:

Universities are a tricky thing. Almost everybody has at least one touchpoint with them: attending as an undergraduate, masters, PhD, or professional student; working at or with them; knowing someone who did one of those things; seeing or hearing “expert opinions” in media coming from professors; or perhaps seeing them as another world that many people pour time and resources into. Technology is similar in its many varied touchpoints with our lives (I’ll get to the connection between the two in just a moment).

Across a broad swath of domains and political positions, there’s agreement that:

1. Universities are important.

2. There is something amiss with universities.

3. Reform of some sort is needed for this important institution.

But there is strong disagreement about:

1. Why universities are important

2. What is amiss with them

3. How things need to change

It’s a blind-men-and-an-elephant situation. Each of us is grabbing the part of a massive system that is closest to our lives and priorities. Some people see universities as doing a poor job giving students skills for successful careers; others see them abnegating their duty to provide moral instruction to future leaders; others see universities failing in their role of discovering true things about the universe playing out in the replication crisis and other scandals; from institutional politicization to insufficient political action on important issues, the list goes on.

The part of the beast that I grapple with daily is the university’s role in “pre-commercial technology research” – work to create useful new technologies that do not (yet) have a clear business case. An abundant future, new frontiers, and arguably civilization itself all depend on a flourishing ecosystem for this kind of work. But in the years since we started Speculative Technologies to bolster that ecosystem and unlock those technologies, we have experienced first-hand a sobering truth: universities have developed a near-monopoly on many types of research. And like many monopolies, they are not particularly good at all of them.

It’s impossible to talk about any specific university issue without stepping into a much