Basically, I agree entirely with Sean’s thoughts. I am now a tenure track professor at a second tier research university.

Like any other job, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is valued. Here I offer an easy way to figure out this stuff.

Offer letters are not talked about openly, generally, but all that you have to do is look at one to get a sense of what is valued. My offer letter is about 2.5 pages. There is a small part of one paragraph dedicated to teaching. The great majority of the rest talks about “external funding” as a requirement (read: research grants), publications, and my startup money package.

I’m new at my university (less than 6 months). During this time, the total time that I have spent talking/meeting/emailing about teaching with any other professor/dean/etc is about 1 hour (and, yes, I am expected to teach in the fall – it just isn’t important enough to actually discuss). In contrast, I have had many, many conversations and meetings about funding – conservatively, I’d say 100 hours on this. That *does not include* the two grants that I have already submitted and the one to three (depending on my choices) that I am about to start work on. (And I’m not even counting “minor” things like training grant applications for people in my lab; did those, too – and got the salary money for my people!).

Need I say more? Again, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is valued…

Well… not exactly. The reason we have taxes isn’t to punish individuals by stealing their hard-earned cash — it’s to raise money for the government. Hypothetically at least, we try to do this in “fair” ways which inflict the least amount of damage to the economy. The fact that Harvard’s profits don’t go towards individual incomes is a reason *to* tax it, not to leave it untaxed, because reducing individual incomes is a bad thing that we want to avoid if we can. On the other hand, Harvard’s profits (supposedly) go to other good things that we don’t want to hurt. The government has essentially decided that we’re willing to leave nonprofit institutions untaxed (and therefore to tax you and me and everybody else more) because they engage in goals that the government considers worth subsidizing. But there’s nothing unreasonable about saying, Hey — we’re giving up a lot of revenue, and we’re not getting a whole lot back for it.

He also said of his diploma: “Every sheep should keep
its skin.”

Major universities are mainly there to crank out
corporate drones – and this applies to science as well.

(1) Tax exemption is granted to charitable gifts, and charitable organizations, because they are seen to provide a public good. Growing capital is NOT one of those public goods, or else we’d grant tax exemption to that in the private industry. Thus, when charitable organizations divert resources to growing capital, they are diverting resources away from the public services that motivate their tax exemption. One can imagine an extreme situation, where society becomes socially/culturally impoverished because all of its charitable organizations are diverting their resources to growing endowments, and not to their primary missions.

(2) One can argue that Harvard is better at what it does because it competes with other elite universities. Historically, we have done just fine with the set of elite universities we have. But our society is growing, and growing more advanced, and it might be argued the circle of ‘elite’ academic institutions should grow to maintain healthy competition across the depth of academic endeavors in our advancing society. This requires inhibiting ‘advantaged’ institutions from too powerfully leveraging their advantage.

(3) As much as Harvard strives to provide equal opportunity to its resources, as an elite university it still serves to perpetuate the advantage of a more privileged class, because it provides a means for those starting with an advantage to increase that advantage merely by institutional affiliation. I don’t think one can really blame Harvard, who simply seeks the most qualified students (and perhaps even sacrifices this aim in order to open its doors to at least some disadvantaged students) — but as a society we can try to muffle this trend by increasing the circle of elite universities. This requires inhibiting ‘advantaged’ institutions from too powerfully leveraging their advantage.

All this said, I do think we (as a society) should proceed cautiously with such forms of ’social engineering.’ As much as is wrong with our society, we’ve certainly got a lot of good things going for us, when you compare to the scope of human history. The Harvards of our society are among its most valuable resources, and it is important not to put those resources in jeopardy with speculative policies to improve the situation (or prevent a possible problem).