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From: deh0654@sjfc.UUCP (Dennis Hamilton)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: University Education and Industry Needs
Message-ID: <1274@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 29 Dec 87 00:00:14 GMT
Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM
Organization: Saint John Fisher College, Rochester, NY
Lines: 47
Approved: taylor@hplabs

Kurt Guntheroth asks:

> Why should industry give more money and resign all control?  

I'm not professionally professorial, but the following events occured here
this past summer.  

The Eastman Kodak company has, in the past, provided a heavy endowment to 
the University of Rochester (and, for example, the Eastman school of music).
Actually, George Eastman did most of it while still living, but the company 
and its minions (and martinets) take the credit.

Eastman Kodak also has a high enrollment in the "Friday Program" MBA
track at the School of Management, and there are many other Kodak students,
adjunct faculty, etc., especially in the busines school.

This last summer, U of R was threatened with withdrawal of Kodak's support
for admitting a Japanese student (and employee of rival Fuji corporation) to
the MBA program.  The University caved in and withdrew the previously-granted
admission.  

Of course, some commentators suggest that the reason this attracted so much
attention is that the student was admitted at all.  Normally, the student 
would have been passed over quite silently and no one might have been the 
wiser.

In the local furor, most of the letters to the editor were in favor of 
bashing the Jap and supporting Rochester's largest employer.  The company
spokespeople (and the University's too) have all been ingenuous.

The notion of funding targeted research is hard to question (but what about
it being the tobacco industry trying to get some favorable research studies 
to cite and some experts that they've bought into their corner -- how do you 
feel about that?).  The notion of academic content and choice of students, 
also a matter of academic freedom, is a real problem.  If an employer has 
an industrial need, why not arrange to have it carried out at an industrial
location.  If, for some reason, it is important for collegiate credit or
recognition to accompany what is in fact training, not education, the problem
is not so easily reducable to an intellectual platitude.

I guess life is just too messy, and human foibles to ever-present, to want
to see the academia-industry connection blured even further than it already is.

[This incident has been reported in the New York Times, and there was a
tremendous amount of local coverage, overall a couple of months, but the
story did *not* originally break locally.]

Dennis E. Hamilton