[lobbying-org] Re: CST Part II - May 1 Official Opening - Invitation

[Matthew Byng-Maddick]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:30:07AM +0100, James Srinivasan wrote:
> > In the past, British universities were encouraged to stay independent
> > from industry.  The worry was that otherwise, universities would
> > concentrate on serving industry's short-term interests rather than
> > investigating important questions in the public interest.  Now,
> > though, contact between the two is almost required; and when industry
> > funds research it gets to influence the agenda, potentially putting
> > areas of research off-limits.  That's the trend at the moment.  It's
> > visible in other subjects, and I think it's visible in some areas of
> > Computer Science to some extent.
> Whether you like it or not, more and more research is going to be funded by
> industry. Personally, I see this as a good thing - the potential for extra
> funding is certainly appreciated for my PhD application.

I'm inclined, in my idealistic way, to agree with Mark here, though I've
been thinking about the problem for a few years now and I have yet to
see a workable solution for where the money ends up coming from. Certainly
in my year out job (in '95-'96) a lot of the work we were doing was in
collaboration with various university departments from various universities.

Questions in the "public interest" is unfortunately difficult to define, and
as more and more people want to do research, there's less money for
individual projects, and projects get more expensive. It's difficult to
decide where this money should come from, and industry has lots of money
to give to further developments it can use.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I'm firmly of the opinion that
some research is better than none, even if it's not necessarily going to
better the "public interest" for however you define it.

It would also be good to spend some time eliminating the competition
between various research departments who are researching the same things
and get them to research different things so we broaden too, but again,
I don't see easy ways of making this happen.

£0.02

MBM

-- 
Matthew Byng-Maddick         <mbm@colondot.net>           http://colondot.net/