‘Why I’m leaving Harvard’
16th November 2010
Matt Welsh follows the money.
And who could blame him? I’d rather work at Google than a second-rate university any day.
But the most interesting part, to me, is this:
And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point.
Note that TEACHING is considered OVERHEAD/RED TAPE, like begging for money (grant proposals) and shuffling paper (committee work).
This points up one of the basic flaws in the modern university system: Its primary objective is research, and teaching is only something they do on the side, like begging money from the government and holding interminable faculty meetings. This is, of course, the baleful influence of the German system that was imported into the U.S. in the 19th century and has been festering here every since.