Pleasing your patrons in academia

Wow, it's been a few days since I posted, but it was a busy weekend for me, I guess I have to try harder next time. Ok now

http://chronicle.com/article/Public-Research-Universities/126464/

The link I just pasted basically tells university researchers to spend more time on projects that bring money to the state. It gave me the sense that many people in the private sector feel that university research is pointless unless it's helping the local community (or the state). I think many people forgot that good research is a slow process that takes a lot of thought, time, and retries. You are basically searching the truth space and sometimes it's not always obvious. These days as we have new data, and faster supercomputers, we are able to find correlations and patterns that gives us some insight on the underlying truths of the world. But people are not patient enough to wait for these truths. I read an article the other day saying that the President wants to spend more on engineering projects instead of "scientific" projects. Engineering is all about implementation, and not really about discovery or really advancing the field. Trust me, I am a software engineering, so all I do is implementation, but my implementations depend on scientists (way smarter than I) to come up with truths that give me the assurance that AES encryption is really hard crack or that a small world graph will give me logarithmic hop-count to any destination (on average). Most times engineers are to bogged down with the hardships of implementation to worry about the scientific (or theoritical) stuff.

Now back to the article, I see it as an omen, because of this new wave of austerity measures sweeping the nation, scientific research funding will definitely take a hit. The future is going to be tough, since there will be less NSF funds and an increasing number of PhDs fighting for it. I guess over time researchers will look more towards companies for funding and maybe that's the future of research. Companies will drive research in universities as a result, they save money in R&D and universities make more money without depending on tax dollars and everybody wins. To reiterate, departments won't have to close because researchers are able to get money for industry, state saves money because they can allocate less to universities, industry saves money because they get a bigger bang for their bug by outsourcing their R&D to academia. For now, I'll just leave it at that. (I actually proofread this one, I guess I'm a sucka today).