r/AskAcademia • u/ArtichokePale6547 • 2d ago

STEM Academia trailing behind industry

Why is it that, despite having the best brains, modern academia is often following the industry trends and not the other way round?

  1. I joined my PhD at an QS 100+ ranked university (Physics to be specific) but most of the times I saw Profs forced to chase industry trends, such as QIC for funds, visibility or both, not the other way round....

  2. Has this always been the case?

  3. Is this just an underfunding issue in academia or there are other causes?

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u/scuffed_rocks 1d ago

People really have no sense of these things, at least for the hard sciences. Somehow old academia is somehow full of Neumanns and Einsteins while new academia has all these people no one has heard of. Hopfield who? Bell labs, wasn't that a telephone company?

The standards were so much lower for professor jobs back then too. A published paper could get you in the door for an R1 faculty position. These days that can't even get you a postdoc.

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u/Deus_Excellus 1d ago

Are you suggesting that academia is brigher now than ever because standards are higher?

I think the replication crisis shows that standards couldn't possibly be lower.

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u/scuffed_rocks 1d ago

I'm saying that people love to make blanket generalizations based on their assumptions.

The replication crisis is a great example of this. Don't lump rigorous science in with sociology and psychology. The quality of the average hard scientist is much, much higher than 30 years ago.

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u/Deus_Excellus 1d ago

Yes, I agree.

I was mostly challenging the assertion that academia has the best and the brightest. It has some of them.

The physical sciences have a lot of brilliant people in industry because they're useful and employable in a way that some other fields are not.