Dear folks,
The autobiography of novelist Nevil Shute, Slide Rule (1954), focuses almost entirely on his successful career as an aviation engineer. At one point in it, he mentions the problems of getting start-up funding, and speaks out against heavy inheritance taxes, on the basis that tax discourages people who have suddenly come into a windfall of money, such as through inheritance or a land sale, from taking some of that money to gamble on a risky investment.
Without such gamblers, Shute asserts, capital funding is available only through managerial bean counters, who are allergic to risk, and therefore never achieve the sometimes-stupendous success resulting from genuine innovation.
Shute's airplane innovations played significant roles in WWII.
Heidi
On Monday, June 22, 2020, 01:28:25 p.m. EDT, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Terry,
Thanks for your reply. While I understand it, I continue to disagree for the reasons I stated.
Australian universities often go overboard on the notion of economic value. It fits together with the overblown managerialism from which many Australian universities suffer.
One historical correction. Einstein’s thesis was not on Brownian motion. It involved determining molecular dimensions. The title was “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.”
The notion that it is always easy to identify and support high quality doctoral projects seems quite wrong to me. It isn’t even easy to identify and accept high quality science when senior scientists put it forward. Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion was in part revolutionary because it demonstrated the reality of atomic theory in such a way that nearly everyone who had previously rejected atomic theory changed their views. It’s easy to forget Ludwig Boltzmann’s long, lonely struggle arguing for atomic theory.
While I understand the notion that a PhD project ought to lead to measurable cash value, I simply disagree. It’s a managerialist notion. Much of this thinking fits in the world of silly measurements that Mats Alvesson criticises in his 2013 book, The Triumph of Emptiness. It doesn’t matter that many aspects of design involve practical outcomes — there are too many responsible arguments against this kind of approach for me to accept it.
The idea that anyone can predict the cash value of a successful solution to a doctoral research question seems silly to me. I still can’t figure out the cash value of several of the finest doctoral theses in the design field, even though each of them has advanced the discipline in ways that I could describe without knowing the cash value they represent. The exception would be research sponsored by industry where the sponsors actually understand the problem well enough to define the cash value of a solution.
The general “cash value” approach makes sense for universities focused on managerial metrics. There are other kinds of universities.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Eminent Scholar | College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning | University of Cincinnati ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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