/sci/ - Science & Math

Just use your unlimited funds to buy out and consolidate all but 9 universities in the world, making your new institution top 10 by definition.

If any of the universities disagree for nationalistic or regional reasons, then use your unlimited funds to buy out their country.

>>16102814
Kek. Not like that. The point of this thread is to discuss what makes a university good. Not try to solve it through sheer buying power.

>muh narcissistic schizo world building fantasy where i get to play god
Ernest Jones, in 1913, was the first to construe extreme narcissism, which he called the "God-complex", as a character flaw. He described people with God-complex as being aloof, self-important, overconfident, auto-erotic, inaccessible, self-admiring, and exhibitionistic, with fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience. He observed that these people had a high need for uniqueness.

>>16102794
(I'm assuming by "disposable income" I'm a western billionaire with softer power than some oligarch or a major tech company that can make their own campus)
>lobby an oil reserve nation (more likely an american state to prevent ideological fuckery, texas would love this as long as it's engineering or med) to establish research funding
>campaign for the need for more x research in the area, infectious decrease, children cancer, woke -ists preventing progress in your industry, anything
>invest in or reclaim some hardware, again more lobbying if we're building something that requires eminent domain for a research hospital or a collider (which would be impossible prob)
>connect with the actual industry you're trying to educate for and advertise the shit out of it while you break ground
>determine if you're going to be research-focused or teaching focus, determines what sort of faculty you're going to attract, give some prominent heads in the space a good bonus and autonomy, only for high impact tho
>start off as a grad school for one specific industry, expand to a state school and exploit your lobby to keep expanding
congrats you've made UT southwestern

>>16102843
have you ever thought about the concept of narcissism beyond "narcissism is bad"?

>>16102794
Buy a casino, offer cocaine and hookers.
First year is the fuck year, you will be legally obligated to have fucking fun and learn to be a fucking human.
Have qualifier exams and instead of normal classes it's all just reading courses, after the first year you're put into an advisor group and you start some kind of research project.
The business and finance majors run the casino, the math and physics guys rig the games, the cs guys manage our website and internal systems, the chem people make us more drugs, the biologists cures the syphilis, the psych people will give the hookers therapy, the education majors will tutor the hooker's children.
The other people can work the bar and clean the toilets so they get used to it. Unless they're nepobabies and daddy is paying big time, that case they will just do drugs and gamble all day.

>>16102794
>small university
>no humanities department
>offer huge salaries to high quality researchers with following conditions:
>they will not spend any time on grant proposals and will not seek external funding
>limited to at most one PhD student at a time
>they should not consistently publish more than 4 papers per year unless it is abundantly clear the quality is excellent
>they agree to not publicly advocate for any political causes
>they agree to not advocate for any diversity of race or sex in hiring decisions
As for students:
>aggressively recruit students from Olympiads to get the ball rolling with fully paid scholarships
>pay for on campus accommodation for all students
>small size encourages interaction between them and researchers
>funds set aside to be used on any student-led innovations in tech etc
>students also agree to not advocate for political causes on campus
>students are not accepted based on irrelevant extracurriculars
>except for interesting intellectual achievements
>no foreign students accepted
And last but not least if this means it’s a 100% white and Asian campus, so be it

>>16102938
What majors would you offer, considering it'd be small?

>>16102946
Ideally I think this would be a good thing to try for STEM + computer science only. Psychology etc. not considered under the S - only the hard sciences.
I think exceptions should be made for seeking external funding condition if there’s a demonstrated need for large amounts of capital plus plausible interested parties. Otherwise I’m letting the “disposable income” part do some heavy lifting.

>>16102938
>they will not spend any time on grant proposals and will not seek external funding
you understand universities take a cut of that right? you literally cut deals with the labs to make sure that cut is satisfactory to keep high-impact profs while raking in funding.
>Olympiads
charter school of a university 0/10

>>16102954
Yes I do and I think that entire system is ruining how we do science. The entire grant system is badly fucking up everything. You understand we have people in every university who have PhDs and do literally nothing but aid proposals? Grants are not even given to projects based on merit anymore, and post docs are taking on more PhD students purely because it looks good on a proposal with absolutely no clue what the PhD students are even for? I.e it’s degenerated into a complete Ponzi scheme. The whole point of the OP is what we could do if money were not an object and the money system is probably the single biggest problem with universities now.
I also don’t understand the complaints people have about Olympiads since they’re great ways of finding bright future talents. Normally people who aren’t very good at them have a litany of issues they think exist with them that really don’t.

>>16102794
I'm not sure that it's possible without just endorsement from superstars. Like if you started a university in SF and Sam Altman was "involved" in creating it, and then using prestige network effects.
I'm pretty sure unis are just prestige schelling points so you just have to kickstart prestige somehow and pedal to the metal stick push it to it's extreme.

>>16102976
>National University of Singapore
>Top 8th best in the world
>Founded in 1980

They pulled it off without any fame, and it's been open for only 44 years, there might be more to it than that

>>16102984
Ratings for the past decade have been an absolute meme and don’t mean anything

>>16102962
you don't get to live in your idealized perfect fantasy world, it makes no difference how frustrated you get or how outsized your sense of entitlement is. heaven is where you go after you die, here on earth you have to deal with the reality of living in an imperfect world.

>>16103056
>heaven is where you go after you die
nice link retard

>>16103056
the premise of the thread is literally how you would make a better university given enough resources retard

>>16102938
>>limited to at most one PhD student at a time
>>they should not consistently publish more than 4 papers per year unless it is abundantly clear the quality is excellent
these are unironically good changes along with raising pay
add slashing admin almost to 0 and this would be ideal imo

>>16102794
>>16102886
Foregoing gay politics, the ideal scenario would be
>Make my profs completely independent of the establishmen and their lobbyists (by for example, guaranteeing a lifetime income)
>Paper quality is rewared rather than quantity
>Anything published, shared or studied going against the public narrative is open to reception and won't cause the downfall of "reputation" or any such gay thing used to gaslight or shut down novel ideas by competition/malicious forces

If this alone is achieved or something similar, forget the top 10 gay ranking. You'll create another soientific revolution.

>>16103382
Basically, you want to concentrate power back to the researchers and teachers, rather than making them dependent on outside funding/publishers with their own agenda on what is and isn't soience.

i thought about this for months. my conclusion is to take kids in their 15s and make them start with material made for pupils older, like 20 yo, end of high school, beginning of university .

For the selection of kids, the entry test is really the usual test made for older pupils too.


Keep in mind that decades after decades the piece of shit leftists have decreased the quality of the amterial they teach. So 50 years ago the material learnt at the end of high school is now learnt in university. This proves the kids can actually learn complex thing pretty young, and that nowadays you have to raise the bar.

>>16102832
Bit that's the answer. Money.

>>16103382
How can you know the impact of a paper being published though?

There's simple shit that ends up becoming groundbreaking and there's also research that took years upon years that ends up being discredited.

Consider the fiasco of the Korean guys who claimed to have created a room temperature superconductor

>>16103391
Academics are so poisoned by ~three generations of that pernicious influence there needs to be a rigorous filter before you hire them, too.
Otherwise I agree.

ANY university could be improved simply by removing it from the textbook scam system. This can be done in any number of ways, but as long as there's a hard cap of $15 text-cost per course, the content control of publishers will be broken.

>>16102794
Which metrics does top 10 entail?
Top 10 in student happiness?
No admittance of problematic democraphic groups, free of charge, throw parties, design clubs
Top 10 in terms of quality of graduants?
Steal all of the top unis top profs, make education super rigorous, only admit people with top grades, top IQ and top probability to pass through, have 10 hour days for students
Best networking possibilities? Bribe world leaders to get their students in and find a balance between happiness and quality to make students and parents happy enough
I am pretty sure that in any case you want to keep the administrative overhead as small as possible because these people contribute nothing of value after a certain point.

>>16103791
>10 hour days for students
Kek why would you want to turn a school into a Chinese sweatshop?

>>16103826
Hardcore elitism.

>>16103826
probably because this whole thread is full of fart-sniffers

>>16102794
I would create a totally new cirriculum format based around the combination of the best of ancient and new learning techniques, all pornography and social media sites would be banned, except for youtube of course, and such things are banned from campus, and any nearby networks, I create opportune social gatherings where I carefully engineer it so that everybody forms innocent and stable lasting relationships, people would be taught and encouraged to compose songs poems stories and myths based around the subject material they learn especially if the subject is one of the sciences or the arts or mathematics, I separate classrooms and by gender except for lecture halls of course, the campus and various activities would be centrally designed around communing with and respecting nature, people would be encouraged to do research on their own time with unlimited access to useful learning materials, including having a massive archive of PDFs that the students can save freely to their devices, which would have minimum technical requirements be rigidly set so that no student is at a disadvantage in computer related classwork. It would be a veritable academic's paradise, in all but the fact that degeneracy would be nearly banned, they would be learning to better the world, not harm it, and if they don't believe in that, then they can leave and have their credits arranged to be transferred somwhere else. I would also hand pick all of the textbooks and learning material used.
>inb4 literally hitler
sort of a little bit, yeah ;)

>>16103952
And of course theology courses would be a requirement, if a student has particular religious needs, they can arrange that study with a professor or we will find a professor for them. If the student is an atheist, they still must choose a theological path of study, no exceptions.

>>16102794
Put all your money into the novel prize winners and fancy facilities. The rest will come

>>16103964

In principle, the study of sociology and the university model of education would seem to be worthwhile fields of endeavor. But in historical practice, both were poisoned right from the very start, almost to the point of the irredeemable: the former by Marx, and the latter by theology, the foundational object of study-and the foundational error-of the university. Lamentable, unnecessary, arbitrary accidents of history.

>>16103979
Yes, Marx ruined the study of sociology, but theology is at it's core the study of god or the gods depending on your religion, and it's of no question that that drive to know our point in life and how to apply what we learn to better our world and to understand what we've been bestowed is the same drive that pushes us toward science and sociology and philosophy. It would be criminal to exclude it, so long as it is not dogmatic or fundamentalist

>>16102938
>>no foreign students accepted
you will never make it kek, us universities' greatest strengths is the prospect of getting to live in the US if you major in STEM, attracting some of the smartest students from Europe and East Asia who all want to be paid in the 6 figures and live in a free country where wanting to make money isn't seen as evil.
The USA works so well because it's draining the best talent from the rest of the world by offering better life prospects to those who have a rare talent.

>>16102794
Top 10 in what?
Producing qualified workforce?
Milling patents?
Sports and gangbangs?
Woke indoctrination?

Universities are obsolete and overpriced AF.

>>16104545
>diversity is our le greatest strength
man it's crazy how we ever achieved all those discoveries before we had millions of international students

>>16104550
>paying for university
you're playing the game wrong, filtered

>>16104606
It's been a while since we've started massively importing great minds from france, germany, UK, japan etc. Sure it got out of hands recently but denying it is crazy.

>>16104641
nobody's denying it, but there have been centuries before that where migration was not common but Europe somehow managed to work out just fine

>>16103504
>How can you know the impact of a paper being published though?
Difficult, but you would need a supervisory body of sorts (comprised of honest people) and honest staff at every level. Supervisors would especially need to be clear of corruption/self interest (LK-99 wasn't hard to debunk with a bit of experimenting, it just got headlines, though most in the field were skeptical).

Of course, this is all difficult to implement irl, I'm thinking of what an "ideal" research university should be, and the original idea behind it.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
Shit like this existed before and I've read interesting old medical texts from its members (it's nothing like it was in its inception). The attitude was mostly aiming to unearth and learn, even if mistakes happened. An atmosphere of genuine interest and time to share found knowledge is missing. Instead, you've got shit being churned and pushed to justify paychecks and dogmatic holdfast to what's considered to be true today (which is dangerous, because we're fucking wrong on so many avenues, just perpetuating and justifying bullshit where holes are present).

>>16104780
Also, like I said, if honest duds (in terms of paper impact) happen, it should pose no issue. As long as the researcher tried. Failures happen and should be allowed to happen.

>>16104791
>As long as the researcher tried.
And everyone else#