Unbundling the University, Part 1

Guest post by Ben Reinhardt

My good friend Ben Reinhardt has written a long essay about the structure of the modern university, and whether it makes sense to fund universities for precommercial technological development. We’re reprinting Ben’s essay in several parts, so as to further the discussion about how best to promote scientific and technological advancement. See more of Ben’s work at Speculative Technologies.

Part 1:

Universities are a tricky thing. Almost everybody has at least one touchpoint with them: attending as an undergraduate, masters, PhD, or professional student; working at or with them; knowing someone who did one of those things; seeing or hearing “expert opinions” in media coming from professors; or perhaps seeing them as another world that many people pour time and resources into. Technology is similar in its many varied touchpoints with our lives (I’ll get to the connection between the two in just a moment).

Across a broad swath of domains and political positions, there’s agreement that:

1. Universities are important.

2. There is something amiss with universities.

3. Reform of some sort is needed for this important institution.

But there is strong disagreement about:

1. Why universities are important

2. What is amiss with them

3. How things need to change

It’s a blind-men-and-an-elephant situation. Each of us is grabbing the part of a massive system that is closest to our lives and priorities. Some people see universities as doing a poor job giving students skills for successful careers; others see them abnegating their duty to provide moral instruction to future leaders; others see universities failing in their role of discovering true things about the universe playing out in the replication crisis and other scandals; from institutional politicization to insufficient political action on important issues, the list goes on.

The part of the beast that I grapple with daily is the university’s role in “pre-commercial technology research” – work to create useful new technologies that do not (yet) have a clear business case. An abundant future, new frontiers, and arguably civilization itself all depend on a flourishing ecosystem for this kind of work. But in the years since we started Speculative Technologies to bolster that ecosystem and unlock those technologies, we have experienced first-hand a sobering truth: universities have developed a near-monopoly on many types of research. And like many monopolies, they are not particularly good at all of them.

It’s impossible to talk about any specific university issue without stepping into a much deeper conversation about the institution as a whole and how we got here. During the 20th and early 21st century, universities developed a monopoly on so many societal roles. These coupled monopolies mean that you cannot fix any specific problem without touching many others at the same time. Those changes require understanding the roles that have been bundled into a single institution, their particular pathologies, and how they play tug-of-war with the university’s incentives.

There is no single solution here. Silver bullets don’t kill wicked problems! But there is a meta-solution: unbundling the university .

For those not up on their Silicon Valley Jargon: you can think of universities as a massive bundle of societal roles — from credentialing agency to think tank to discoverer of the laws of the universe to generator of new technology. Unbundling means creating new institutions that are specialized to excel at small subsets of those roles.

However, the solution is not to raze the system to the ground: destroying institutions outright almost never works. Considering the historical longevity of universities and the Lindy effect, the odds are that Harvard will outlast the United States. Unbundling is arguably good for the universities themselves, enabling them to focus on the things they are best at. (Of course, reasonable people disagree about what those things are!)

To be explicit, the point of this piece is severalfold:

1. To try to synthesize the different viewpoints on the university.

2. To argue that the university story is intimately coupled to the technology stagnation story.

3. To create a big tent among the different groups of people who care about the different aspects of #1 and #2.

4. Finally, to suggest a path forward.

We’ll follow a path that looks a bit like the “ machete order ” of Star Wars:

• Part 0 is an executive summary — laying out the core thesis for busy people.

• Part 1 is about pre-commercial technology research: what it is, why it’s important, the ways that academia has created a stranglehold on its creation, and why that’s bad.

• Part 2 jumps back in time to see the backstory of the university, how it ended up in this monopoly position, and how it’s taken on so many important societal roles.

• Part 3 explores possibilities for the future.

0. Executive Summary

21st century universities have become a massive “bundle” of societal roles and missions — from skills training to technology development to discovering the secrets of the universe. For the sake of many of these societal roles and arguably for the sake of the universities themselves, Universities need to be unbundled and in particular , we need to unbundle pre-commercial technology research from academia and universities.

Universities have been accumulating roles for hundreds of years but the process drastically accelerated during the 20th century. (For an extended version of this story, see section 2. ) A non-exclusive list of these missions might include:

• Moral instruction for young people

• General skills training

• Vocational training for undergraduates

• Expert researcher training

• A repository of human knowledge

• A place for intellectual mavericks/ a republic of scholars

• Discovering the secrets of the universe

• Inventing the technology that drives the economy

• Improving and studying technology that already exists

• Credentialing agency

• Policy think tank

• Hedge fund

• Sports league

• Dating site

• Lobbying firm

• Young adult day care

These different missions all come with money, status, and vested stakeholders. Money, status, and stakeholders in turn have created a self-perpetuating bureaucratic mess that many people are unhappy with for drastically different reasons. One point of agreement, regardless of which roles you care most about: Universities are no longer balancing these missions well.

“University issues” evokes many different things in different people’s minds. Consider these stylized but true anecdotes:

Alice went to grad school to advance clean energy technology. She spent five years doing work that was published in top journals but would never actually scale. The technology never left the lab.

Bob enrolled to become a better thinker and engage with great ideas. He found adjuncts racing between campuses teaching standardized intro courses, while tenured professors focused on publishing papers nobody reads.

Carol expected college to open doors to a career. She’s now serving coffee while working on her second masters because she was told “your degree doesn’t matter, just explore!”

Dave’s breakthrough battery chemistry is stuck in tech transfer limbo. After 18 months of negotiations, the university still wants 30% equity and exclusive licensing rights. No investor will touch it.

Eve spent her entire life striving to become a professor because she loved doing math and building experiments. She now spends 80% of her time writing grants, managing bureaucracy, and navigating university politics instead of thinking about physics.

Frank joined a university to start an unconventional new research center after years working in the federal government. Clearly no stranger to slow-moving bureaucratic organizations, he rage-quit after six months because he couldn’t get anything done.

Grace joined a prestigious lab hoping to uncover the secrets of human nature. Instead, she spent three years optimizing click-bait paper titles and p-hacking results to maintain grant funding.

This situation grew organically through a series of steps that each made sense at the time: from “Universities are where the literate smart people are, so let’s have them educate government administrators instead of just priests” to “the smart people at universities are pretty good at research and it’s a war, so let’s ask them to expand their scope” to “More and more people are going to college, so let’s use graduating from college as a requirement for the large majority of jobs.” (For the full story, see section 2. ) But like the peacock evolving to have such a heavy tail that it can’t escape predators or the Habsburg Jaw, processes where each step makes sense can still lead to outcomes with a lot of issues.

There are reasons to avoid marrying cousins even if it keeps power in the family…

The university bundle is like expecting every coffee shop to also include a laundromat, a bookstore, and a karaoke bar. There’s nothing wrong with a laundromat-coffeeshop-bookstore-karaoke bar, and in fact, that may even be exactly what some people want. The problem is that when every coffee shop is also a laundromat, bookstore, and karaoke bar, it’s hard to imagine them making the best coffee they possibly could. Furthermore, there’s work that someone might want to get done in a quiet coffee shop that’s hard to do over blasting karaoke music and bad singing; water from leaking washing machines might damage the books, the people waiting for their laundry might ruin the vibe for karaoke singers; and a host of other problems, big and small.

The solution isn’t to shut down all the laundromat-coffee shop-bookstore-karaoke bars or make a law that nobody can serve coffee in the same building as a laundry machine. Nor is the solution the common sentiment: “ah, if only we created a new laundromat-coffee shop-bookstore-karaoke bar that prioritized the function I care about.” Instead, we need to encourage people to start places that just serve coffee or just do laundry (or just sell books and make coffee but not laundry).

For the sake of education, science, and culture, we need a diverse ecosystem of institutions. This ecosystem probably includes universities, but prevents any specific monoculture.

The right mix is probably impossible to know a priori . The unpredictability of the new ecosystem is a feature, not a bug; underspecification leaves room for people to try all sorts of experiments. Just for discovering the secrets of the universe you can imagine all sorts of institutions: one rewards the wackiest ideas, one prioritizes just trying stuff really fast, and one is set up to do work that only has external milestones every 100 or more years. Now imagine that for roles from credentialing to education to skills training.

It’s fine and good to say “unbundle the university” but what does that mean concretely?

There is a whole laundry list of things that will enable other institutions to spring up that you can do in many different institutions: from private companies to foundations to governments to your capacity as an agentic individual. Here are some, but nowhere near all of them:

Things organizations (governments, foundations, etc) can do:

• Stop requiring university affiliations for grants.

• Reduce cycle times for funding research.

• Experiment with how universities are run.

• If you have access to spare physical resources like lab spaces or machine shops, make it possible for unaffiliated people to use them.

Things individuals can do:

• Judge people on portfolios, not degrees.

• Give people a hard time for getting unnecessary degrees.

• Focus on how effective organizations are at achieving their stated goals instead of assuming that “the Harvard Center for Making Things Better” is actually making things better even though it’s in the name and it has fancy affiliations and lots of money.

• Celebrate institutions and individuals who support weird institutional experiments.

• Create ways for people to learn about culture and the humanities outside of universities.

• Simply stop expecting universities to be the solution to society’s ills.

On top of interventions to clear the way for new institutions, unbundling needs people to build genuinely new ways of fulfilling roles that we have heaped onto universities. Think of how Oracle succeeded by specializing in building databases that were just one part of IBMs business and a thousand other examples. These institutions will take many forms: from informal groups to high-growth startups to open-source projects to ambitious nonprofits.

Unbundling pre-commercial technology

While it’s not clear what roles should or should not be bundled together, I am confident that pre-commercial technology research can happen much more effectively in a new institution. Academia’s core structures and incentives revolve around education and scientific inquiry, not building useful technologies.

Quick aside on definitions : ‘Pre-commercial technology research’ is a nebulous term I’m using for work that is intended to create useful technologies but is not a good investment (yet or ever). To a large extent, this is synonymous with work to bridge the ‘ Valley of Death ’ between initial work to create a technology and making it into a commercial product. Note that there is lots of research that isn’t pre-commercial technology: academia can be good for many inquiries into the nature of the universe. (For a much more thorough explanation of pre-commercial technology research see Section 1. )

Let’s look at a specific situation: trying to spin up a program to unlock technology for pulling CO2 and methane out of the atmosphere and turning it into useful complex stuff. (This is a thing we are trying to do at Speculative Technologies, so this isn’t just a made-up example.) If we were able to do this, it would enable us to make all the great things we make out of petroleum (plastics, drugs, commodity chemicals) but without the petroleum. This work makes no sense as a startup because it requires a big chunk of up-front research but the chemicals are incredibly low margin. The actual work entails things like finding and engineering the right enzymes, figuring out how to get them working in a continuous flow system, etc. There are about five independent projects that need to happen, each requiring specialized skills and millions of dollars of equipment. Unless you want to buy all that equipment and hire all those specialists, the only place you can turn to is university labs.

But then here’s a laundry list of things you then need to do just to get a program like this going:

• First, you need to negotiate with five different professors, none of whom are actually going to be doing the hands-on work and will probably spend at most 20% of their attention managing the project. Those professors’ incentives are to get tenure, fund their labs, graduate their students, and publish discrete chunks of work that their community finds new and interesting, in roughly that order. Maybe they have ambitions of doing work that could turn into a company, but none of those priorities are “make the bigger system work.”

• Once things are hashed out with the professors, you need to negotiate with the universities. Chances are that you will need to negotiate with several different parts of each university — the tech transfer office, the grants office, and the general counsel. This can take months and thousands (tens of thousands?) of dollars of legal fees. The Universities’ incentives are to avoid being sued, to follow policy, and get paid – in that order. Many universities default to charging more than 30% overhead (which means that the university gets 30 cents for every dollar that goes to research), and demand ownership over any resulting intellectual property.

• Assuming you can actually get everything settled with five universities and five professors, you then need to wait for the professors to hire the grad students or postdocs who will do the actual work. If you’re lucky, a professor has just taken on someone who doesn’t have a project, but it might take until the next crop of grad students is admitted in almost a year.

Once the work finally starts months or years later:

• You will constantly need to course-correct teams that want to go down the “most interesting” path. A grad student may discover that an enzyme they were trying to get to regenerate ATP 10% more efficiently (which is critical for the whole system to hit a reasonable efficiency) exhibits some strange behavior and spend weeks down a rabbit hole figuring out why and then writing up a paper about it. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing things because they’re interesting! But it can be detrimental to bigger goals when you’re creating new technology in coordination with a number of other groups.

• You’ll inevitably need to adjust timelines for a thousand possible reasons: graduate students graduate, postdocs get permanent positions, or professors shift focus for months at a time to get a paper out, teach, or serve on committees.

Now imagine that the projects have hit their goals and you want to actually get the technology out into the world to have an impact:

• The graduate students who actually did the hands-on work need to get their professor’s permission to continue it outside of the university.

• The professor (who spent less than 20% of their time on the program) is unlikely to leave the university to join the company, but they are likely to want a significant chunk of equity and the ability to have a say in the company’s operations.

• The university’s technology transfer office will want their pound of flesh: either large licensing fees or a chunk of equity in any resulting companies. Even if you contract with the university to have access to the technology, the university still owns it and any organization that uses it will need to license it from them. The technology transfer office will probably demand upwards of 10% or more equity in a company. Normally, you sell ownership stake in a company for money you can use to build the company, so having a chunk of it gone from day one without any money in the bank makes it that much harder to raise money. Unlike VCs, the people at the tech transfer office don’t actually make more money if the company becomes super valuable, so they don’t have strong incentives to see spin-out companies actually succeed.

• Now repeat that process several times. Remember, the work happened across several different universities and labs because most technologies are systems with different components requiring different technical expertise that all need to work in concert.

Suffice it to say: we have not succeeded in building technology for pulling CO2 and methane out of the atmosphere and turning it into useful complex stuff. There are versions of this story across so many of the roles that universities have taken on.

This is what happens when we allow the world’s most bureaucratic institutions to gatekeep the future of civilization.

More abstractly, here’s a non-exhaustive list of the ways that academia is misaligned for pre-commercial technology research:

• Training academics and building technology effectively are at odds. Having trainees – graduate students and postdocs – do the majority of the work on the knowledge frontier is great for their education (and the pocketbooks of everybody involved except the trainees) but it is at odds with building useful technology. A company where most of the code was written by interns would quickly go out of business, even if they were being supervised by senior engineers. In addition to their inexperience, graduate students have naturally high turnover; they can take years to get up to speed and tacit knowledge is constantly lost. Furthermore, academic labs have no incentive to increase productivity because a lot of research funding is earmarked for training: productivity comes from investing in technology to decrease the number of people you need to do work, which isn’t something you do when you have a lot of funds earmarked for heavily subsidized labor.

• Academia incentivizes new discoveries, not useful inventions. Academic incentives are built around scientific inquiry to discover the secrets of the universe. These incentives are direct descendants from natural philosophy. As a result, academia incentivizes novelty, discovery, and general theories over usefulness. Paper and grant reviewers ask “Is this idea new? Does it generalize?” not “Does this scale or work well in the specific case it’s built for?” Academic incentives are great for discovering the secrets of the universe, but not for building powerful technology. Often the work that makes a technology actually useful is just elbow grease and trying tons of things out in a serious context of use, long after you’ve discovered the new thing. This work is something no tenure committee or journal cares about.

• Academic incentives make large teams hard. Successful professors and grad students need to build a personal brand by being first (or last, depending on the field) authors on papers. Awkwardly, there can only be one first author. ¹ Large academic teams can certainly happen, but it requires pushing against all the incentives the system throws at you. Building useful technologies requires teams with many specialties working together without worrying about who gets the credit.

• Universities have become a bureaucratic mess. Arguably, universities have become the most bureaucratic institutions in the world; I know several people who have worked in both government and name-brand universities; they say things move more slowly and it’s harder to get things done at the latter. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that there are as many non-medical administrators at Harvard as researchers. Large bureaucracies make it hard to move fast and do weird things, both of which are critical for creating new technologies.

• University tech transfer offices add massive friction to spinning out technologies. With a few rare exceptions, universities own any IP that is created within their walls (even when funded with government or corporate money). This arrangement isn’t necessarily bad (companies own the IP their employees create as well) but to get out into the world, that IP needs to go through tech transfer offices that have few incentives to actually help the technology succeed. Instead, tech transfer offices can drag out negotiations over draconian licensing terms for months or years. It would be one thing if universities depended heavily on tech transfer to support their other activities, but only 15/155 tech transfer offices in the US are profitable and even Stanford only made $1.1B over four decades in licensing revenue. At a global tech transfer summit a few years ago, only two of the top 30 tech transfer professionals at the meeting said generating revenue was a goal of the tech transfer office. Instead, 30/30 said the goal was the poorly-defined “economic development.” It’s a longer discussion, but the best way to achieve that goal may be to just shut down the office. Profit isn’t everything, but it should be a major focus of an organization whose job is to spin out companies. These are not serious people.

(The list goes on but you get the idea)

The poor fit between academia and pre-commercial technology research wouldn’t be such a problem if academia hadn’t developed a monopoly on pre-commercial research over the course of the 20th century. Pre-commercial technology research once happened in the basements of inventors like Goodyear or Tesla, high-margin research contractors like BBN, and industrial labs like GE Research, Bell Labs, or Dupont Research. How academia gradually took over this critical ecosystem niche and why we can’t just “RETVRN” is a complicated story of both government and market forces, pressures towards specialization and efficiency, and increasing technological complexity. The gutting of corporate research, disappearance of inventors, and decline of small research orgs is an involved story for another time.

In the world of laundromat-coffeeshop-bookstore-karaoke bars, the academic monopoly is like looking around the neighborhood and noticing “huh, there used to be a bunch of stand-alone karaoke bars but the big coffeeshop-laundromat chain came through, acquired all of them, and installed espresso machines and dryers.”

What about non-university research institutions? There are lots of non-university research organizations ranging from the Broad Institute to the Naval Research Lab. Without students, it’s natural to expect them to avoid many tensions that hamstring universities. While they do remove teaching loads and some bureaucracy, the reality is that they’re still subject to many of the incentives that make universities a poor place for pre-commercial technology research. Many organizations are attached to universities at the hip — it is common for non-university research organizations to have university-affiliated professors as primary investigators or be actively administered by a university, like many of the national labs. Even within research organizations that have no affiliation with a university, researchers often see academics as their primary peers; in many cases, the role of professor is still the highest status thing one can aspire to. As a result, people still play the same games as academia – scoring points for novelty, discovery, and papers.

The reality is that it’s very hard for individuals and organizations to avoid interfacing with academia if they have an ambitious pre-commercial technology idea. If you want to work on a technology idea that isn’t yet a clear product, you need to either be in or partner with academic organizations for equipment, skills, or status. That, in turn, means slogging through all those adverse incentives and bureaucracies.

Many people have (correctly) noticed that many of the problems in our research ecosystem are driven by incentives: from p-hacking and fraud to citation obsession, incrementalism, and intense bureaucratization. But most of the solutions unavoidably involve academia: new institutes are housed at universities or have principal investigators (PIs) who are also professors; new grant schemes, prizes or even funding agencies ultimately fund academics; the people joining new fields or using new ways of publishing are ultimately still embedded in academia.

Academia’s monopoly means that shifting incentives in the research ecosystem is incredibly hard because most interventions don’t change who is doing the actual work and what institutions they work for. Changes to the research ecosystem are bottlenecked by where the work is done.

Most new research orgs still depend on people working in university labs to do the hands-on research because there are many reasons for working with universities: universities have a lot of (often underused) rare or expensive equipment; universities are staffed by graduate students and postdocs, who provide cheap labor in exchange for training; universities are where the people with experience doing research are. Spinning up a new research institution from scratch is slow and expensive. Hiring people full-time can lock you into research projects or directions.

The advantages to working with universities were why when we first started Speculative Technologies, we sought to emulate DARPA’s use of exclusively externalized research. However, we’ve come to realize that it’s incredibly hard to do work that doesn’t have a home in existing institutions by working exclusively through existing institutions.

In retrospect, “duh.”

The academic monopoly on pre-commercial research has created a bonanza of research misfits : people and technologies with incredible potential who are poor fits for the academic system. These are the same people and technologies that historically have unlocked new industries and material abundance: Many Nobel prize winners and world-changing technologists have asserted that that they wouldn’t have been able to do the work they did in today’s system.

Yes, we continue to invent, but how many Kaitlin Karikós didn’t persevere under similarly adverse circumstances. Is it possible that ever-decreasing research productivity is not because ideas are getting harder to find, but that we just keep injecting more friction into the system?

Speculative Technologies needs to be a home for these misfits. Research misfits need an institution that drives towards neither papers nor products, but instead focuses on building useful, general-purpose technologies without being wedded to a specific way that they get out into the world. Sometimes papers are best, sometimes products are best, sometimes none of the above.

Building a home for research misfits

There are at least two ways we are thinking about building a home for these misfits. (Note that these are things we’re actively working on making a reality – if you want to help please let us know!):

• A Hardcore Institute of Technology. Counterintuitively, the way to train hardcore scientists and technologists is not to build yet another school; instead, you start by building a research lab for experienced misfits that is working on real, serious problems. You then start bringing in “journeymen” who have some training or experience. A bit later you bring in “apprentices.” These folks are the equivalent of undergrads and grad students, but there’s no grades, no degree, and no accreditation; just experience and trial by fire. This would be like the navy seals of technical training – you know that anybody who comes out of this place is the best of the best. Think about it: portfolios are starting to matter far more than credentials and certain companies are now far better indicators of quality than schools – a successful tour of duty at SpaceX has more signal than a degree from MIT.

• A crucible for new manufacturing paradigms. The US industrial base has been hollowed out. The way to manufacture things cost-effectively in the US won’t be to try to out-China China – they’ve gone so far down the learning curves with current paradigms. The way you compete with an entrenched player is to change the game and leapfrog paradigms: minimills were a new paradigm for manufacturing steel that at first produced an inferior product, but new technology allowed it to take huge market share from traditional steel manufacturing and do it in new places. Similarly, cell phones enabled internet access in Africa and other places without requiring desktops; digital payments leapfrogged credit cards, submarines leapfrogged battleships, the list goes on. Successful American manufacturing in the 21st century won’t look like American manufacturing in the 20th; it will be based on entirely new paradigms. Creating these new paradigms requires more than just startups creating point solutions – it needs systems-level research happening in tight communication with existing industry. In other words, an ambitious industrial research lab focused on building useful, general-purpose technologies and getting them into the world.

All of this requires physical spaces decoupled from the constraints of academia, startups, governments and big corporations. A place for people with brilliant ideas to build atom-based technologies that won’t necessarily work as high-margin startups; to start projects that don’t necessarily fit into a specific bucket. These projects could evolve smoothly into bigger programs, baby Focused Research Organizations, or nascent companies; all united by a common mission to unlock the future.

Conclusion

Speculative Technologies ’ core mission is to create an abundant, wonder-filled future by unlocking powerful technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions. Since we launched in 2023, we’ve learned a lot about what is broken in our research ecosystem and how we can best execute on that mission.

One big thing we have realized is the blunt fact that over the past 50 years, universities have developed a near-monopoly on many types of research and, like many monopolies, they are not particularly good at all of them.

Pre-commercial technology research is clearly not the only thing that needs to be unbundled from universities — the world needs new institutions for doing everything from credentialing to vocational training to discovering the secrets of the universe. It is the place to start because it’s one of the poorest-fitting stones in the wall pieces and the upside of doing so is so large.

If you care about universities : Unbundling will not kill academia and universities, but save them. Ask any professor and they will tell you that they have at least 10 jobs, each of which comes at the cost of the others. In large part, these roles are downstream of the laundry list of roles bundled into a single institution. If you ask different people what the role of a university or professor is, you’ll get many conflicting answers. Unbundling at least some of the roles would let the teachers teach, the inventors invent, and the scientists discover.

Pragmatically, it’s also a bad bet to wager on destruction of one of the longest-lived human institutions. Harvard was here long before the United States and I will bet that it will be here long after. Instead, unbundling will put competitive pressure on universities to up their game and focus on what they’re best at.

Regardless of your position, from deep institutionalist to radical revolutionary, it’s clear that something needs to happen: unbundling pre-commercial technology research is a high bang-for-your-buck start.

Every week, I run into misfits with brilliant, potentially transformative technology ideas that are poor fits for either academia or startups. Giving those people and ideas a home and the resources to execute on those ideas is how we’re going to play basketball with our great-grandchildren, jaunt to the other side of the world for an afternoon, and explore the stars.

[TO BE CONTINUED]