The Ronin Institute Vision of Democratic Scholarship

Kitsune à Inari

At the Ronin Institute, we are assembling a twenty-first century community of Research Scholars who are addressing the important and interesting questions that are now being neglected by universities, and who are doing it at a fraction of what it would cost in the old system. We hope that you will support us, or maybe even join us, as we endeavor to return scholarship to its fundamental core: taking smart, talented people who have profound expertise and passion, and helping them to push at the boundaries of human knowledge. Since World War II, the predominant model of basic research has been one where the federal government provides the funding and universities carry out the work, to the point where being an active researcher became virtually synonymous with holding a faculty position at a university. But that system is fundamentally broken. Universities carry exoribant costs associated with extravagant facilities and bloated administrations, and the ongoing corporatization of universities is distorting decisions about which fields and questions receive resources and attention. When a university researcher receives funding for a project, that funding comes with a substantial amount of “indirect” support, which is intended to pay for incidental costs, like electricity, facilities maintenance, and accounting. This overhead also supports things like luxury rec centers and ever-increasing administrative payrolls. Universities invest in expensive state-of-the-art facilities in order to attract grant money, but this increases their need for overhead money in the future. The dependence on grant money — not just to support research, but to maintain the physical and administrative infrastructure — distorts decisions about hiring and promotion. The system does not necessarily reward the most important research. Rather, it too often promotes approaches that are most likely to be able to feed the university’s need for overhead. These problems have been compounded in recent years due to a general shift toward a more corporatized model. It is no longer simply that universities have large fixed costs that must be paid every year. Today, maximizing the flow of cash through the university is treated as a goal in itself. The net result is that universities are no longer committed to asking the most interesting and challenging questions, except to the extent that those questions are also expensive. The system is still well suited to research questions that require expensive facilities, equipment, and reagents. However, there are many questions that will be answered not through expensive experiments, but through careful study and consideration by creative people with the sort of deep knowledge that only comes from years of immersion in a subject. While the twenty-first century has seen accelerating growth in the problems associated with universities, it has also seen the development of tools needed to build a new path forward. In the past, being physically located at a university was critical for doing top-quality research, because it allowed you access to resources (like journals and books) and a community of like-minded experts. Today, that is no longer true. Information and colleagues are now accessible electronically. Virtual scholarly communities can be constructed for a fraction of the cost of the brick-and-mortar university system. While university research has also taken advantage of these new information and communication resources, it is hamstrung by its need to continue to financially support the old, twentieth-century infrastucture. The transformation of academia underway at the Ronin Institute will return the focus to the core of scholarship: the quest to discover and share knowledge.

For More Information – http://ronininstitute.org/

 

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