It’s Time for Ph.D. Programs to Partner With Industry

The postwar connection between research universities and the federal government has had its ups and downs across four generations, but it always rested on a stable foundation. Both sides knew what to expect. That’s no longer true.

For years, the bargain was easy to track. Researchers would employ government grant money to create scientific and technological advances, benefiting not only the military but society at large: not only ballistic missiles but also genome sequencing and the World Wide Web. The productivity of the partnership across the arts and sciences vaulted American higher education to the top of the world. That was then.

Now, destructive chaos prevails. In not even a year, the Trump administration has imposed sudden, deep, and arbitrary funding cuts, held research funding hostage as part of negotiations over internal university practices, rescinded already-awarded grants, and implemented an unprecedented ideological yardstick for the granting of many awards in the place of scientific and scholarly merit. The system continues to be buffeted by seismic shocks, and in certain sectors it has been upended.

The question facing academics today is simple: What to do now? Scientists have been exploring an answer: concerted partnership with industry. And central to this new alliance is the training of Ph.D. students.

To do this, we can learn from existing role models. “The current model” of doctoral education “reinforces the wall between science and industry,” Chevelle Newsome, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said at the workshop. “This is the moment that we take some lessons from our European colleagues.”