Can you imagine the conservatives at MIT (they are there!) being happy that MIT outsourced price-setting and hiring decisions to the White House?
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.
This Compact aims to radically reshape the management of higher education. In that, it is anything but conservative. Conservatives should reject it for that reason alone.
> "if you want federal funding, you'll do this stuff"
There's another piece that keeps getting lost. That is: the US government has a set of policy goals it is trying to accomplish. Outsourcing to third parties some parts of the work of getting there is a cash-light approach. As an American, I think this is better than e.g. the DoD building duplicate capacity (and competing for researchers) at multiples of the cost.
In one sense, MIT gets federal funding in the same way that Raytheon gets federal funding (and there are DoD asset tags at MIT to prove it).
This isn't just MIT getting funding, it's also the US buying some capacity from MIT. It's a mutually beneficial transaction.