<story><title>You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation</title><url>http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wanderfowl</author><text>Just a quick note: &amp;#x27;Dual Affiliation&amp;#x27; is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline&amp;#x27;s a bit odd.&lt;p&gt;Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school).  This is a well-known and common practice, and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there&amp;#x27;s not one true home), it&amp;#x27;s not a &amp;#x27;harmful&amp;#x27; thing.&lt;p&gt;As the author explains in the article per se, he&amp;#x27;s talking about an industry&amp;#x2F;academic split.  This is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; harder, for the reasons he&amp;#x27;s outlined, and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation, and it&amp;#x27;d be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry, particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market.&lt;p&gt;But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire career professors and educators.  And as any adjunct-heavy institution will tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life. Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody&amp;#x27;s life isn&amp;#x27;t enough to support all but the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this will just further damage the instructional core of universities.&lt;p&gt;So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a great model for the future.</text></comment>
<story><title>You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation</title><url>http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bvc35</author><text>The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not &amp;quot;curiosity driven research&amp;quot;. If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the majority of a professor&amp;#x27;s time, they should try competing, rather than bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic asceticism.</text></comment>