I keep hearing about how miserable things are in academia and have come to perhaps a surprising conclusion: research and education need to be broken up. I know that there&#x27;s arguments that the two should stay entangled, and that new research feeds quickly into education blah blah blah. But I personally think that the world is far better off with large, dedicated, quasi-commercial R&amp;D labs and institutions like Xerox-Parc, Bell Labs, Howard Hughes Medical, Battelle, Microsoft Research etc. and that those research labs operate off of a &quot;licensed innovation&quot; model.<p>It feels like these places are struggling (I might be wrong), but I&#x27;d argue for a vast expansion of this system on par with the university system, but without either being burdened by the needs of either one. Offer competitive industry pay and work on demand for commercial and public interest.<p>A kind of kernel of this already exists, either big National Labs that try to spin out mature research paths into companies (giving the researches a shot at making it big as CEO or CTO of these new companies) or as dedicated commercial R&amp;D firms that get hired to produce product ideas for commercialization. But I think it should be institutionalized in the same way universities are rather than running as independent as they do now. And then universities should get out of the research game altogether.<p>I don&#x27;t have real concrete ideas on how this should be done, but it would provide a better career track for smart people.