So I read it, and it seems like his point is buried somewhere in there.
I get that he thinks like industry and academics in computing shouldn't mix, because they have very different time horizons and goals.
But what's the strength of the academic enterprise aka the title? The only part I saw in the entire essay was:
The explanation is that, with all its aloofness, the
university has an essential role to play, viz. to explain
to the world the foolishness of its ways.
Yeah, that wasn't a very strong defense. Critiquing current practices is one thing some parts of academia should do, but it'd be sad if that were 100% of what it were doing. The strength of the academic enterprise imo is doing hard-to-monetize basic research: developing the ideas and techniques that after several more iterations will produce or enable interesting things. I tend to think of tech-heavy startups as essentially mining ideas and results that are promising but have never been made practical; academia's job is to keep restocking that mine.
Critiquing current practices is one thing some parts of academia should do, but it'd be sad if that were 100% of what it were doing.
Precisely. And Dijkstra seems to take great offense at the critiques traveling in the opposing direction. To wit:
Did the writer not know that the use of the term "the real world" is usually interpreted as a symptom of rabid anti-intellectualism, or did he not mind?
As a PhD candidate in political science, a good 90% of my colleagues could use a daily injunction to think more about the problems of "the real world," rather than the abstractions of Deleuze and Guattari.
I don't have time to write a synthesis so I'll just copy & paste excerpts that should answer your question.
The university is at the other end of the spectrum: it is the professor's task to bring the relevant insights and abilities into the public domain by explicit formulation. (...) openness and honesty are characteristics that touch the heart of the academic enterprise: a university that hides or cheats can close its doors.
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The University with its intellectual life on campus is undoubtedly a creation of the restless mind, but it is more than its creation: it is also its refuge. (...) on campus, being brilliant is socially acceptable.
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If academic research is often astonishingly successful, it always is because the researchers had the wisdom and the opportunity to avoid both the trivial and the impossible, and to follow the very narrow path in between. It is that narrow path in between that defines the intellectual autonomy of successful scientific research. The major strength of the academic enterprise is that in a very technical sense scientific progress is unique in a way that neither political nor commercial interests can change.
I get that he thinks like industry and academics in computing shouldn't mix, because they have very different time horizons and goals.
But what's the strength of the academic enterprise aka the title? The only part I saw in the entire essay was:
That's it? Am I missing something?