The Customers of the Academy

I had an epiphany reading an article in the Trenton Times when I lived in New Jersey at the turn of the century. The article interviewed companies along a certain street lobbying for a new bus route so their employees could more easily get to work. The customers for mass transit are not its riders but the employers who need workers to get to them. Maybe that's why mass transit trains and buses offer a functional but not particularly comfortable ride.

So who are the customers for universities? Before I go there, let's look at newspapers. Until the early 2000s, newspapers were primarily driven by advertising revenue. Readers were the product. While newspapers needed readers to sell, they could get them by offering cheap subscriptions by focusing on quality coverage that focused on news and analysis from a broad range of views. But since then, the few newspapers that thrive now do so mostly on subscription revenue, print and digital, and the readers have become the customers. They also have more competition from other sources like social media. So newspapers now tailor their coverage and their brand for the paying subscriber, and while most still focus on accuracy, they'll stick to narrower views in their analysis which often overshadows the pure news.

Universities have a mission beyond just serving students, providing them with knowledge in exchange for tuition. They have a societal mission. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which helped establish and grow a number of public universities, wanted to educate students to improve the productivity of American agriculture and industry. The GI Bill in 1944 brought the masses of returning soldiers into higher education. The Higher Education Act of 1965, brought in resources for students through Pell Grants and federally-guaranteed student Loans to further the competitiveness of America through the Cold War. Most universities have non-profit status because of their broader mission.

In other words, society as a whole was our customer. Our role is to educate and prepare students to help push our society forward. Many universities also have a research mission, also mostly government funded, both to recruit expert professors to educate our students, but also to produce important knowledge to manage the complexities of the world. Students participated willingly for future intellectual and financial gain and our role was to ensure the students got a strong education, for the betterment of not just themselves but the workforce and society they would later join.

Our viewpoint has changed as college costs increased and universities became more dependent on tuition and governmental financial aid. Institutions started treating the students as the customer, to ensure they came to the university and stayed there. More amenities, grade inflation, much more student support and tolerance. The relationship became transactional, a student comes, pays their tuition and their time, gets a degree and gets a job. The focus becomes more on degrees that prepare you for the workplace, a focus more on immediate skill and credential building than producing students who have the critical thinking skills to build a strong career. 

And now in a time of changing demographics, less government support and AI heading towards performing many of the skills universities teach, how does the story continue? How do universities focus back on producing students who can not just live in our society but improve it? How do they focus on the right customers while ensuring educational quality? Universities need to get it right, or they won't have customers at all. 

The New Lower Bound on Busy Beaver of 6.

 We denote the busy beaver function by BB.

BB(n) is the max time a Turing machine of size n takes to halt on the empty string.

(A particular model of TM and a notion of size has become standardized.)

BB(n) grows faster than any computable function. That is obviously interesting. What is less obvious (and  some of my co-bloggers disagree) the pursuit of actual values of BB is interesting. For an excellent overview of the BB numbers, written in 2020 (that is relevant) by Scott Aaronson, see here. (Computable and Aaronson are flagged by my spell check but I think they are spelled correctly.) 

When Scott's article appeared, BB(5) was not known. In June 2024 the value of BB(5) was discovered.  See Scott's blog on this, here. The value of BB(5) isn't even that big- its just 47,176,870. That's one of those numbers that is SMALL now but would have been LARGE in (say) 1964 (see my blog about a different number of that type here). 

What about BB(6)?

No, I am not going to announce that Scott announced it is now known. 

I am going to announced that Scott announced better lower bounds for BB(6) are now known. 

I won't restate the lower bounds since (a) Scott already has (see here) and (b) typesetting the bounds is hard (for me). 

SO, what to make of all this?

1) At the time of Scott's article it looked like BB(6) was large. How large was hard to say. Intuitions about how large BB(6) would be are hard to come by, so the new result is neither surprising nor unsurprising. 

2) We will never know BB(6). Shucky Darns!

3) Many of the results on BB are not published in refereed journals. However, the ones mentioned in the context of BB(5) and BB(6) were verified in Coq.  I doubt other parts of math could take this approach;  however, it is interesting that results can be verified via computer in this field. Indeed- I doubt a referee could verify the results without a computer aid. 

4) Why the interest in BB? Some speculation:

a) Computing power is such that one can actually get out some results (read Scott's blog on BB(5) for more on that).

b) The internet: there are not that many people working on BB but those that are can easily communicate with each other. 

c) Scott's article and his blog posts on it helped generate interest. Since I asked Scott to write the article for my open problems column, I get some credit here also (very little).

d) Results generate interest, and interest generates results.

e) Items a,b,c,d,e all help to reinforce each other. 

A Professor Again

A new dean has taken my place, and I have returned to the professoriate at Illinois Tech, ending thirteen years in administration, six as dean and seven as department chair at Georgia Tech. I won't rule out more administrative roles in the future, but only if the right role presents itself.

I'll teach intro theory in the fall, my first course since 2018, and take a sabbatical in the spring, mostly at Oxford. I plan to focus on writing, hoping to get out another book or books and other projects. It will be hard to go back to traditional computational complexity research, the field has changed considerably. I plan to spend some time understanding how AI changes the way we think about computation. Particularly why we see many of the benefits of P = NP while cryptography remains secure.

Also for the first time in 13 years I don't have a "boss". Technically I report to the department chair, who until a few days ago reported to me. But tenure protects my job, I choose my own research agenda, and teaching and service assignments are more of a negotiation than a top-down decision. Freedom!

For the blog, I have held back talking about the inner workings of universities while I had administrative roles. I'll now be more open in giving my thoughts, at least in general terms.

The next chapter begins...