This post stems from a big personal grouse of mine, and this twitter thread captures that perfectly. I didn’t want to reply on there because a) complex conversations on Twitter sucks, and b) this wasn’t my conversation to butt into. Especially since I would veer towards ranting. This is why blogs exist.

Backdrop: Microsoft Research is one of those amazing places that allows you to do path-breaking research at the intersection of tech and the social sciences. As mentioned in the thread above, it is an academic community at heart and looks at the longer arc of research questions and trajectories while designing its agenda. It is also well-funded and presumably offers not-so-small bucks for researchers. Other Big Tech giants have similar research divisions, with varying degrees of integration into the business side of things.

It’s fairly obvious why I’d love to work at a place like MSR: It lets me stay in Tech, explore tool building and tinkering with frameworks, while deeply engaging with critical studies of Tech. It marries my (newfound) theoretical side with my experience as a computational researcher. And I’ll be honest: it’s one of the few jobs out there outside of traditional academia that pays you to study this kind of stuff.

Thing is, all of these positions have a strict PhD requirement. You have to be a PhD student to be eligible for internships, and be done with a PhD for full-time positions. Tarleton Gillespie (whose work I admire and love greatly) has offered reasons in the thread above as to why this is the case.

Obvious and material personal interest aside, this got me thinking about the purpose of academia-industry collaborations like MSR. As the MSR folks in the thread put it, is the objective the framing of long-term research questions and thus opening up a one-directional pathway from academia into industry? That is, is the objective purely to enrich academia in the long-run? At least, that;s my impression from reading the exchange above, especially with the framing of how we need to train PhD students to ask these questions of tech.

But if the objective of the research beyond research’s sake is to move the needle in terms of practice, or even bring greater nuance to the conversation, why are tech practitioners frozen out of this setup? The framing about ‘creating foundational research’ comes with the underlying assumption that such research can only come from one place: within traditional academia, crossing over to industry to pollinate it. And this is where my complaint kicks in: such foundational research can come from folks outside of academia too.

Tech isn’t a cloistered enclave divorced from the rest of the world anymore. With the proliferation of tech in our lives, the overwhelming quantification of the social sciences, and The pool of people to influence isn’t miniscule, and the pool of people with experiences and expertise that can inform and frame critical discourse isn’t limited to academia alone. Why wouldn’t a sufficiently qualified engineer who’s worked on the product side – maybe even building some questionable tools – who can and wants to explore questions at the intersection of tech and society be frozen out of this kind of intellectual and productive setup? Is the objective to enrich academia alone, and hope that industry practices fix themselves? I recognize that I haven’t made any argument as to why that’d be useful. I’m still reasoning this out.