The ridiculousness lies entirely on the US having sponsored professors.
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Historically lots of academics were sponsored by the nobility, right? Say what you will about Taco Bell, I’ll take their sponsorship over a bunch of pretentious thugs and hereditary gangsters.
> pretentious thugs
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
Going out on a limb and say that’s not a majority opinion.
Possibly, people romanticize the gangsters of the last century already, and they don’t even have the benefit of a thousand years of propaganda.
He just happens to prefer Taco shaped diagrams.
Taco Bell is not nobility. Nobility = warriors
1000 years of English aristocracy disagrees: nobility = landowners
Not an especially precise or traditional equality.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
The English aristocracy might have disagreed 1000 years ago, but nobody cares what they thought because the French (Normans, mostly) would shortly prune those noble family trees quite aggressively.
Endowed professorships are common globally.
They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.
Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.
Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.
Can you give any example of an academic title being defaced by an ad placement? I doubt there was any "Zorba's Olive Oil Philosopher" in Plato's Academy.
UC San Diego was the first convenient list of endowed positions I found, but it's hardly unique:
ASML Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies
Callaway Golf Chair in Structural Mechanics
Chugai Pharmaceutical Chair in Cancer
Ericsson Chair in Wireless Communications Access Techniques
Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Embedded Microsystems
Etc, etc.
Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie at Basel.
Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG-Professur für Distributed Ledger Technology/Fintech
Cambridge had a BP Professor of Chemistry until 2019 when BP stopped paying.
Their price list is online: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/endowin...
Are three examples sufficient? Taco Bell is a more ethical and apt supporter of higher education than BP, Credit Suisse, or Roche, lol.
Thanks, this is all completely new to me!
That’s only because you don’t recognize the old brand names/people, not because the phenomenon is new.
So you can't give an example then?
Ah, HN rate limiting.
A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.
Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.
Roche-Professor für Infektionsimmunologie
No wonder Diogenes was looking for an honest man
‘It is difficult for a man to see something when his salary depends on it’ - Plato, probably. (/s)
Considering most European countries have universal healthcare the pharmaceutical industry is just an arm of the government.
That's not how any of this works. Even the UK, which does do direct provision, doesn't have state pharma manufacturing. Most European countries have a sort of hybrid approach of universal insurance but private regulated providers.
Novo Nordisk is not part of the state of Denmark.