Instead of the Golden Apple, we should call it the Poisoned Apple. A President, by pure leadership, can change that culture. The power of teaching assistants, and their workload, should be decreased in favor of actual professors. I'm not suggesting that a school this size can abolish the need for the teaching assistant entirely, I'm just saying we need to rely on them less. In addition to changing the structure of education, we should focus on that other basic conflict.
Basic research seems to be declining in favor of more corporate-sponsored applied research.
Although I have no solid numbers here, I could point to a numb er of high and low-profile projects which seem to have no relation whatsoever to our mission of expanding knowledge. Although government has a p roper role in supporting universities in developing and expanding our base of basic knowledge, neither government or universities have any proper role in paying for industry's applied research. In its most basic sense, it is unfair competition. Not only does it distort the market in unforeseen ways, but it distorts universities. It creates pressure on individual researchers to secure corporate partners and thereby modify the scientific design of their research, it turns different blocs of universities into completing conglomerate blocs of alliances, and it devalues the concept of science.