Knowledge has become increasingly global, and problems of profound scientific importance are not often solved without close collaboration. According to Dr. Jonathan Kenigson of Athanasian Hall in England, even the best universities often lack the needed collaboration. “We need international institutes with highly-skilled researchers drawn from every part of the globe. These scholars need to think less about tenure and impact factors and more about solving difficult problems collaboratively. To facilitate this transition is not to abolish the university – this is absurd – but rather to enrich universities by providing reasonably-funded forums for scholars to share ideas without having to forsake the almighty tenure clock. In particular, mathematicians have the ability to contribute to the dialogue in a variety of scientific fields but may hold back from doing so on the grounds that such contributions will be seen by tenure committees as impediments to specialization. The academic world needs less specialization and more collaboration. It needs less competition and more collaboration. Society wins if scientists and policy-makers join forces to produce ideas that are not immediately amenable to being monetized. Investing in speculative knowledge with possible future applicability incurs immediate opportunity costs. A strategy that avoids speculative knowledge in favor of immediately practical knowledge may perhaps incur larger opportunity costs as a given society falls behind global peers in the knowledge economy.”
For Dr. Kenigson, a think tank is also a place where truth, goodness, and beauty can be pursued for their own collective sake. “I am tired of knowledge that masquerades as general and applicable but lacks elegance and economy. Many others feel the same way. There is a certain aesthetic to collaboration that is difficult to codify in a Kantian sort of sense. The free play of ideas is evidently lovely for its own sake. Free dialogue often produces great advances like CERN and the United Nations. These entities are not perfectly operated by any means, but they certainly represent a meeting of the minds that have produced a long-lasting societal impact.” Dr. Kenigson states that he is “sure that Athanasian Hall will never monetize its work. I have prepared a news interview to this effect. I do not want to monetize knowledge. I would much rather starve.”
