# Academia is not just universities While many academics are associated with universities, it’s not a perfect correlation: institutions like HHMI and National Labs are still incredibly academic, despite having different structures and than Universities. The folks at these places are still playing the same *game* as people at universities. [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]; as a platonic ideal, [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]. In reality, though, [[Modern academia is a nebulous institution characterized by some combination of labs with PIs being judged on papers and labor being done by grad students]]. In fact, there has *never* been a 1:1 correlation between universities and academia. If you count academia as dating back to Plato’s academy, academia arguably predates the university by more than a thousand years; it’s even longer if you count academia as the institution dedicated to generating new knowledge about the world. During the high Middle Ages, the correlation tightened but by the early modern period academia and universities had decorrelated: maybe less than a quarter of the [[Royal Society]] were associated with universities when it was founded. ### Related - [[National labs and other government research centers are an academic alternative to universities]] - [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]] - [[§Academia and Research]]