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Interaction of the industrial and academic world is of course a very old problem. The relative roles of each organization and the education of the next generation of scientists has long been debated. However, in the last ten years, there has been a substantial change in the interaction and the expectations of each group. The principal reason for these changes have to do with pure economics. As the cost of "big science" has increased. The need for more resources at universities to train students has increased and the need for highly trained students, who work as teams rather than as individual scientists, has become more important. No longer is corporate research done exclusively by the single scientist or engineer working in their laboratory for long periods of time to come up with the "Eureka" solution. At universities, the tenure system tends to require an individual to develop his or her own research topic. The cost of developing new topics has increased enormously. In this paper, the interaction of industry and the academic world are reviewed from the viewpoint of the academic individual. While I have had industrial experience, it was not as great as others who have written on the subject. The main topics are, 1) what drives the need for so much money in the university community, 2) assuming there is a need, what are the sources of those funds, 3) what role should American and foreign companies play in educating and sponsoring research at universities, 4) what should be the expectations of the university community and the industrial world, 5) what are possible formats for such an interaction, and finally, 6) what are the dangers to the universities and to the United States economy in the long run by such interactions.
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