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Academe: Technology For Sale
America has always loved technology and money in generally equal amounts, since they are so intertwined. And techno-capitalism has been very good to us, bringing both freedom and prosperity.
But until recently, we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture -- stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations. That was important, especially in a free and prosperous society. That principle established their credibility and helped keep social forces like big business and big technology in some sort of check and balance.
Nodody kidded themselves about the fact that money was the engine that drove both business and technology in the U.S but there were at least some critical, detached and independent voices to raise questions, sound alarms, and pursue research avenues for reasons other than profit. That, increasingly, is no longer true.
Once upon a time, journalists felt free to take the occasional investigative or editorial poke at big business (rather than celebrate people like Bill Gates), and universities provided safe havens where politics and P&L statements couldn't intrude too brazenly on critical thinking and expression. Artists, too, from musicians and painters to filmmakers, playwrights and authors, believed they wielded a particular kind of integrity; they could be outspoken, take sharp, honest looks at society and culture. Those kinds of penetrating looks are rapidly vanishing from both mainsteam media and the arts. Even the theater has been corporatized, dominated by big-bucks, mass-marketed musicals and other super-productions.
The new global corporatism has proven more powerful than any of these institutions or the ethical standards they once brandished. Nobody seems able to stand up under the onslaught of corporate money, or cling to values beyond maximum revenue input. This is what makes capitalism and corporatism so different. Corporatism's contemporary clout dates to the 80's, when a combination of government de-regulation of business, begun by President Jimmy Carter and greatly accelerated by Ronald Reagan -- and the advent of technology, marketing and global business created a new kind of ideology. It has become the most powerful social and cultural force in the world, especially when linked with technology.
One by one, American institutions -- politics, business, agriculture, journalism, the arts, such professions as law and medicine, even middle-class restaurants, real estate firms and funeral homes -- have succumbed to the Corporate Republic. Academe had been one of the last holdouts. Scientific and other kinds of research was always thought to be governed by values other than simple profit, beholden to nothing but the principles of science. No more.
Columbia University in New York, for example, is spearheading an academic revolution, profiting from its scientific research and development of intellectual property. Columbia annually collects more in patents and royalties -- $100 million -- than any other university, its annual report announces, and is aggressively cashing in on its technological research.
"There's been a paradigm shift," in academic thinking about selling research to corporations, says Cornelius W. Sullivan, vice provost for research at the University of Southern California. "There was a time that this kind of work -- and the idea of making money from your research -- was not acceptable at universities, including ours." Sullivan is dead-on. It's no longer possible for the public, members of the student body, or anyone else to really grasp the motives and goals of scientific researchers working on new technologies. They could be working for the good of humanity. Or they could be trying to cash in on lucrative patents, generating uneeded or flawed technology for cash, or to get a sweet corporate contract for themselves or their school. Making money off of technological research is certainly acceptable now. This year, The New York Times reports, Columbia will collect more than $144 million from patents. One covers a new technique that uses animal cells to manufacture proteins for use as drugs; another discovery paved the way for eye drops to treat glaucoma. Across the country, university officials admit the Net is a gold mine, providing a much faster and larger paybacks for researchers than traditional scientific research in areas like biology. Dot.coms are aggressively seeking investment academic opportunities (at Harvard, Professor Arthur R. Miller is setting up an online law school).
As usual, this "paradigm shift" is accompanied by little or no public debate over the propriety of university research (often funded in part by taxpayers) becoming increasingly tailored to corporate clout. Congess isn't paying attention either; it's much too busy trying to pass laws requiring lobal libraries to keep Johnny off the Playboy Web site.
Yet the issue matters, especially when it relates to technology. Academic researchers are deeply involved in some of the revolutionary technological devevlopments of this century -- genetic mapping, artificial intelligence, super-computing. Theoretically, their work is supposed to proceed ethically, with the public's best interests and the highest standards of science research in mind. How does that happen when professors and administrators are drooling over dot.com stock options and other corporatist contracts? Soon, the public will be as cynical about academic research as they are about government decision-making. And the evolution of technology will get even less scrutiny and oversight. Some of the best elements of the Net and the Web came about because academics and researchers were working outside of the marketplace, not because they were dominated by it.
Corporatism has already proved a more powerful force than any of the institutions that were supposed to keep an eye on its power and hunger. Technology and corporatism are a particularly lethal combination, even more so when applied to competitive and money-hungry institutions like academe. That was a world where technology and research were supprted for their own sake and for the larger public good.
But just last month, Columbia announced the creation of Fathom.com, an online commercial partnership with such other prestigious institutions as the New York Public Library, the British Library and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. A couple of months earlier, the university had announced that it was hooking up with Cognitive Arts, a software designer firm planning to offer continuing education on the Web.
Here in the Corporate Republic, there are no public institutions operating outside the marketplace any longer, free of its influence, maintaining the credibility and independence to comment honestly on critical social and cultural issues and to monitor technological growth.
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself. Looks like a sure winner.
If these are not the people responsible for identifying the dangers and risks of the modern world, then who?
Read 'The Kept University' if you couldn't stomach Katz's take on it. This is SERIOUS, dammit. Even ignoring the concerns over wholesale destruction of the cooperative spirit in scientific research, public health matters, and the stats are freaking chilling. "More recently, an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that studies of cancer drugs funded by pharmaceutical companies were roughly one eighth as likely to reach unfavorable conclusions as nonprofit-funded studies.". Read this stuff! This matters. It's not okay to suppress risk information...
One only has to look as "scientific research" to see that Universities have never been rich. This "independent" research has depended on outside corporations handing out large sums of money. And whoever pays the piper picks the tune.
Some examples, for you:
- Much "independent" research on tobacco has been
paid for by... tobacco companies.
- Much research on what foods are healthy has
been sponsored by... large produce growers and
large agricultural re-sellers.
- Much research on nuclear safety has been paid
for by... the nuclear industry.
The list goes on. Do you think these "benevolent" corporations all handed over wheelbarrows of that green stuff, purely out of the goodness of their own hearts? Get real! It was to allow them time on news shows to invalidate any real concerns that had formed.(BSE in America? You must be joking! The cattle ranchers have only our best interests at heart...)
Money really IS the root of all evil, and blaming corporatism for simply continuing down a road that had been made when the British Empire was still a futuristic dream, and Latin was the most widely spoken language in the Old World. Stop the Blame Game and Start trying to figure out how to stop this continuing devastation!
What good does pointing fingers do? When you get right down to it, when you point one finger at "the bad guy", you're pointing THREE fingers back at you.
No, blaming "Corporatism" for taking advantage of the obsession with green scraps of paper (which is all Capitalism really is, anyway) isn't an answer. At the very least, there needs to be something in it's place. Some kind of "utopia", where the "deserving" are rich and everyone else is on the streets is simply Corporatism from a different angle.
What, then, =IS= the answer? I doubt there is any one single, simple answer. Instant Solutions are like Instant Mashed Potato. Sure, you only need to add water, but it still tastes like regurgitated cardboard with sawdust seasoning.
The best I can come up with is to say that humanity needs to ditch it's obsession with money. As a form of simplified bartering, it served it's purpose. But some resources are dangerously out of balance, now. Human-caused extinctions of entire species of flora and fauna are now so frequent, the biosphere is likely to become unstable within one, at most two, generations.
Then, there are other resources which are so plentiful in principle (but throttled back in practice) that to deprive others of their use in an attempt to get rich is utterly pathetic and amoral.
(Decent education is one. The Internet is another. =CLEAN=, unpolluted water is a third.)
IMHO, those comodoties which are "universal" should be taken out of the bartering equation completely. The rest can be phased out over the next few centuries, as superior alternatives are found.
(We don't =have= any superior alternatives, because nobody with the money to really look for any has any interest in doing so, because to do so means to reduce their own elevated status.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Research for it's own sake is the only reason you are able to read the page you just posted.
It is the only reason that you can drive your car.
It is the only reason we have big shiny airplanes.
Research for it's own sake is what truely DRIVES INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY. Without it, we are left with nothing more than last year's crap with a pretty new face. If you have ever worked at a company without a REAL research budget, you will know what I mean.
Business men are not the smartest in the bunch, they are the most greedy. They have to be told far too often the implications of the technology they promote, and if they can't show a profit from something from day one they don't want to hear about it. Nothing gets accomplished in an evironment like this. Nothing.
The "american dream" in this country has not only been destroyed, but it was auctioned off to the highest bidder. No longer can you do anything for the love of it, no longer can you be an individual without being asked "how much can you make off that".
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
To all but Katz such statements border on the self-serving and reflect unpardonable amnesia.
Is there anyone who doubts that the economic interests of the United States (and of other countries) haven't consistently influenced their foreign and domestic policies? From the rationales for British imperialism in the 19th century, to the arguments *for* slavery by southern plantation owners in the 19th century US, politics has always reflected the economic interests, and supporting morals and mores, of the ascendant economic elite.
I don't mean that *everything* in politics has been derived from an economic imperative (an invisible hand?!), but most big decisions have. Academic institutions have helped, in the past, to reproduce knowledge and social institutions that supported existing hierarchies of power and privilege. Rather than being apart from economic and globalizing trends they are a critical enabler of them.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Let's take the American Medical Association as an example.
What would happen if, say, a generalized cure for all our physical ailments were developed (e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)? Suddenly there is no more disease or death (save accidental, violent, or suicide). The need for doctors is diminished to almost nil, save for the occasional accident victim.
Would the AMA push for approval of such a technology, knowing it would put most of their membership in the unemployment line? Or would they delay, possibly even bury, such a breakthrough to maintain their own profession? To suggest the former is to stretch credibility beyond any reasonable bound, while to suggest the latter, unpleasant, possibility, conjurs unpleasant memories of similar actions in other industries which have already been documented.
Many arguments (of varying veracity: some quite compelling, most not) have been put forward that the medical establishment has already buried cures for various ailments which are more profitable to treat than to cure. True or not, it does point to the disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
A flagrant real-world case of abuse is the criminalization of marijuana. A natural substance with medical and practical non-medical uses (paper, rope, textiles) has been outlawed in no small part to protect certain business interests (the cotton industry, the wood-pulp industry, and more recently the pharmaceutical industry).
In Normal, Illinois teenagers convicted of possession of marijuana were enrolled in manditory treatment centers, where many were then diagnosed with depression (what teenager wouldn't be, especially after getting "busted" and having their life turned upside down by the authorities?), and required to take anti-depressents. An exchange of a relatively innocuous substance for an addictive and very potent psychiatric drug!
Clearly, pharmaceutical profits were being protected at the direct expense of the good of the people. Is it reasonable to believe this is the only occurance of such abuse by this one industry? I don't think so. I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg -- how many penecillin-esque wonder drugs have simply been buried, because they would undermine the profitability of other, well selling product lines? Since we are privy to so little privately funded research, we may never know.
Do you honestly believe research conducted by private, for profit groups, is going to be anywere near as open and accessible to public scrutiny as research funded today by public institutions such as the National Science Foundation?
I would submit that recent history demonstrates the opposite: corporations with existing business models will, on average, find it more profitable to bury their own research than change their business models (which most breakthroughs generally entail).
While conducting public research does not eliminate this problem, reducing it (as was done in the 1980s) and eliminating it (which is the trend today) certainly makes the problem worse and the abuses both more chronic and more acute.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Katz's point is not that Columbia's administration has it in for geekhood, as your jab seems to imply. It's that there is a danger in tying the funding of an academic institution to a corporate agenda. I know that as an employee of a state university, I'm forbidden from officially endorsing any product (at least in the IT field), but I wonder if that would be the case if we became the Microsoft Information Technology Research Center.
Who told you that? The Science Fairy?
It's a running joke now, in the tech industry especially, that two competing corporations which comission studies on the same topic will come up with differing answers. Third party research which is funded by corporate entities is always suspect. Even in instances where no improper behavior takes place, such studies are often treated with skepticism just because of the possibility of bias. Witness the Mindcraft/Microsoft debacle of a few months ago.
For the most part, Katz is speaking less to direct funding of academe than academe's entrance into the corporate arena in its own right. And here, my own testimony is a bit suspect - we do what amounts to consulting services for money here (although we're salaried, and make considerably less than the average consultant). But I have to admit that part of me regrets the loss of the whole "ivory tower academia" stereotype.
The problem is that these are not necessarily compatible. The goal of capitalism is to make profit. That's all! All other goals (saving the whales, educating the children, cleaning the environment) are secondary to the goal of making a buck. Furthermore, this buck making is generally a very short sighted effort, looking to make money right now despite potentially dangerous long term impacts of the effort.
As the number of independent researchers diminishes, who is checking the work of these for-profit efforts. Certainly if they find out that there technologies are harmful they will do everything they can to cover it up. Non-disclosure agreements, bought off politicians, etc. Without some journalists and scientists out there asking the tough questions, free of a corporate leash, we may be in serious trouble.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with making money from technology, but there is something wrong when the independent voices challenging the impact of your developments diminishes. Furthermore there is something wrong when the amount of pure science research is being diminished by the drive for profit.
There are a lot of things in the Universe that are worth exploring on an intellectual level that are almost totally pointless at an economic level. Capitalism puts the immediate growth of profit margins above the long term growth of the human mind. What if all of the government and academic funded "pure science" research was scrapped in favor of money making technologies? Anything that doesn't have immediate applications or marketability (come see the wonders of the pharoas for a low low price of $25) wouldn't be touched.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
One reason I've heard for this is that it prevents a student from submitting a single piece of work to multiple classes. I.e. if I write an essay about "Quantum Computing" I can't turn it in for a grade to my physics class and my comp.sci. class without permission from the instructors. It is perfectly reasonable for the university to try to prevent that type of thing, but it is not reasonable for the university to claim copyright over things I write as a student. I'm paying them, they're not paying me!
Another thing I think this is trying to stop is students selling good essays to be used by other students. I don't think that type of thing is very good, but the problem isn't the person selling the essay, it's the people fraudulently claiming they wrote the essay they bought. Why shouldn't I be able to publish my good essays that I wrote for class? They're mine.
We need to speak out against this abuse.
...if linus would have studied in a corporate run university where everything that counts is making money?
Sorry, Jon, but no institution has ever been free of the influence of the marketplace. Every institution collects money, buys things, and pays people. This has an effect on the marketplace, and inevitably the marketplace affects it.
Your nirvana never existed. You're wasting your time mourning its passing.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
At my school, Harvey Mudd College, corporatism is even integrated into the curriculum to some extent. Seniors in some of the "classic" disciplines like chemistry or biology still do research for theses, but computer science and engineering students are required to participate in at least a year of "clinic" for graduation.
Basically, these clinics involve teams of students becoming contractors of sorts for corporations. Clinic teams are given somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to complete these projects, which are funded by companies such as DirecTV, Raytheon, TRW, and of course, Microsoft.
Based on the success of the clinic experience, the school is experimenting with initiating "entepreneurial clinic" where a team of students literally receives VC funding to start a company. They receive credit for this, but in addition, the school is made a partial owner of the company.
One of the visiting professors here a couple years ago spoke out against the clinic system, saying it was turning students into corporate slaves, but the trustees got rid of him. This past year's senior class made a move to have him as the commencement speaker, but the trustees went with someone else instead.
I see no sign of the clinic system here abating, and expect it to catch on at other universities in the near future as well.
John C. Polanyi. Excerpt from the keynote address to the Canadian Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science, Toronto June 2, 1996.
It is the research for the sake of science, not technology, that pushes uncharted boundries that has the potential to return with the largest benifits to society. By standing on the basic building blocks of the universe we live, in we can see and understand more of that universe. The pure research that is conducted to create solid foundations of understanding ultimately leads to building of that which is most benifitial to society. As a concrete foundation is to a building, pure scientific research for the sake of science is to practical scientific research.
Here is a good example:
Understanding in quantum mechanics allowed for the creation of instruments like electron microscopes and other high precision instruments. These intruments allowed for the discovery of DNA. The understanding of genetics allowed us to modify plasmids in bacteria to produce human insulin, which allows diabetics to live more normal lives. Technologies due to understanding in quantum mechanics also include televisions, computers, cat scans, etc... They are also leading to things like nano-technology.
There is research being conducted today that has the potential to revolutionize our society. Fields like high energy physics have great potential that hardly anyone sees. Through the understanding of the basic particles that make up all matter, and the fundemental forces that bind everything the ability to do great things for society arise. Discoveries in particle physics help out with research in fusion. With a better understanding of gravity we may be able to achieve interstellar space travel. The dicoveries made at high energies allow for a better understanding of how the universe was when it began.
Research in practical areas is good but I believe that Academia should spend more time working on that which could have the greatest impact, ie science for the sake of science.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
It's not news that academics are swayed by money. For literally hundreds of years, what research got done and what types of findings were generated has been driven by who pays (start with Christopher Columbus and other exploratory expeditions ... work through the North and South pole expeditions at the turn of the 20th century ... you get the idea).
I'm glad that Katz is talking about this, and has included the astronomical sums from Columbia as food for thought.
Anyone who kept their eyes open in college should know already about how the money flows. Big science research (where the grants go) have all sorts of equipment, new buildings, classroom space, faculty offices, etc. The places where grants usually don't go (the humanities, especially) are in the run-down buildings and the faculty are still using 386 computers. I work at a big-time research university, and see this every day.
There's still something "pure" about the intellectual climate at colleges and universities, and you're less likely (but far from unlikely) to be censored or fired for expressing unpopular thoughts. So, let's try not to get too cynical about universities that work to make a buck from their intellectual capital (aka, employees). Just keep your eyes open for the evidence that's easy to find for anyone involved with higher education.
how exactly is this worse than the cold war era, when the majority of research at our major universities was funded by the "military industrial complex"?
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All the "examples" you mention have _nothing_ to do with research. They simply concern student lifestyles. While that may seem important to students, I can't conclude from the evidence you provide that there is any effect on research.
:)
Pepsi may pay for a building, and that may bug you (as may the fact you can't get a Coke on campus), but the real issue is: has any researcher said, "Oh no! Pepsi gave us money! Forget basic research on topic X and let me work on topic Y which is more applied!"
If your purpose was to provide examples, try again
Because you're not a researcher. They don't go to their jobs so that you can feel that "phew! there is a place on earth that corporations can't touch!" Rather, they take on their jobs because _they_ find it interesting. It's their lives and their work. Don't be so presumptutious to think you can or should have any control over it up and above what you pay to them in taxes and/or tuition.
When they choose to go into academia, they face an opportunity cost: go to industry and make $$$ or stay with basic research and work on more _interesting_ problems.
But as basic research finds applications, the equation changes: they can easily switch to private industry and still do the same things they like. Or, they can spin off a company. Or, they can seek corporate dollars. Or, the liscence their patents.
I don't think the outcome is grave or dangerous. Academia is still filled with thousans of people who have a Katzian hate of "corporatism". There will always be people who _want_ to do basic reserach because it is much more interesting than anything they would do in industry. And as long as they can get their hands on research grants, life goes on.
If, on the other hand, the government research grants are augmented by private-sector research funding, who loses?
I would argue there is a benefit.
As people who _want_ to be more applied get their funding from corporate sources, there is less competition for government (read: tax-payer supported) funding for more "pure" research.
If played right, this could be a win-win situation.
Yeah, you're right. This is why governments and corporations suppressed the polio and measles vaccines -- because it would have dramatically lowered cases and taken away something for them to treat. How could we have missed such a vast conspiracy.
(The truth is that curing a disease is a much bigger and more complicated problem to tackle than is treating symptoms).
There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when the people (corporations) that fund research get to decide which research project will get funded. Even this works OK when the funding entity has a "good" motive (wealthy person whose spouse died of cancer funds cancer research), but the problem is that there are a lot more wealthy and greedy people than there are wealthy and altruistic people (not researched, merely observed).
Mobil isn't going to fund a university that researches methods of eliminating oil from the world's energy supply - it's not in their best interest. This type of research IS in the world's best interest, but not the oil company's.
There is no financial reason for people like Einstein or Hawking (or Dirac or Bohr or Tesla or Feynman or ...) to be able to pursue their research, at least not in the near term. These "pure research" people need funding just as much as (or more than) the people researching the best way to make a supercomputer (a lucrative proposition).
The other problem with corporate or government funding is that there is ALWAYS an "ulterior" motive for the funding: NASA gets funding because the Air Force wants to become the Space Force, The internet is developed because the DOD wants a research and military data infrastructure (ARPANET), etc. As an offshoot of this type of funding, we get trips to the moon and pure scientific data from Voyager and other space probes (and the internet :).
It is easy to see where Corporate America and Political America screw the people. In the case of news, we have the excellent example of US television covering the 1996 Olympic Beach Volleyball Quarterfinals (where the Americans were playing), and not broadcasting the Soccer Gold medal competition where top-ranked Argentina lost to the basically unknown Nigeria because the US had already been eliminated. This type of reporting happens all the time - the major news services are not interested in bringing us the news - they are interested in selling more newspapers with something like the OJ hype or the Lewinsky "issue", while there wars going on around the world. That isn't news reporting, it's selling more potato chips to Americans who couldn't care less about the rest of the world.
- The Sigless Wonder
The line the University held to, and still holds to, is that NCSA's job is to research new technologies, not to market them as business products. Once Mosaic was deemed a success, they gave licensing rights over to a separate company (Spyglass) and got back to researching other technologies.
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself.
Well, you can't get equity, but you can buy debt if you want to invest in your country (too bad the returns are so-so. Of course, the risk is pretty much damn near zero too..).
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Let me begin by saying that I am a student at Columbia University, and that I fully support their decision to profit from patents and other intellectual property. Your opposition to this, I think, reflects a poor understanding of the nature of scientific research.
Columbia's engineers work hard to develop useful, even marketable products, and the fact that these products are useful and marketable is a testament to Columbia's success -- not evidence that they have "sold out." What's more, this money can go to other useful causes, such as student financial aid, or to fund less-profitable research in other fields, such as history, or sociology, or pure mathematics (which I am paid to do).
It's not as though Big Evil Corporation (TM) calls up the office of Columbia's president and says: "Quick, we need some research and statistics from the Chemical Engineering department to support our evil, corporatist, anti-geek agenda!" Scientific research isn't like that. It's based on facts -- you can't just magically come up with results to support your personal agenda. In that way, it's quite different from journalism, don't you think?
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Yes, Jon, these institutions have all too often served to check freedom and prosperity. Fortunately, freedom and prosperity have succeeded in overcoming these checks, at least in the US, and we are now mostly free and mostly prosperous. However they still exist, and they would still like to check freedom and prosperity. I'll do my best to stop them. Won't you? Vote Harry Browne in 2000!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Recently there have been reports about how hard it is for schools to retain professors in the technology sector because many professors could be making tons more money if they were in the workforce developing patents for companies and actually working to create new products.
How do you propose getting around this problem?
Have you ever thought about how a school can get their tuition costs down, while at the same time attracting top-notch professors away from lucrative positions?
One of the ways that a school subsidizes their expensive labs to teach students in is to make their departments more like co-ops; where a professor and his students work to develop a theory, technology, etc. with the end product being something that is patentable and able to generate more revenue to fund the school. Many private schools rely on this so that the can continue to attract the brightest people to their "Center of Learning"
Of course they are relying more and more on this revenue generation... but isn't it better to rely on this than to make tuition more expensive than the majority of students can afford? Do you want higher education to become more and more the education of the wealthy and elite?
By having the goal become a patent in some cases, a school can generate money to subsidize the giant costs of running a private institution.
Of course people are going to argue for public colleges, but public colleges do the same thing because their costs are even more complex. They are required to give in-state tuition at a lower cost so that they can receive money from the state government, however these federal grants are often less than required. Also, as we've approached a period where a college education is becoming more and more required for higher paying jobs, there is a need to keep these costs down for a large population. Without more federal subsidies (that are deducted from YOUR payroll), how do you propose reducing these costs?
Many posters have been crying "what's wrong with formerly starved researchers making a little money?"
Well, instead of researchers, let's put in the words:
artists
politicians
judges
journalists
policemen
teachers
doctors
You could easily make the same argument for any of them getting paid more for the work they do, and perhaps doing more work because of it.
But if we value the work of these professions only in terms of money, the value of their work diminishes: it's not as honest, as challenging, as self-sacrificing, as useful, as impartial, as thorough when it is done in an atmosphere where its value is set only by who finds it valuable.
Think about it. What's worth more money? A report on how product X kills, or a report on how product X grows hair on your scalp? If the makers of product X can't pay for the report, it's a toss-up. If they can, it's a slam-dunk that they'd pay well for the good news, and pay even better to suppress the bad.
There's another element here: competition for scarce resources. The universities are conveniently NOT part of the corporations that are providing funding, so that they can claim credibility, or at least plausible deniability. Rather they are sub-contractors, looking for the customers with the deepest pockets, and eschewing the research that is just costly overhead, or even merely low-margin.
Don't underestimate this later point. Think about the harm to all of us from the fact that the best:
researchers
artists
politicians
judges
journalists
policemen
teachers
doctors
serve the communities and individuals with the most money, and the worst of these professions serve those of lesser means.
What matters is not that we keep these professionals poor. What matters is that they work for values other than money, and that we avoid systems like the one brewing at universities that punishes professionals that attend to anything other than money.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
This isn't about the Corporate Republic - instead, it's the early Free Market pioneer's dream. We have systems that prevent abuses of the market - Microsoft, for instance. Our judicial system decides on these. In the meantime, that which can be sold, will be sold - it's simply an extended bartering. It fosters intellectual growth, and encourages new product development. Ultamitely, people will buy what people want; and the corporations will make what the people want. If jorunalism is what the people want, the corporations will make that. And note the plural - because of that, we can have several voices in the marketplace. Indeed, this is the dream of the early Free Market pioneers.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
What disturbs is that as more and more Universities cash in with corporate sponsorship, students are being looked at more and more as customers by their universities. And I DON'T mean as customers receiving the unviersities' product, their college education, I mean as consumers of the university sponsors' goods.
An example, since I enrolled in the University of Maryland at College Park in 1998, the university has gained endorsements from Pepsi, Rebok, and most recently our school bookstore was bought out by Barnes and Nobles. On top of that, students who live on campus are going to start receiving Comcast cable, and will be billed for it whether they use it or not.
While Katz was bemoaning Universities getting paid for research, I must agree with the numerous other posters who said that this was not the true problem. The true problem is that universities have started to exploit their captive audiences. When you can no longer buy both Coke and Pepsi on campus, and Barnes and Noble is the ONLY store to carry your textbooks, and you can't walk to class without being accosted by numerous people trying to solicit you with credit card offers, there IS a problem. We are starting to lose that free market that our country was supposed to be built on. Certainly, demands for low cost higher education have caused universities to look for alternative sources of income, but people don't seem to realize the impact these corporate sponsors can have. If nothing else, Universities SHOULD be encouraged to make money off of their research rather than resorting to milking the students like cash cows.
The other benefit is that it teaches the grad students and other who work on the project a lot more than just how to program a robot to recognize who it's talking to, it teaches them how to develop a product, talk with corporate sponsors, and "sell" a proposal. This is very valuable if these students or professors leave acadmia.
In my last semester, I was part of a research project that was 66% sponsored by a private company, and 33% sponsored the the "Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance" and the 12 students in this course got to not only apply their skill as engineers, but learned how to give a proposal, conduct cost-benefit analysis, etc, etc. This was probably my most valuable course as an undergrad for that reason.
Academia is just trying to find the happy in-between. They want the public to see the benefit, and the students toget a benefit, while still being able to conduct new and innovative research. I think they're doing a good job.
-nosilA
You can't be too surprised that universities get jealous when they see their ideas make people multi-millionaires and they don't get a penny. There was a project here at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign called Mosaic a little while ago. The project leader graduated and then founded a new company designed on the project, which became Netscape. The university now keeps tighter reign of their "intellectual property". According to their policies, if a student uses university computers for a personal project, the university owns the rights to all the work done. Something to think about.
How is this much different from the old system in which researchers produced potentially flawed technology and biased research in the name of tenure and standing? Academic institutions have always been very politicly and econmically motivated places, it is just that htth were previously "donated" to by large companies and the government rather than working in active partnerships. While certainly there is a paradim shift here, I do not think it as servere as is made out in this article. We are simply seeing a formalization of relationships and conditions that have exist for a long time.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Here's a story about potential conflict's of interests for professors. It involves Prof. Leighton, an MIT prof who's research led to Akamai.
The issue of how patents are handled at universities is also an issue at MIT. Currently, as I understand it, MIT's patent department assists students in obtaining patents in return for a percentage of any income derived from those patents. A view on this was expressed by Prof. Bose (yes, that Bose =) in a guest column in the school newspaper.
A recent partnership with Microsoft (!)brought up more discussions about MIT's role and how the many partnerships with industry affect MIT's goals. (I can't seem to find the articles that popped up about it, though :(
Here's an old one by "Drexel University professor Noble, formerly an assistant professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society".
IMHO, I don't think industry ties are entirely bad. Like anything else in the world, there are pros and cons. Obviously, as these ties become closer, ethical issues arise, and there isn't a clear resolution to this problem. Unless you make the professors and students choose between academia and industry. The Media Lab is an example of how industry and universities can dovetail successfully. AFAIK, corporations provide funding to the Media Lab as a whole. Then, if they see anything they like, they can take it in house and develop it to their own desires. As a result, the Media Lab receives a huge influx of funding, and is thus able to research things that may or may not have an obvious commercial value. But cool things come out of there all the time. (i.e. Lego Mindstorm was developed there).
The campus became a regular campsite for companies trying to hawk their products. For example,
- Glamour Magazine was allowed to set up a tent on the illustrious Lawn, hawking products, trying to enlist subscribers, scouting for models, selling poor self-image.
- Football fields and buildings, and renovations (and benches and tables and lightswitches) were named in honor of donors, as usual, but the donors were moving in corporate directions. The main building of our Darden School of Business is called the Pepsi Forum (it's should be no surprise that you can't get Coke in there).
- I first spotted the Reebok logo appearing on our football players in my third or fourth year, although it had probably been there all along; perhaps they increased the size.
(I'm sure there are more examples I've forgotten.)I don't think Katz adequately addressed the issue of why corporate sponsorship is a problem. In my opinion, such contributions are like the system of patronage that strangled the painting world for many years (and continues to, I believe). You can't really bite the hand that feeds you and then expect another bite. I think it is safe to assume that research at UVA is not going to suddenly announce that caffeine and sugar combine to form toxins that eat your brain... Such systems dilute the value of the research, and also direct it away from "pure research" (as opposed to profit-research) which tends to lead the way in advances that actually help society.
(Incidentally, UVA hosts one of the two crash test research centers that use actual human cadavers in the car; the other is the University of Heidelberg... "Hey, those aren't dummies!")
Every few days, the Katz machine churns out another big chunk of crap, weaving whatever is upsetting the geeks into some great conspiracy involving the "Corporate Republic". What exactly is he trying to acheive?
Oh no! Napster got shut down! "Blame the corporate republic".
Oh no! Somebody's sponsoring a University! "It's all the fault of money! Be communist!"
Oh no! Some mad kids went and shot a load of people! "Blame closed source!"
He's like a UFO spotter or some other kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist - nothing but hot air, and an inablility to see how unreasonable he sounds, all the time.
Frankly, it's dull. It's boring. It's the same crap every week. The reason nobody plays "Guess what Katz wrote this week" is that the game is far too easy.
And, like most Americans, he concentrates entirely on what's going on within the borders of his little country. One day, he might actually realise that there's a whole world out there which doesn't care about what goes on in the United States of Overinflated Egos.