NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
E D I T O R I A L
NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
E D I T O R I A L
With big business courting universities as allies in the fight against government regulation, a business-orchestrated obsession with U.S. technological innovation taking root, federal government spending on research and development flattening and student protest at a low ebb, universities began to open their doors to big corporations in new and once-controversial ways.
"University-industry cooperation," especially in the sciences, became the rage among university administrators, and universities began experimenting with a host of partnership arrangements. Corporate-sponsored research, university-established industrial "incubators," consortium research agreements between groups of companies and individual universities, contract research and many other linkages gradually became more prevalent.
By 1982, Edward David, president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company, felt confident enough to proclaim, "We are entering a new era in the way scientific research is managed and supported in this country. And the most outstanding feature of this era will be the growth of industry-supported research in our universities."
The single most important institutional change facilitating the new university-business cooperative schemes was a revision in federal patent policy engineered by universities and big business. Prior to the patent law change of 1980, the federal government owned inventions developed in universities with federal research money; the government licensed those inventions, nonexclusively and without charge, to any party which desired to use them. Under the new rules, universities take possession of the inventions, and are free to license them exclusively and for profit.
Today, the university-industry relationship is well entrenched. Major corporate sponsorship programs are barely noteworthy; exclusive licensing of university inventions to private companies is routine. Individual university officials and professors have become deeply enmeshed in the business world [see "Serving Two Masters" and "Death of Disinterestedness" in this issue].
Now, universities are brazenly entering into financial arrangements with corporations that limit students' rights and choices.
Last year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison nearly entered into a contract with Reebok that included a "no-disparagement" clause that would have prohibited sports team coaches from saying anything negative about Reebok apparel, labor practices or the university's association with the company. The clause was dropped amidst a storm of student protest, but the signed contract does require university athletes to wear only Reebok shoes and apparel in practices, games and media interviews.
Currently, the California State University system is considering a fuzzy plan to enter into an entangling and far-reaching for-profit partnership with Microsoft, GTE, Hughes and Fujitsu. The companies would wire the university system, providing telecommunications infrastructure estimated to be worth more than $300 million over a 10-year period. The partnership hopes to generate $3 billion in revenue by selling computer support, pager accounts and internet access to students and the public. The partnership would force students and faculty to use and be trained on, and perhaps buy, the proprietary technologies sold by these companies. The corporate partners may even gain some control over educational decisions, curricula and materials, a point of enormous contention on Cal State campuses.
There are serious costs to the corporatization of U.S. universities. Most outrageous is the exploitation of students and the leverage of university power over students to benefit university business partners. These arrangements -- including exclusive shoe contracts and the proposed Cal State deal -- should be eliminated immediately and altogether.
Other consequences are even more harmful to society. Corporate sponsorship arrangements and federal patent law enable private companies to skim the benefits of taxpayer investments in research -- exclusively and without any reciprocal obligations to the taxpayers. Patent laws should be changed to eliminate or sharply limit the exclusivity terms, and to condition the use of government-sponsored inventions on payment of royalties, reasonable-pricing guarantees or other forms of payback to the public.
The most profound harm of university-industry ties may be the erosion of university and professorial independence. Universities are unique repositories of information and expertise, and society looks to academia to provide disinterested recommendations for, and critique of, policies, technologies and products. When the autonomy of huge swaths of the university is compromised, and when open debate is displaced by corporate norms of proprietary secrecy, then society loses an important pool of potentially independent, trustworthy experts.
Consider the realm of biotechnology. Most leading academic biologists have ties to biotechnology companies. On critical biotech policy issues, such as the safety of releasing genetically altered organisms into the environment, there are few independent expert voices enlivening the public debate.
Public disclosure is the first step to deal with the issue of potentially conflicted professors and academic institutions, but it is not enough. There is a need also to develop university norms that discourage both individual and institutional ties to business, so the academy can fulfill a more robust social role than that of corporate subsidiary.