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Academe: Technology For Sale
from the the-Corporate-Republic-swallows-another-one dept.
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.
I'd buy some shares! (Score:4)
Well, you can't get equity, but you can buy debt [savingsbonds.gov] 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..).
Columbia, Patents, and Profit (Score:4)
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
Yes, they have checked freedom (Score:4)
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
how to retain professors (Score:4)
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?
It's about values, people (Score:4)
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.
Researchers need to eat, too (Score:4)
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.
Students as Customers (Score:4)
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.
Money - Better Projects - Better Advancement (Score:5)
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
Can't be too surprised (Score:5)
Re:Researchers need to eat, too (Score:5)
> was right - does that mean that it's wrong to
> say that slavery is wrong?
This depends on your perspective. Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery and treat them as property, no matter how many people are willing to tolerate it or think that its ok.
> Capatalism has long been accepted as the best
> model for the development of society -
> universally since the fall of Communism.
A) Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
B) Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places. I direct you to The Farm [thefarm.org] a community in Tennessee which has experimented with a couple of forms of progressive communism for the past 30 years.
> This isn't about the Corporate Republic
> - instead, it's the early Free Market pioneer's
> dream
Hardly! A free Market pioneers dream is what the corperations crush. All of the benefits that capitalism lovers point to as the result of "market forces" are actually hindered by mega-corps.
Large corperations have found that it is more profitable to crush competition or buy them out than to compete with them on fair ground. They have found that its more profitable to take away peoples choices, than to produce good products.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market? Noone can compete with them. Nothing can touch their profits.
When its more profitable to make producing better products unprofitable for others than to produce good products yourself, the people get screwed over. It is a moral atrocity to do so. It acts to the detriment of society itself. It makes the corperation a parasite rather than a productive member.
Free market pioneers would roll in their graves to have this perversion called their dream.
How is this much different? (Score:5)
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.
Issue of Concern at MIT (Score:5)
Here's a story [mit.edu] 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 [mit.edu] in the school newspaper.
A recent partnership with Microsoft [mit.edu] (!)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 [mit.edu] 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).
Argh (Score:5)
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!")
Jon Katz - duller than a roomful of UFO nuts (Score:5)
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.