"The past role of the university to serve the public has been hopelessly compromised."
Leonard Minsky, co-founder with Ralph Nader of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, laments that "universities, once proud defenders of academic freedom and critical thought, are now ever more exclusively the cradle of industrial invention."
According to Minsky, "The past role of the university to serve the public has been hopelessly compromised." This compromise came when universities began to conduct research on behalf of corporations, and to teach curricula that corporations design.
Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, authors of "The Kept University" (The Atlantic Monthly, March 2000), agree. Both are fellows at the Open Society Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to building an open society in countries that are transitioning toward democracy, and to "correcting the deficiencies of the essentially open society of the U.S." Key to the mission of the Open Society Institute is challenging "the intrusion of the marketplace into inappropriate areas." Echoing Minsky's pessimistic view of academia, Press and Washburn write, "Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education disinterested inquiry."
In The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press, 1998), Bill Readings, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal, states these concerns even more starkly: "The university is now an autonomous bureaucratic corporation responsive to the idea that what really matters in today's world is economic management rather than cultural conflict." The university, says Readings, "is simply a market for the production, exchange and consumption of useful information -- useful, that is, to corporations, governments, and their prospective employees."
University
mission
Are these dire assessments of academia correct? Has the mission of universities really changed? In his September 1998 Witness article "Hire Education: the Rise of Corporate Curricula," Christopher Cook reminds us that "the needs of industry have long been a driving force in defining education. The federal Morrill Act of 1862, for example, established land-grant colleges and universities which focused on agricultural technology as part of national economic policy and which hastened the mechanization of training." But the relationship between the university and the corporation is now tighter than ever and is intensifying at an unprecedented rate.
The campus itself, as David Noble, professor of history at Toronto's York University and author of Digital Diploma Mills, explains, has become "a significant site of capital accumulation, a change in social perception which has resulted in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property." The university, then, has been reconfigured in market terms.
According to Noble, this reconfiguration has occurred in two phases. First, there was "the commoditization of the research function of the university." This transformed "scientific and engineering knowledge into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market."
Second, says Noble, is the "commoditization of the educational function of the university." In this phase, which has intensified with online education, courses are transformed "into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market."
Research becomes product
Lawrence Soley, the Colnik professor of communication and professor of journalism at Marquette University, discusses this first transformation thoroughly in his book Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of the University (South End Press, 1995). He argues that the university's research function has been sold to corporate America: "The ivory towers of America have been leased by corporations. Being 'politically correct' in academia today means having an endowed chair or a lucrative consulting contract." Below are some examples of the university/corporate marriage, what Soley calls "corporate easy chairs":
The way university research is conducted today, Soley explains, is also fundamentally different from the way research was treated in the past. Then, it was treated as knowledge to be shared in the public forum, among scholars who would build on each other's work.
The transformation of research from public good to private product was not a gradual or natural change but the work of a deliberate lobbying effort. In the mid-1970s, corporations and universities, fearing increased international competition, joined to form the Business-Higher Education Forum. The goal was to increase U.S. competitiveness by changing the way universities conduct research and strengthening the relationship between academia and private business.
In 1980, directly as a result of these lobbying efforts, a new law called the Bayh-Dole Act, or the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, was passed. A 1983 executive order extended the legislation to large corporations, and the 1981 Recovery Tax Act increased the tax deductions corporations could claim for donations made to universities.
Prior to the Bayh-Dole Act, the results of university research funded by the federal government were considered public and could not be sold exclusively to one corporation or another.
The 1980 law changed this by making it possible for universities to own the patents, trademarks and licenses that might result from their research, even though the majority of university research -- about $14 billion worth a year -- is still federally funded.
This means that universities can now make deals with companies to give them exclusive rights to research. And universities are making deal after deal, as evidenced by the number of patents they are requesting. Before the 1980 law, universities produced roughly 250 patents a year. In 1998, 18 years after the passage of the Act, universities in the U.S. generated nearly 4,800 patents.
The Bayh-Dole Act transformed research from knowledge for the public good into "property" that is "owned" by a company and that cannot be shared easily with other scientists.
In instance after instance, universities agree to delay publication of research for up to one year in order to allow corporations to patent results. A 1994 Massachusetts General Hospital survey of 210 life-science companies found that 58 percent of those sponsoring research require delays of more than six months. In a second survey of 2,167 university scientists, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1997, nearly one in five researchers admitted to delaying publication for more than six months to protect proprietary information.
These delays concern Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, one of the country's leading cancer researchers. "There's been a shift toward confidentiality that is severely inhibiting the interchange of information," says Rosenberg, who believes that "the ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well." The university ethical system, which promotes knowledge for the public good, is in direct contradiction with the corporate ethical system that emphasizes ownership and protection of trade secrets.
Soley presents an instructive example from Berkeley. Novartis, Inc. gave Berkeley $25 million to fund basic research in the department of plant and microbial biology. In exchange, Berkeley gave Novartis first right to all licenses on one-third of the department's discoveries, including research funded by federal sources. Novartis also has two seats on the department's research advisory committee. In addition, and far worse, Novartis has the right to require the university to delay publication of its discoveries for four months. This delay gives Novartis a chance to license discoveries but it also interferes with the development of new scientific discoveries.
Even worse than delaying research results, in some cases corporations have demanded that universities never publish the results at all, especially if the company considers results unfavorable. David Kern, formerly the director of occupational medicine at Brown University's Memorial Hospital, worked on research funded by Microfibres, a Rhode Island company that produced nylon flock. When Kern discovered evidence of a new lung disease among the company's employees, the company threatened to sue if Kern published his findings. Kern published the results anyway. Soon after, his position at Brown was eliminated.
Not surprisingly, this emphasis on corporate or commercial research affects other aspects of university life as well. While corporate grants may pay part of professors' salaries, explains Soley, researchers are not taken off the university payroll. Yet, these professors may be released from some or all of their teaching responsibilities. They are often senior scholars, showcase professors whose reputations are supposed to attract graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduate students can rarely take their classes, however, since these professors rarely teach. And to fill the teaching slots vacated by these faculty members, the university may hire low-paid adjunct instructors or graduate student teaching assistants. In this way, says Soley, the adjunct, the graduate student and the undergraduate student are exploited, and education suffers.
Because contracts with corporations are complicated and because universities have added licensing and grant-seeking departments, the union of corporation and campus does not really bring additional moneys to universities. Instead, this union adds administrative costs while shifting the focus of universities from teaching to research. As York University's David Noble explains, between 1976 and 1994, expenditures on research increased 21.7 percent at public research universities, while expenditures on instruction decreased 9.5 percent. During this time, tuition continued to rise at unprecedented rates, sometimes as much as four times the rate of inflation. College students are supplementing the costs of research while the quality of education declines.
Courses become 'courseware'
Along with transforming the research that universities conduct, the union of corporation and campus has also changed teaching. Many define this change as the commercialization of classes in which training for a profession replaces education.
Peter Radecki, director of corporate services at Michigan Technological University, sees this shift as positive. "What's driving everything," he explains, "is the accelerating rate of technological developments. It used to be that you could get an education, a degree and a job. But, now, in some areas, as much as half of what a student learns as a freshman is obsolete by the time he graduates. For corporations to be competitive and for the university to be satisfying a real need, we have to change the education process. We have to amalgamate technological development, education, and corporate development and infuse technology into education. We need those corporate partners to verify that what we are teaching does not become obsolete."
Radecki points to a number of benefits in the marriage of corporation and university: 1) a high placement rate ("we train the workers corporations need"); 2) faculty development ("faculty go on sabbaticals and work for some of our corporate sponsors"); 3) industry advisory boards for every department ("these are populated by corporate folks who make sure work is appropriate for their needs").
Radecki does believe, however, that the university also needs "to have some places that challenge us to think about other [non-corporate] models. What are other routes to happiness? I think an academic environment should provide a certain amount of that diversity."
But this distinction, according to David Noble, is not necessarily so easy to make because there is a real difference between "training" and "education."
"In essence, training involves the honing of a person's mind so that the mind can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person," Noble says. "Training thus typically entails a radical divorce between knowledge and the self. Here knowledge is usually defined as a set of skills or a body of information designed to be put to use, to become operational."
On the other hand, Noble argues, education entails "the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge. Education is a process that necessarily entails an interpersonal (not merely interactive) relationship between people -- student and teacher (and student and student) -- that aims at individual and collective self-knowledge. Whenever people recall their educational experiences they tend to remember above all not courses or subjects or the information imparted but people, people who changed their minds or their lives, people who made a difference in their developing sense of themselves. Education is a process of becoming for all parties, based upon mutual recognition and validation and centering upon the formation and evolution of identity. The actual content of the educational experience is defined by this relationship between people and the chief determinant of quality education is the establishment and enrichment of this relationship."
College campuses are not factories that produce knowledge or stores that sell education. Yet, says Noble, the educational process is being divided into discrete and saleable items. The onset of online education makes this transformation even clearer. For online, the human interaction between teacher and student is removed.
As Noble describes the transformation, "In the first step toward commodification, attention is shifted from the experience of the people involved in the educational process to the production and inventorying of an assortment of fragmented 'course materials': syllabi, lectures, lessons, exams (now referred to in the aggregate as 'content').
"Second, these fragments are removed or 'alienated' from their original context, the actual educational process itself, and from their producers, the teachers, and are assembled as 'course,' in which they take on an existence independent of and apart from those who created and gave flesh to them.
"Finally, the assembled 'courses' are exchanged for profit on the market, which determines their value."
Instruction is therefore transformed into a set of deliverable commodities and "the end of education has become not self-knowledge but the making of money," says Noble.
He concludes, "In the wake of this transformation, teachers become commodity producers and deliverers, subject to the familiar regime of commodity production in any other industry, and students become consumers of yet more commodities. The relationship between teacher and student is thus re-established, in an alienated mode, through the medium of the market, and the buying and selling of commodities takes on the appearance of education. But it is, in reality, only a shadow of education, an assemblage of pieces without the whole."
Hope for the future
Still, there remains hope for the future of education. Noble sees the potential to combat the commercialization of education when faculty members remember why they entered academia in the first place: to teach, to help students become the adults they can be. Faculty, especially unionized faculty, says Noble, can act as campus leaders who refocus the university's attention on education.
Noble points to the example of his own faculty union at York University. By taking control of online education, faculty challenged some of the "in-corporation" of the campus. As Noble explains, "In 1997, faculty secured a new contract containing unique and unprecedented provisions which give faculty members direct control over all decisions relating to the automation of instruction. According to the contract, all decisions regarding the use of technology as a supplement to classroom instruction or as a means of alternative delivery 'shall be consistent with the pedagogic and academic judgements and principles of the faculty member employees as to the appropriateness of the use of technology in the circumstances.'"
Changes to instruction, then, will be made only when they "contribute to a genuine enhancement rather than a degradation of the quality of education," says Noble.
In March 1998, this attempt to refocus the university on education spread to other campuses including Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and Cornell, which held teach-ins on the corporate influence on academia.
In May 1999, the American Association of University Professors likewise held a special conference to protest the corporate influence on academia. According to a June 1999 report in the Philanthropy News Digest, professors "spoke out about what they see as unacceptable corporate intrusion into research at their institutions." Professors also protested pressure they feel from their schools to pursue corporate funding at all costs, regardless of "the strings attached." Physicist Irving Lerch began an effort of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to protest "the commercialization of science."
Ultimately, as Leonard Minsky states, "The university should not be pursuing the goal of profit." The university is "one of the two institutions we look to for ethics," the other being the nation's religious organizations. It is time for everyone to take universities back and to provide professors and students with the freedom they need to learn and grow. "Democracy," Minsky says, "requires education free from corporate interest -- free from any special interest."
Camille Colatosti is a professor of English and The Witness' staff writer.