The growing corporate control of academe
Corporations exert too much control over universities, and universities are responding not by trying to regain control but by aping corporations, write Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn in "The Kept University." The authors, fellows at the Open Society Institute, devote most of their piece to "the academic-industrial complex," in which businesses finance professors' research in return for a role in setting the agenda for the work and having early or exclusive access to it. These deals, the authors write, have eroded the value placed on the sharing of intellectual discoveries. Universities "are beginning to look and behave like for-profit companies," they write, devoting resources to protecting their intellectual property, fighting for greater profits from discoveries, and shifting the curriculum away from the humanities or fields that are perceived to be of little economic value. While the article laments the lack of public interest in the educational values of higher education, it also says that the current trends in academic-corporate deals may hinder future economic growth. Many of today's biotechnology breakthroughs are the result of long-term basic research, the authors note, just the kind of work that is losing value because it can not demonstrate an immediate payoff to corporations. They add: "The freedom of universities from market constraints is precisely what allowed them in the past to nurture the kind of open-ended basic research that led to some of the most important (and least expected) discoveries in history." The article is not online, but information about the magazine is at http://www.theatlantic.com _________________________________________________________________
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