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Ideas for Sale

Growing Pains
Resources, competition, and our institutional character

Technology transfer is just a subset of knowledge transfer.
Dennis Liotta, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry

Show me the money . . .
1997 licensing income and patents from Emory and other institutions

What is applied research?

How does funding work in the sciences?

Overheard on campus
Remarks from Stanley Chodorow, CEO of the California Virtual University and former provost of the University of Pennsylvania

Academic Exchange December 1999/January 2000 Contents Page

The recent Academic Exchange contains a number of interesting comments concerning the place of technology transfer within the university setting. I greatly value of colleague Dennis Liotta and hold him in high regard but philosophically disagree with the sentiments he expressed within the Academic Exchange.

It is essential in an academic environment to openly express our opinions, even when they diverge from those of our colleagues. Given that premise, and with all due respect to Dennis, I offer the following counterpoints to the underlying assumptions in Dennis's interview.

• Dennis's fundamental assumption is that we can and should do at a university what is already done in the commercial sector. This assumption underlies most, if not all, of Dennis's statements in the Academic Exchange, and his arguments flow logically from that incorrect primary assumption.
  
• The university is not a business--it is a not-for-profit, educational institution. Universities, like businesses, serve society, but they do so (or at least have done so historically) from a different set of guiding principles. Businesses are motivated explicitly by profit, and will make a profit if they serve a societal need. Universities serve a very different role in society; they share knowledge that is unbiased, and particularly unbiased by the profit motive. To lose sight of this important difference will corrupt universities and ultimately harm society. In order to express myself professionally, I intentionally chose a university setting and not an industrial research laboratory, because I value true scholarship, unencumbered by the profit motive. If a faculty member wants to carry out commercially motivated research, he can best serve society by leaving the academy for industry. A faculty position will then be freed for one motivated by scholarship, not profit, and the unique role of the university in society will be protected.
  
• In the private sector, an entrepreneur assumes significant personal risk for a potential monetary reward. When a university professor engages in entrepreneurial behavior, no personal risk is assumed. The university assumes that burden and its associated non-monetary losses. I see a clear conflict of interest and something fundamentally flawed when the university provides a professor a lifetime, secure salary, research labs, and unencumbered access to university resources, and the professor uses his or her position to engage in risk-free entrepreneurial behavior.