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Previous AE coverage
of these issues:
www.emory.edu/
ACAD_EXCHANGE/1999/
decjan00/ideas.html
Money
Changes Everything
Commerce, philanthropy, and the culture of
the academy
"We
should be more creative in thinking about how we reward people for
what they've done."
Rich Rothenberg, Professor
of Family and Preventive Medicine
"If
I'm going to accept [the Sloan Foundation's] money in good faith,
I have to minimally carry out their agenda."
Bradd Shore, Professor
of Anthropology
University,
Inc.
License income, patents, start-ups, and research expenditures for
a selection of eleven institutions
Who
sees the money?
Emory's recently revised intellectual property ownership policy
Return
to Contents
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Two conferences, one big anxiety.
Growing worries about money in higher education—where it comes
from, whether there will be enough of it—lay at the heart of
the Sam Nunn Forum on the Commercialization of the Academy and the
Graduate School of Arts and Science’s Conference on Philanthropy
and the Research University, both at Emory last April. Recent shrinking
markets and lackluster endowment performance also have heightened
a more ineffable anxiety about the ways financial forces buffet
academic culture. Participants in both conferences raised concerns
about the ways university faculty seem committed to increasingly
contradictory ideals. Does intellectual curiosity or market demand
drive research? Does the university serve a profit motive or a greater
good—or both?
The two Emory conferences highlighted two revenue streams—commerce
and philanthropy. While more than half of all funding for university-based
research still comes from the U.S. government (and most of that
through the National Institutes of Health), federal support is gradually
receding. Roughly 7 percent, however, comes from industry-sponsored
research contracts and technology transfer, or the delivery of academic
ideas into the marketplace, heralded as the most promising new source
of support for higher education. In fact, decades of federal investment
into biomedical research have fueled an explosion of patents and
licenses on university-based inventions.
The benefits of technology transfer are clear—rapid and efficient
application of important discoveries, economic development, profits
for the university. But the marketplace isn’t encroaching as
rapidly as one might think. The numbers
of university-owned patents and licenses are on the rise, but actual
revenues from them are not skyrocketing. Aside from a few “blockbuster”
patents that tipped total royalties to colleges and universities
over the billion-dollar mark in 2000, only nineteen universities
made more than $10 million on such revenues, according to the Association
of University Technology Managers. Emory, which ranked nineteenth
in licensing income, made $10.6 million, 4.9 percent of its actual
expenditures on research. Two of Emory’s twenty-eight patents
yielded more than $2 million in income. In coming years, however,
the university and several of its researchers stand to earn significant
royalties from the recent settlement of a patent and licensing dispute
with GlaxoSmithKline and Shire Pharmaceuticals over drugs for treating
HIV infections.
Private foundations add their own kind of pressure. Philanthropy,
which accounts for another 7 percent of research funding, is becoming,
as graduate school acting dean Gary Wihl put it, “something
closer to investment.” In recent years, according to data from
the Foundation Center, the rate of philanthropic giving to postsecondary
education tapered from 14 percent of total grant money in 1994 to
11.3 percent in 1999, sliding to 8.8 percent in 2000. Demanding
more in the way of evidence that their philanthropy is having a
tangible impact, many foundations are leaning toward projects that
will show an immediate, quantifiable return on their investment,
such as giving computer equipment to elementary schools.
As these key sources shift, many observers note that universities
have, in response, begun a kind of reordering of their own. These
subtle changes in the climate of
the academy revolve around prized principles—tenure, curiosity-driven
research, academic integrity, the sharing of data, and sweeping
notions of intellectual culture.
Scholar-Entrepreneurs
“We have a unique and valuable
thing in universities,” Derek Bok, emeritus president of Harvard
University, told the Nunn forum. “We have an enormous amount
of personal freedom as professors to do what we choose. That is
necessary for creative work; it’s a major attraction of academic
life. But when you have that much freedom, a lot depends on the
willingness of faculty to do more than the job description literally
requires. By legitimating profit-seeking, commercialization puts
that voluntary, communal spirit—that set of values that makes
professors spend more time preparing their courses, working with
students, going to faculty meetings, working hard on the promotion
process—it puts all that in danger. Professors are tempted
to spend more time making money through consulting, giving speeches,
and starting companies.”
Others, however, call for balance between those values and the fiscal
realities of the academy. University of Georgia Provost Karen Holbrook
exhorted the Nunn forum to “push our promotion and tenure guidelines
into alignment with the modern world, in which the private sector
and universities support each other in commercial collaborations.”
Holbrook critiqued the notion that such faculty efforts fall “outside
the academic promotion and tenure process, that technology transfer
is more a matter of personal business.” Designating an emerging
class of faculty as “scholar-entrepreneurs,” she described
them as people with “unimpeachable” integrity, superior
teaching records, abiding interest in research, an eye for market
application of university inventions, and an ability to “move
from the classroom to the laboratory to the company boardroom.”
Private Data, Public Trust
While technology transfer is “working,” suggested Marie
Thursby, the Hal and John Smith Chair of Entrepreneurship at Georgia
Tech, speaking at the philanthropy conference, it does have some
“unintended consequences,” such as a proprietary resistance
to sharing data. In her own research, Thursby has found that about
half of the time, when a university researcher wishes to publish
findings of industry-sponsored research, the sponsoring company
reserves the right to withhold some information. Further, she suggests,
sponsoring companies commonly delay publication of research in the
interest of keeping industry secrets.
Moreover, industry, rather than disinterested science, is setting
the research agenda and gaining greater control over studies conducted
in universities, charged Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in the Department
of Social Medicine at Harvard and former editor of the New England
Journal of Medicine, at the Nunn forum. “Until the past decade,
industry sponsors simply gave grants to researchers to test their
products,” she said. “Then they stepped back, waited for
the results, and hoped their product was good. That is no longer
the case. Drug companies now design studies to be carried out by
academic researchers who are little more than hired hands, supplying
human subjects and collecting data.
“The point of drug companies is to sell profitable drugs, not
necessarily important ones, and they sponsor clinical research as
a means to that end. So instead of important new drugs, we’re
getting a blizzard of ‘me-too’ drugs directed toward chronic,
often minor ailments in adult populations.”
Such compromises, Bok said, “threaten to diminish the trust
of the public in the objectivity of university work. As you develop
these financial ties with industry, you have many more conflicts
of interest. When you do not have adequate tools to limit them,
public faith in the integrity and objectivity of research begins
to decline.”
But the motives of academic research have never been entirely pure,
noted president of the Social Science Research Council and professor
of history and sociology at New York University Craig Calhoun, speaking
at the philanthropy conference. “On the one hand, we research
university faculty constantly share and produce knowledge,”
he said. “On the other, we also engage in hoarding and accumulation.
We store knowledge in inaccessible academic journal articles written
for the approbation of a handful of colleagues or simply a line
on a vita. We treat our opportunities to do research not as a public
trust, but as a reward for success in our previous studies.”
But the real reward, Emory College interim dean Bobby Paul said
in closing the philanthropy conference, is those moments “when
a class or seminar produces an air of electric excitement, or when
a student suddenly comes up with a wholly novel idea we had never
thought of. Surely we have thought to ourselves, ‘this is why
we went into this business. . . .’ It is our job to create,
maintain, and protect institutions and practices within which these
moments can occur, and be recognized and valued,
both in and for themselves, as well as with ancillary values of
the monetary market and the prestige and status systems.”—A.O.A.
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