INDUSTRIALIZING OUR UNIVERSITIES

...Thus, what has largely been a 30-year social investment is suddenly a private windfall brought about by . . . universitycorporate agreements...

...Finally, there is an issue that, perhaps because of embarrassing political ramifications, the NCR report touches upon rather gingerly: "The less basic the research, the more difficult becomes the determination of whether the use of public funds for university-industrial re181 search relationships is proper...

...At stake is, above all, the university's intellectual capital...

...Yet on balance the American university is one of the few institutions relatively free of intellectual bias and corruption...

...The institutional concept of science as part of the public domain is linked with the imperative for communication of findings...

...It affected "what kinds of questions would be asked . . . which problems would be investigated, what sorts of solutions would be sought, what conclusions would be drawn...

...geneticist Jonathan King has explained, [there is] a conflict of interest between the university's duty to gather and disseminate knowledge in an unbiased fashion and the university using its faculty in a profit-making enterprise serving a different master: maximum return on investment...

...Secrecy is the antithesis of this norm, full and open communication its enactment...

...By the turn of the century, engineering was the country's most populous profession, and industry was explicitly influencing science and engineering curricula while availing itself of the trained personnel universities placed at its disposal...

...If so, how can the solemn commitment of the university (and of science) to the public weal be reconciled with industry's obsessive drive for ever greater profit...

...In fact, almost every major university, from coast to coast, now is engaged in some form of research for industry...

...But this is a vacuous distinction...

...As Harvard's general counsel told the faculty in the course of a widely publicized debate on the proposed commercialization of DNA research, ". . if we are to continue to meet rising expenses and to maintain scientific research of high quality, we need to explore ways of sharing in the financial rewards that come from the application of the new knowledge discovered in the University...

...An invention that becomes common property can prove of only minimal value to a corporation intent on securing a competitive edge or to a researcher or university eager to collect patent royalties...

...Such concealment runs counter to the concept of science as part of the public domain and to the imperative for communication of findings...

...The absence of public representation is especially deplorable in the schools of agriculture, where applications of biotechnology could lead to a profound restructuring of farming...

...The intimate working association of graduate students and professors in projects affiliated with industry poses a particularly delicate problem...

...Unfortunately, the lamentable record of industry's indifference to workers, consumers, and the environment leaves little room for optimism about its response to this challenge...

...But as M.I.T...

...In 1974, however, the university accepted $23 million from Monsanto for research on the tumor-angiogenesis factor (TAF) in cancer therapy, agreeing to assign the company the rights to a TAF blocking agent should one be developed...

...In the face of soaring unemployment, American workers evidently still believe they have more to lose than their chains...

...the legacy of Love Canal and thousands of waste dumps leaking into wells and streams while the Chemical Manufacturers' Association successfully lobbied Congress to reduce the toxic-waste "superfund" from $4.2 billion to $1.6 billion and emasculate its liability provisions...

...The nation's universities now are severely burdened by steadily mounting financial pressures and an overall decline in federal support, and by the need to replace obsolescent equipment with costly modern machines to keep pace with the explosion in scientific instrumentation...

...has not maintained the innovative characteristics which fueled its earlier scientific and economic success...

...Furthermore, by succumbing to the temptation of cashing in on industrial contracts and giving financial priority to "productive" departments while starving or eliminating the "nonproductive," universities may crush this freedom entirely...

...The NCR's assumption seems to be that applied research is too directly tied to private profit to justify the use of public funds, whereas basic research is sufficiently removed to make it palatable...

...Perhaps the most intractable may be the problem of secrecy...

...By 1978," NCR data indicate, "direct industrial support for university basic research had become almost minuscule as a percentage factor," and there is no reason to think this figure has changed appreciably...

...That's already happening...

...Most of the problems relevant to academic freedom are being debated within or on the periphery of the academic community...

...Although the magnitude of these ventures is unprecedented, the university-industrial connection is rooted in the nascent capitalism of the 19th century...

...She quotes Merton: The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community...

...Gabriel Kolko's observations in Government and University in America regarding military research are equally pertinent to industrial research: No one opposes the free choice of subjects for inquiry, but the critical question is whether such choice begins with the scholar, who is then free to explore unpredicted but promising dimensions of his study, or whether external agencies designate for him the subject matter and even the research data...

...The difficulty arises less from the patent per se, though how it is exploited may be crucial, than from concealment during the prior research...

...Alas, this is a miracle unlikely to recur, especially in the academic setting...

...In the five-year period after the passage of air and pollution laws, the EPA referred 130 violations to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, a procedure drastically curtailed under the agency's incumbent Reaganaut, Anne Gorsuch...

...the failure of Ely Lilly & Company to disclose the scores of deaths linked to Oraflex when requesting government approval to market the drug...

...The scientific ethos," Culliton concludes, "is compatible with the definition of technology as private property...

...182...

...For years its patent policy required that any health-related discoveries made in its labs be dedicated to the public...

...Much of this concern focuses on the idea that the U.S...

...Hoechst, A.G., the giant German pharmaceutical combine, recently has given $50 million to the Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard affiliate...

...Its membership comes from the university hierarchy, several professional associations, and industry, the latter represented by the president of Exxon Research and Engineering and by the senior vice-president of Monsanto...

...They are obviously common practices and not confined to the isolated, industrial malefactor: they are endemic to the system...

...Sixteen corporations—including GE, TRW, IBM, IT&T, Honeywell, and Texas Instruments —all have bought into Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems, at a cost of $750,000 each...

...The plight of academia happens to mesh with that of American business...

...By 1909 the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that the engineer was "becoming a tool of those whose aim it is to control men and profit from their knowledge...

...Stanford's Graduate Student Academic Affairs Committee has identified a number of distressing practices arising from this conflict of interest—such as the use of a student's ideas in industrial patents without recognition of that student's contribution...

...The business of business is making money and goods...

...But that will not be so if the experience at Harvard becomes typical...

...The NCR believes that the university's greatest strength lies in its capacity for basic research...

...the $100,000 fine levied in December 1980 against the nation's largest independent coal producer for falsifying coal-dust samples submitted for inspection...

...Biology Department...

...faculty suppression of information (normally available to colleagues and students) to advance the competitive position of a firm...

...These instances of industry's social responsibility "with public health and safety as prime considerations" could be multiplied a hundredfold...

...Another knotty problem is the intrusion of the cash nexus into the traditional governance of the university...

...Once upon a time,] one of the strengths of American biomedical science was the free exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information...

...Omenn, Culliton, and Merton speak for the traditional conception of the university as an institution embodying disinterested teaching, research, and public service...

...178 Culliton offers the example of Cesar Milstein, who with a colleague was credited with the invention of monoclonal antibodies and who in sharing the cells with others asked that they not seek patents...

...But is a marriage possible—or are the two partners so constitutionally antipathetic that connubial bliss seems unlikely...

...The paramount issue remains• who is to control the university's intellectual capital—society, to serve the public interests —or national and multinational corporations, to serve theirs...

...The cuts—"selective discontinuance" in administrative jargon—are apparently aimed at the Schools of Art, Education, and Natural Resources, with the Geography Department slated for elimination...

...Communism, defined in the nontechnical and extended sense of common ownership of goods," Culliton writes, "places great value on researchers' freely sharing what they learn...

...deliberate attempts by faculty to channel student research into areas of lesser academic merit but of potential benefit to commercial enterprises...

...Exxon is underwriting an $8 million combustion project at M.I.T...

...These include free and open communication, respect for individual views, insistence on excellence, disinterested objectivity, fastidiousness and honesty in the reporting of research results, and dedication through education and research to enhancing the state of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us...

...179 • the "miracle-drug" Clofibrate that Ayerst continued to sell as a heart-attack preventive when solid evidence had demonstrated it to be ineffective and hazardous...

...These social dividends, however, are extrinsic to the nature of capitalism, be it the primitive 19th-century variety with its iron law of wages or the "enlightened" present-day variety with its runaway shops and recourse to cheap, nonunionized foreign labor...

...Similar objections were voiced in a discussion at M.I.T.'s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, which is a gift from Edwin C. Whitehead, the founder of Technicon and Revlon's largest single shareholder...

...What we want is to get pregnant without really losing our virginity," quipped one administrator, speaking of the university-industrial connection and its implications...

...She refers to the norms that govern, according to sociologist Robert K. Merton, the social structure of science and would appear to encompass the university as a whole: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism...

...OSHA's 1980 report, labeled one of the ten "best-censored" stories of the year by Project Censored, that over 100,000 workers die each year and more than 300,000 are disabled as a consequence of occupational diseases attributed to chemicals in industrial products and processes...

...Industry, however, has invariably concentrated on—and endowed—applied research with its fairly rapid payoff...

...The NCR therefore admonishes industry to perform its productive function "in a socially responsible manner with public health and safety as prime considerations" (emphasis added...

...But, retorted Professor of Zoology, Richard C. Lewontin, "The prospect of the University treating with an even hand and without the slightest prejudice a professor in whom it has already invested $200,000 in a joint financial venture is ludicrous...

...Purdue is working on computers for Control Data, Carnegie-Mellon on robotics for Westinghouse, and Rensselaer Polytech on automation for IBM, GE, Grumman, Lockheed, and Bethlehem Steel...

...Nor has the proliferation in the past two decades of public-interest groups and government agencies charged with shielding us from the more predatory inclinations of business signaled a discernible abatement of historic practices...

...The Celanese Corporation is funding $1.1 million in enzyme research at Yale, in exchange for exclusive rights to resulting patents...

...The concomitant wealth has laid the economic foundation of Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and public welfare...

...Pointing to the millions of dollars in federal support for recombinant DNA research and the more recent investments of the multinationals, the Cornell bulletin echoes Noble: "Clearly the research underpinning [of] the earliest biotechnological products has . . . been underwritten by public funds...

...Honoring these ideals has frequently been easier than observing them...

...The flouting of academic freedom, subversion of objectivity in times of war, the feeble response to the "red" hysteria after World War I and in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, the resistance to affirmative action, the doctoring of research and the occasional lapses from excellence—such aberrations underscore how fragile is the myth that would insulate the ivory tower from the real world...

...At the University of Michigan, for example, a recent report alleges that "A new era is underway...

...No wonder demands have increased for speeding the transfer of scientific knowledge to the marketplace, so that new products and industries can restore the country's mercantile preeminence...

...The patent policy was then revised...

...The danger here is that if universities accommodate the industrial sponsor and increasingly engage in applied research to the detriment of basic research, they will restrict and possibly destroy 180 the freedom of scholars to choose the subjects of their investigations...

...The March 1982 Pajaro Dunes Conference of university presidents and corporation executives, the ACLU, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of American University Professors, all have proposed or soon will propose a series of guidelines to deal with these problems...

...the scandal of Johns-Manville, which censored an unfavorable study of asbestosis prior to publication and fought desperately to prevent disclosure until its behavior could no longer be hidden...

...Science had indeed been pressed into the service of capital...

...U. of M. is cutting programs which serve broad social needs and opening its doors to business and the military...

...If the fiscal squeeze vexes Harvard with its $1.6 billion endowment, less affluent institutions surely are feeling the pinch even more acutely...

...But to dwell on academicfreedom issues alone is to overlook the forest for the trees, however endangered that freedom may be...

...In the words of "Industry and the Universities," a 1980 report of the National Commission on Research (NCR),* There is widespread and serious concern among leaders in government, the universities and industry over the erosion of U.S...

...Who will control it and whom will it serve—society or the national and multinational corporations...

...Moreover, our political freedoms have survived—too often in spite of corporate power—and upward social mobility has not completely vanished...

...Yet, "the firm has in essence transformed a part of a public-sector social resource into a private-sector preserve with little public scrutiny or accountability over its use of the facility...

...the high incidence of brain tumors among petrochemical workers at Dow Chemical and Union Carbide plants and of bladder cancer among DuPont workers...

...faculty voted overwhelmingly to take—together with $20 million for building the nonprofit institute, $7.5 million for general purposes, $5 million a year for staff, and a permanent endowment of $100 million...

...This convergence of economic interests, bolstered by the potentially lucrative advances in high technology and biogenetic engineering, has impelled university and corporation to effect a closer, more permanent relationship than the comparatively casual dalliance of previous decades...

...In the same journal Barbara J. Culliton, an editor of Science, supplements this picture with a perceptive discussion of academic research...

...While reiterating that "the public benefit should take precedence over profit making," it emphasized the idea that patents should henceforth be aggressively sought...

...WE NOW HAVE WITNESSED: million-dollar damage suits stemming from dangerously defective car design...

...EVEN ASSUMING industry were above reproach, the problems of its relationship with the university still would be enormous...

...It promises to open the door to people coming in with a lot of money to throw around...

...The record was familiar long before Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth and the muckraking studies that succeeded it...

...hegemony in science, technology and rates of production...

...Since the universities constitute "a substantial social investment, one made over many years by generations of tax-payers, scholars, contractors, workers, scientists and the like," writes David Noble, they "are an inherited resource that rightfully belongs to all of us...

...Ironically, having paid for the labs, the instrumentation, and often the salaries of research personnel, the public will pay again when the corporation retails the product, frequently under long-term, exclusive license that permits the company to charge what the market will bear...

...President Bok subsequently noted that in the universities the accumulated shortfall in equipment alone exceeds $300 million...

...Gone were the days," Culliton remarks of this new dispensation, "when Harvard would stand in the way of profit making from patented research discoveries...

...A related problem is the kind of research that universities should undertake...

...This plan threatens to change the nature of higher education," contends Biology Professor Sheldon Penman...

...These faculty-industrial ties," the committee asserts, "blur the traditional distinction between research sponsor and researchers and make it difficult for faculty to adequately protect the interests of their students working on sponsored research...

...Secrecy," to quote Merton again, "is the antithesis of this norm, full and open communication its enactment...

...We lose control over our faculty appointments, we lose control over our graduate students, we lose control over the direction of our research...

...in return the corporation will be allowed to market any discoveries made in Harvard's Department of Molecular Biology, which Hoechst's largesse has created...

...Contemplating the corporate image, the NCR notes that "the seeming [sic] insensitivity of industry to the common good alienated a newly aware generation of students—and many of their professors...

...The whole thing has been poisoned...

...David E Noble's America by Design has traced it back to the establishment of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1849 and the introduction of engineering courses at West Point shortly thereafter...

...Monsanto has signed comparable $23 million contracts with the Harvard Medical School and Washington University...

...and will obtain irrevocable, worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to ensuing inventions...

...Few would disagree with the NCR that as a research center the university in the U.S...

...Confirming this assessment, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development now ranks the United States merely tenth among industrial nations in per-capita gross national product...

...Until the last decade, with the exception of the Great Depression and periodic recessions, it has performed well enough to out-produce the rest of the world and provide us with a standard of living that, for all the mixed blessings of our material possessions, no other nation could match...

...Approximately 300 other firms are spending millions on the application of bioengineering to agriculture and plant breeding...

...Property rights in science are whittled down to a bare minimum by the rationale of the scientific ethic...

...The NCR is supported by private foundations...

...now if you sanction and institutionalize private gain and the patenting of microorganisms, then you don't send out your strains because you don't want them in the public sector...

...The practical question is, 'Does this kind of scientific research pay?' " The schools rapidly adapted themselves to this view...

...The business concepts of secretiveness and proprietary control," says the director of the NCR, "are anathema to the academic environment...

...Academic freedom is inherently incompatible with military research . . . because the essence of freedom and creativity is the ability of the scholar to decide in the manner, place and time of his own choosing what research to do and how to release the product of his effort...

...After all, corporate ethics are seldom any better than they have to be...

...Basic research necessarily precedes applied research and is therefore inextricably linked with whatever marketable products eventuate...

...But it was AT&T's chief engineer, J. C. Carty, who spoke for the vast majority of the profession when he enunciated company policy: "The criterion which we apply to the work conducted in these labs is that of practical utility...

...Fifty years later, in commending an industrial associates program to the Yale faculty, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the university's president, declared that educational institutions, "an integral part of the private sector," must promote their "natural alliances" with the business community...

...is an institution of unsurpassed performance, a model eagerly emulated by other nations...

...And since most universities today are either public or quasi-public institutions by virtue of their taxexempt status and their receipt of large government grants, the public has an interest in what is being investigated and the fruits thereof...

...It is a question that our democratic polity must resolve sooner or later if it wishes to secure the social benefits to which it is entitled...

...With the dramatic growth of the university-industrial connection, a fundamental transformation is radically altering the conduct of the sciences, threatening the status of other academic disciplines, and endangering the autonomy of the university itself...

...The institute is to be operated in conjunction with M.I.T., which will designate several candidates for the self-perpetuating 14-member board including three of Whitehead's children, who will comprise a majority of the key finance committee...

...What of the other party...

...In the heated debate over the commercialization of DNA research, Harvard's general counsel stated that "when considering the promotion of junior faculty whose work might offer considerable commercial promise, the possibility of financial return must not prejudice or seem to prejudice the academic decision on promotion...

...The Whitehead Institute will appoint up to 20 professors of the M.I.T...

...Universities represent important values in our society," writes Gilbert S. Omenn in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine...

...The determining influence," a bulletin from Cornell's Department of Rural Sociology tells us, "will no doubt be the large multinational corporations because [they] will be in the best position to control the allocation of capital to biotechnology research and to the . . . commercialized biotechnology substances...

...The difference between these views illustrates the scope of what is happening to American higher education...

...These are risks the M.I.T...

...177 This utilitarian emphasis assumed, writes Noble, "particular forms molded by the specific, historical needs of private industry, by particular firms intent upon increasing their profit margins and powers...