Corporate U
Thursday, April 24 2008 by Frank Stasio and Olympia Stone
The relationship between business and academia has always been uneasy. Corporate funding accounts for a small percentage of all university research funds--seven percent of the total--but that percentage has grown more rapidly than any other in the past decade. So, is the privatization of the public universities at our doorstep? Kurt Smith, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, and WUNC Education Reporter Dave DeWitt join host Frank Stasio to talk about the corporatization of higher education.
Use the following to listen to the archive of this talk:
http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot0424a08.mp3/view
I heard this story on NPR's "The State of Things" yesterday. Although I had come to some of the same conclusions, it was very interesting to hear it explained from the perspective of marketing and economic consumerism.
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4 comments:
Great topic, Matt... and one that hits pretty close to home for me, too.
Personally, I believe research done by public universities funded by/for private companies should almost invariably remain public domain... If a company wants to develop proprietary knowledge and IP, then it needs to do so within the bounds of private industry.
Hmm, I actually agree with Beck. Odd. And oddly not free market for him. The attitude of business has been that if they foot the bill they get the patent and all subsequent profit. I understand their large investment, I just think that university research should be about the research and the promotion of knowledge and not about the profit.
Well, I don't really look at it as a free market issue. A private company can hire all the researchers they want, or fund that research through another company if they want to keep that knowledge proprietary. I don't have a problem with that. And I don't have a problem with private companies funding research through public universities.
But if a public institution does the grunt work for a specific technology, then the knowledge gained ought to belong to the public, as far as I'm concerned.
I think we are all in agreement on this one.
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