Subj: The growing corporate control of academe
Date: 02/21/2000 11:04:19 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: [log in to unmask] (Jim Vander Putten)
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To: [log in to unmask] (Working-class list)
Hi everyone,
This is FYI from the Chronicle of Higher Ed ...
Jim Vander Putten
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MAGAZINES & JOURNALS
A glance at the March issue of "The Atlantic Monthly:"
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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Copyright (c) 2000 The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
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