Whose property is it?

Academe, Sep/Oct 2001 by Rhoades, Gary

Quality Control

As intellectual property becomes increasingly privatized, who controls its use? For many faculty members, what is at issue is not the money, but quality control and professional autonomy. With the advance of corporatization, academic managers have increasing say over initiatives in research and instructional programs, evaluating them, along with academic work in general, in terms of their potential commercial value. Formerly, such decisions were more firmly within the professional domain of faculty members and based more exclusively on academic criteria.

With instructional materials, most academics are not looking to make big money; their goal is mainly to control how their products will be used. They want to ensure that only qualified instructors teach with the materials and that the faculty creator can revise or pull them off the shelf when they become outdated, as opposed to their being recycled to make money for the institution.

With research products, most academics are driven less by commercial promise than by the prospect of seeing their work have practical impact. Few scientists or engineers aim primarily to get rich off their products; on the contrary, many are delighted when their work translates into a product from which the public can benefit. Right now, the principal mechanism for ensuring such a result is to sell the product in the marketplace.

Academic managers, however, focus on maximizing revenues. This goal affects their evaluation of academic work and their assessment of research and instructional programs. They are more likely to favor fields that offer the promise of producing commercial products, commanding private support, and yielding potentially lucrative patents, along with fields that attract federal funding, than fields driven by curiosity and dedicated to academic publishing.

Like decisions in other areas, those affecting instructional programs and initiatives reflect this shift in authority and criteria. Decisions increasingly bypass collective faculty control and are made with an eye toward efficiency and profit instead of educational quality. Hoping to expand their institution's market share and enhance tuition revenues, academic managers develop costly distance-education ventures that lie outside the purview of most faculty members. On campus, managers increasingly favor investments in technology over those in new faculty positions, viewing technology as a means of gaining efficiencies through larger class sizes. Such investments reorganize instruction in ways that decenter the faculty, rationalize teaching, and expand the role of nonfaculty professionals. Without faculty consent, some institutions are even "branding," trading on educational reputations earned through academic labor. They are signing over instructional programs to businesses that offer them under the institution's name but without using the institution's full-time professors.

So who controls the use of academics' intellectual property? Under the corporate model of higher education, managers do, relying on a commercial calculus that centers potential revenue gain and decenters academic autonomy. Managers are reorienting the academy to serve those who can pay the most for research and instruction. Their strategy is, however, short-sighted in that they fail to count the costs of their efforts economically (considering the debit side of the balance sheet) or politically (considering the price in broad public support).