Whose property is it?

Academe, Sep/Oct 2001 by Rhoades, Gary

Public Domain

Academe is a distinctive ecology, defined less by shortterm commercial payoffs than by long-term educational values. It is more than just a professional domain; it is also a public domain, and the two are intertwined. Professions arose in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries partly to mitigate capitalism's excesses, serve public purposes, and broaden the public domain; their legitimacy lies to some degree in maintaining distance from the commercial world. For-profit higher education entities that have no full-time faculty and offer cookie-cutter course work constrain professional creativity and academic freedom, offering little by way of publicly oriented intellectual work. As not-for-profit universities model themselves increasingly on corporations, their ecology is at risk. Privatization threatens academic positions and the professional status of academics in colleges and universities; it also threatens academe's core intellectual work and position in the public domain.

In negotiating intellectual property rights, we negotiate not only individual claims and the collective direction of the academy, but our external legitimacy as independent professionals. Our negotiations currently leave out the public as a claimant; the public has become simply a marketplace from which academics and corporate-style institutions of higher education can generate revenue. Thus the public domain shrinks. The more we are complicit in this corporatization, the more our claims to be independent professionals working in a domain worthy of public support become suspect.

Collectively, faculty need to renew their commitment to public purposes and work. I am not suggesting that we take vows of poverty and sequester ourselves like medieval monks and nuns. But there are reasonable alternatives to the privatization of academic knowledge. One combines private gain and public access. Through royalties from publishing books, faculty members capitalize on the proceeds of their intellectual property, yet it is available for public use in libraries. Thus intellectual products can yield private gain and be in the public domain. Although we want people to buy our books, we would not suggest that the books should not be available at libraries for free. We want to be cited, even read: that is our coin of the realm. We can pursue a similar model for other types of intellectual property.

A second alternative would be to set aside part (or all) of the movies generated by intellectual property in a "public trust" for purposes ranging from need-based scholarships to outreach activities in local schools and communities. Some institutions create a fund devoted to research from monies generated by patents; a public trust fund would extend this concept. A third alternative would be to "discount" the cost of what the public pays for academic products to recognize its subsidy of them. A fourth alternative would be to ban institutional and individual sale of a product. One collective bargaining agreement, for example, says that the institution will not sell instructional materials designed for or used in distance education.