Marketing science, marketing ourselves

Academe, Sep/Oct 2003 by Montgomery, David C

The quest for external funding dominates academic science. But today's scientists shoud think about p edging allegiance to traditional academic values.

Many years ago, I was summoned to lunch by a dean. (That was in another country, and, besides, the man is dead.) I was then a newly hired physicist who had shown a modest aptitude for raising academic research grants from the government, and he wanted my opinion on the future potential for government support of academic research. He had heard that the game was about over, and that such opportunities were becoming increasingly limited. I told him that although funds might be in a trough at the moment, the possibilities were bound to pick up, because the Cold War was still being energetically prosecuted.

I don't know if my views helped to mold his opinion, but something converted him. He became an enthusiast of external funding and took the campus with him. At that institution today, the ability to secure not only government grants but also corporate support is an important qualification for admission to professorial life, as is skill at developing for-profit "spin-offs." I am told that discussions of faculty hiring and promotion frequently do not delve deeply into the details of a candidate's research or scholarship, but rather cut immediately to the person's success at the chase after external money. Student teaching evaluations also receive attention-with an emphasis on consumer satisfaction. To discuss anything else is naivete, bad manners, or proof of a lack of seriousness.

Some have suggested that this transmutation of values has spread throughout American universities. Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie make an impressively detailed case in favor of this argument in their 1997 book, Academic Capitalism. Academe devoted its September-October 2002 issue to the closely related topic of who owns the intellectual property rights to and benefits from research paid for by external agents, corporate or governmental. Probably every reader of this magazine knows from personal experience how much influence a successful professor-entrepreneur who can pay some bills wields, and how much such a person can affect the agenda, values, and style of an academic department. It would be redundant to develop in any more detail how willingly (or how quietly) the American university is surrendering its insistence on the primacy of values unrelated to the marketability of a "product," whether that be a research paper or a graduate. And this transformation has happened quickly-in less than one long academic lifetime (mine).

During this process, relatively few heavy-handed violations of academic freedom of the kind that the AAUP has so persistently resisted over the decades have occurred. Usually, no one is told what not to teach, what not to think, or what conclusions to reach. Cases that lead to placement on the AAUP's list of censured administrations can seem almost pleasingly classical and simple by comparison with the genteel coercions involved in pursuing government- or corporate-sponsored research. Perhaps we should be thankful that relationships with external sponsors have held out mostly carrots and few sticks. But from the point of view of one whose academic values were fixed forty or fifty years ago, it can seem sad and also remarkable that the once jealously guarded autonomy of the university has been so easily purchased.

Is this the end of the story, then? Perhaps, but I hope not. We need to ask whether we really want or need to proceed further down the market-driven path. Is some implacable economic mechanism forcing us to do so-is the deck stacked? Or is there something in the classical nineteenthand early-twentieth-century model of the university in America, or the older European antecedents from which it evolved, that might be worth reverse-engineering or breeding back to? What assumptions underlay the earlier model, and do they have any validity for us now?

This article is too short to treat such questions comprehensively, but it isn't too short to suggest some answers. Unfortunately, mine may invoke values and beliefs that lie outside the acceptable academic vocabulary of 2003.

Enthusiasm for the pre-Cold War model can probably not be justified in utilitarian terms or explained as a consequence of economic forces; it may rest on nonfalsifiable hypotheses or even simple aesthetic preferences. But two ideas behind the enthusiasm can be stated in an uncomplicated way: (1) the primary obligation of a university is to acquire, develop, transmit, and protect knowledge in a sensitive and inclusive way, and (2) no one, not even those actually doing the intellectual work, can know in advance to what future humane or inhumane use that knowledge may be put, if any. The responsibility for applying the knowledge lies elsewhere, and it is the academic's job to follow his or her own instincts about what to look at next. Two corollaries are (1) those directly engaged with acquiring and transmitting knowledge are the sole best judges of where and how to invest their own efforts, but (2) they are obligated to separate rigorously their role as researcher or scholar from their equally legitimate roles as citizen, advocate, or consumer. Using the privilege of determining where best to invest one's effort to accumulate wealth, either for oneself or for a corporate sponsor or partner, has no legitimacy under this model. The academic's role in the historically privileged community of higher education is inherently unprivatizable, whether a person gets a paycheck from the public or the private sector: to privatize the role is to destroy it, by robbing the academic of the authority needed to be taken seriously. For the same reason, the magazine Consumer Reports does not accept advertising. Who would believe it if it did?