TEXT C In recent years, we have
all watched the increasing commercialization of the campus. The numerous
advertising posters and the golden arches of fast food outlets may be an affront
to our aesthetic sensibilities, but they are. arguably, no worse than ugly. Some
of the other new features of commercialized campus life do, however, constitute
a serious threat to things we rightly revere. "Privatization" and the "business
model" are the potential menace. What do these notions mean To
me, they involve an increased dependence on industry and philanthropy for
operating the university, an increased amount of our resources being directed to
applied or socalled practical subjects, both in teaching and in research; a
proprietary treatment of research results, with the commercial interest in
secrecy overriding the public’s interest in free, shared knowledge; and an at
tempt to run the university more like a business that treats industry and
students as clients and ourselves as service providers with something to sell.
We pay increasing attention to the immediate needs and demands of our
"costumers" and, as the old saw goes, "the customer is always right."
Privatization is particularly frightening from the point of view of public
well-being. A researcher employed by a university-affiliated hospital in Canada,
working under contract with a pharmaceutical company, made public her findings
that a particular drug was harmful. This violated the terms of her contract, and
so she was fired. Her dismissal caused a scandal, and she was subsequently
reinstated. The university and hospital in question are now working out
something akin to tenure for hospital-based researchers and guidelines for
contracts, so that more public disclosure of privately funded research will
become possible. This is a rare victory and a small step in the right direction,
but the general trend is the other way. Thanks to profit-driven private funding,
researchers are not only forced to keep valuable information secret, they are
often contractually obliged to keep discovered dangers to public health under
wraps, too. Of course, we must not be too na ve about this. Governments can
unwisely insist on secrecy, too, as did the British Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries. and Food in the work they funded in connection with the bovine
spongiform encephalopathy epidemic. This prevented others from reviewing the
relevant data and pointing out that problems were more serious than government
was letting on. A recent study found that more than one--third
of recently published articles produced by University of Massachusetts
scientists had one or more authors who stood to make money from the results they
were re porting. That is, they were patent holders, or had some relationship,
for example, as board members, to a company that would exploit the results. The
financial interests of these authors were not mentioned in the publications. If
patents are needed to protect public knowledge from private claims, then simply
have the publicly funded patent holders put their patents in the public domain
or charge no fee for use. Even philanthropic groups can
sometimes do skew research and teaching. The Templeton Foundation, for example,
offers awards to those who offer courses on science and religion I teach such a
course myself and feel the temptation to seek one of their awards. It seems
innocent enough, after all, I am already teaching the course and they are not
telling me what I have to believe. Moreover, they will put $ 5000 in my pocket
and give another $ 5000 to my chronically underfunded department. Everybody
wins, so why say no The expression "keep... under wraps" in the third paragraph probably means ______.