Biotechnology : professional issues and social concerns / editors, Paul DeForest [and others].

Date:
[1988], ©1988
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Biotechnology : professional issues and social concerns / editors, Paul DeForest [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    University Entrepreneurship and the Pubifc Purpose Sheldon Krimsky Tufts University Universities, like other complex institutions, adjust their goals and practices to сЬгт- ges in the broader political and economic environment within which they function. Over the past decade, a number of factors have been responsible for producing a closer coupling between academic and corporate institutions. The result has been a merging of corporate and university values for both the faculty and the institutions. Some view this as a positive sign. They argue that faculty and curriculum can become stale, irrelevant, or outdated if they are too insulated from wordly affairs. Many ad¬ vantages are cited in promoting closer ties between the academic and industrial sectors, not the least of which is opening up new funding sources to the university. It is also ar¬ gued that the country as a whole benefits from university-industry partnerships because of improved technology transfer (Bearn, 1981). Too many useful inventions and dis¬ coveries remain unrealized because they are not brought to the attention of the innova¬ tion sector. According to former Presidential science advisor George Keyworth, unless universities and industry work more closely, the United States' industrial competitive¬ ness will decline precipitously (Keyworth, 1982). Universities have also begun to emulate the private sector by adopting management practices and efficiency criteria, by profiting from faculty discoveries and inventions, and in a few instances by direct investment in commercial ventures. Also, the concept of the corporate liaison program, which allows universities to earn income by providing com¬ panies with privileged access to faculty research, has gained wide acceptance. The distinction between universities and corporate institutions in mission, mode of operation, and public purpose has been widely recognized (Abelson, 1982). Bartlett Giamatti, when President of Yale University, highlighted the differences as follows: the academic imperative [is] to seek knowledge objectively and to share it openly and free¬ ly; and the industrial imperative [is] to garner a profit, which creates the incentives to treat knowledge as private property (Giamatti, 1982, p. 1279). Cooperative agreements between the academic and business sectors can sometimes result in uneasy compromises. In the past several years there has been considerable debate about the proper boundaries for these contractual arrangements. The debate has been spurred by a new generation of financicd and research partnerships, perhaps most visible in the area of biotechnology. I shall argue that these linkages have created an entrepreneurial atmosphere that has begun to alter the ethos of science. Norms of behavior within the academic community are being modified to accommodate closer corporate ties. In addition, there are more subtle losses to society when the leading faculty in entire disciplines have financial inter¬ ests in the commercialization of research. To gain a better grasp of these changes, the paper will proceed as follows. First, I shall explore a metaphor that conceptualizes the university as an institution with multiple per¬ sonalities in dynamic equilibrium. Second, I shall identify several factors external to the