Archives
Who should control faculty knowledge?
Keynote at GSE symposium looks at trustees’ interest in marketable research
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
What comes first: a university's board of trustees or its marketable research?
That's one of the questions that Sheila Slaughter asked the audience during her talk Friday on "Re-Defining Research Universities in a Global Knowledge Economy."
Slaughter, author and Louise McBee Professor of Higher Education at the University of Georgia, spoke as part of the multidisciplinary symposium "Working Methods, Shifting Contexts: Crossing Disciplinary, Cultural and Geographic Borders in Social Research."
Organized by the Graduate School of Education and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the symposium brought together scholars from law, public health, education and psychology to examine border-crossing issues and methodologies.
The conference was part of the UB 2020 emphasis on civic engagement and public policy, which is focusing university-wide intellectual strengths on understanding and finding solutions to social problems that are confronted by the community.
Slaughter began by describing a study she is working on that looks at the implications for universities if their trustees have "direct interest" in faculty members' research—and ultimately, its products.
For example, she asked, do trustees who are pharmaceutical company executives "sign up (to be board trustees) because they are interested in knowledge or do universities pick these trustees because they are in businesses that can fund, market and sell the products" that result from their faculty members' research?
Slaughter maintains there has been a tremendous increase in the "new circuits of knowledge that closely connect universities to markets," and that more university administrators have taken the view that "all forms of knowledge are commodities" in the end, creating potential tensions between them and the faculties of higher education institutions.
"All AAU (Association of American Universities) universities have some degree of systemic conflict of interest," although the connections between universities and corporations appear to be stronger in the private AAU universities, Slaughter said.
But boards of trustees are involved in policy-making, and the past decade has produced a rise in intellectual licensing, co-patenting and start-up companies policies at universities, policies that "really have to do with how to control faculty knowledge," as well as how to make a profit from it, according to Slaughter.
And although public universities may not be "connected to corporations in the same way as private universities," their participation in allowing policies to be rewritten by trustees on their boards, who accept "part-time jobs for which they are not paid" in order to gain some control over these policies, leads Slaughter to wonder "are these really public universities anymore?"
The co-author of two books on what she calls "academic capitalism," Slaughter says such practices have destabilized faculty members' traditional way of working and has caused university administrators to view professors' research findings primarily in terms of profit.
Additional help from such legislation as the Bayh-Dole Act, which permitted universities to license inventions, has further driven institutions of higher education toward focusing on potential financial gains.
In the end, according to Slaughter, this trajectory toward the marketplace in universities has led to confusion, quarrels and litigation between faculty and their workplaces. Cases such as the lawsuit that the University of Pennsylvania filed against its own professor, Retin-A inventor Albert M. Kligman, and Johnson & Johnson over ownership of the patent rights to the product—"even though he (Kligman) gave them 10 percent of the profits" made through royalties—can't help but be highly disruptive to faculty everywhere, she said.
Upon settling the lawsuit, Penn's general counsel issued a statement acknowledging that Kligman had donated substantial royalties "before this lawsuit" and that the "crux of the issue...was whether the university, rather than Dr. Kligman, had the right to control the negotiations with J&J regarding the anti-wrinkle product."
Slaughter said that such cases and the continued revision by boards of trustees and universities of policies regarding intellectual property ownership led one unnamed professor to comment that "lab animals have more protection and rights than humans" at universities.