University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education

by Jennifer Washburn

Overview

Our federal and state tax dollars are going to fund higher education. If corporations kick in a little more, should they be able to dictate the research or own the discoveries? During the past two decades, commercial forces have quietly transformed virtually every aspect of academic life. Corporate funding of universities is growing and the money comes with strings attached. In return for this funding, universities and professors are acting more and more like for-profit patent factories: university funds are shifting from the humanities and the less profitable science departments into research labs, and the skill of teaching is valued less and less. Slowly but surely, universities are abandoning their traditional role as disinterested sources of education, alternative perspectives, and wisdom. This growing influence of corporations over universities affects more than just today's college students (and their parents); it compromises the future of all those whose careers depend on a university education, and all those who will be employed, governed, or taught by the products of American universities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786722389
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	920 KB

About the Author

Jennifer Washburn is currently a Fellow at the New America Foundation. Formerly a Fellow at the Open Society Institute and a senior research associate for the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research Washburn writes for the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, Lingua Franca, the American Prospect, and other national magazines. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: A New Kind of Uprising at Berkeley
Chapter 2: The Lessons of History
Chapter 3: The Birth of the Market-Model U.
Chapter 4: The Republic of Science in Turmoil
Chapter 5: Are Conflicts of Interest Hazardous to Our Health?
Chapter 6: The University as Business
Chapter 7: Dreaming of Silicon Valley
Chapter 8: Paying More for Less: The Commercial Squeeze on Teaching & the Humanities
Chapter 9: The Path Forward: Protecting Our Public Patrimony

Editorial Reviews

Intellectual property, developed in the biology and electronics labs of our great universities, is being methodically transferred to industry, reports independent scholar and journalist Washburn. For the past two decades or so, she argues in her first book, institutions of higher learning have sold out the public weal for private wealth. The sciences, generally sponsored by big business, do quite well while the humanities lose in scholastic budget battles. It's not Chaucer who pays the bills. On campus, research comes before science teaching; targeted study supports corporate needs; proprietary and secret investigations are replacing platform research and shared information. Supported by federal legislation, researchers simultaneously serve two masters: their educational institutions and the mighty corporate sponsors that fund their studies. These researchers frequently have personal financial interests in the results of their often-tainted science. In exchange for cash, stock, and corporate titles, the sponsors retain important rights in the studies, including control of journal reports. Big money is involved, and no one should be surprised that virtually every college, from mighty Ivy League to little land-grant school, boasts its own active technology-transfer office, eager to provide facilities and contracts. Beside ghostwritten reports and bad mentoring, the results may include flawed protocols and fatally mistreated human test subjects. The free marketplace of information, the historic core of science, is going out of business. Instead, short-term aims clothed in proprietary secrecy are on sale (for considerable fees) with an academic imprimatur. Chaucer gives way to computerprograms and the demands of genome manipulation. Taxpayer-funded studies are subject to license fees, instead of being freely shared. While Washburn doesn't suggest that the IRS investigate the unrelated business income of tax-exempt institutions, she does advocate specific corrective actions along the lines of improved legislation and third-party oversight. A heartfelt, well-documented expose of a major rip-off that debases education in several important ways. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews