The Kept University

            Is it necessarily a bad thing that professors at research universities are being pressured to think more like entrepreneurs? The article seems to side against the entrepreneurial spirit because it takes away the “no cost” free-experimentation side of higher education. But we must realize that people respond to incentives. If there is a demand for a product that can result in a significant profit, then a professor is more likely to focus on making that product. It will serve him well to contract the brightest minds, the best resources, and conserve the most money then if there was no financial incentive. There are plenty of positive reverberations that result from the entrepreneurial professor. Companies will spawn in hopes of creating their own product and patent. The competition will increase, and for some time, the monopolistic prices will remain high, and consumers will pay that price. But when the patents expire, not only will the world’s citizens have access to drugs we find valuable, but prices will drop do to the influx of generic reproductions. If we are going to accuse pharmaceutical companies of being misplaced in universities, we have to think about the cost imposed on us if we forbid them from connecting with high-learning institutions. Can we live without the drugs they invent? Is the high commission earned by the innovator well-deserved? The entrepreneurial sprit has been a defining factor the United States since its founding. Why should we criticize it now? Is the argument to keep Corporations out of Education similar to the argument for keeping Church out of state? Can we conclude that the sphere of the corporation and the sphere of education are distinct entities and should never cross paths? I think not. There are certain negative externalities of the corporation in the university that we are considering (research focused professors, lawsuits, high-drug prices, corporate leverage etc) but there are always plenty of positive things that result from the combination of what might be considered Americans greatest strengths: the corporation and the university.

Just because education is a useful instrument in attaining business-oriented goals, does that mean that those goals are not consistent with what is good for man? If we are sacrificing a well-rounded, liberal arts education, is that a bad thing? While studying humanities such as classics will enable one to be a good democratic citizen, political, and knowledgeable, studying, for instance, dead languages or ancient philosophy will rarely result in anything profoundly beneficial to the human race. The principle idea of natural sciences is to understand new ways of looking at us and to make advances in that knowledge by way of technology and innovation. If you forget for a moment the money involved, the product of biotech research is almost always a direct benefit to us. Can the same be said for a scholar of classical literature? There is of course inherent value studying humanities, but can we condemn technology and innovation for stealing the spotlight—the same light that classics have commanded for hundreds of years?

When professors have commercial acumen, does that set a bad example for the students? I think a professor’s first and foremost obligation is to teach her students about the subject in which she is an expert. But beyond that, a professor who showcases an appetite for innovation and originality may be encouraging and beneficial to her students.

Is that not what education is all about: not just acquiring a certain set of knowledge, but stepping beyond that and learning to think for yourself? It just so happens that many innovations in the science world are commercially valuable. And while that probably is the primary interest of professors conducting biotech research, the students and the society at large benefit from the commercial acumen of the professor. It goes to show that education is not a preset course in which you digest and spit back humdrum information, but instead, it is a process that provides you with the tools needed to understand deeper meanings, and to make advancements and original conclusions.