|
« AAUP Homepage
|
University-Industry Partnerships Touted
Universities should foster research collaborations with corporations, says a report released in June by the Business-Higher Education Forum, a group formed by the American Council on Education and the National Alliance of Business. The group, composed mostly of academic administrators and corporate executives, studied the issue of university-industry collaborations for two years and concluded that such relationships are beneficial to both sides because they give corporations affordable access to academic expertise and give universities access to funding sources and industry knowledge.
"The president of a university campus should be responsible for establishing a cooperative tone toward university-industry research collaborations and should align incentives to encourage teamwork and promote research collaborations," the report states.
For some in the academic community, however, such collaborations raise a red flag. "Universities must be on guard against relationships that could compromise their public responsibilities," cautions Mark Frankel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The loss of trustworthy, disinterested advice on matters of public policy would be a high price to pay if professional judgment were to be skewed by the promise of economic reward." He adds that universities participating in industry-funded research should provide clear policies regarding publication, intellectual property, and the roles, rights, and responsibilities of faculty, students, and postdoctoral researchers.
Along with other higher education associations, the AAUP has focused its attention on issues arising from the increasingly strong relationships between corporations and universities in recent years. A report on corporate funding of academic research published in the May-June 2001 issue of Academe notes that although research universities have long collaborated with industry to their mutual benefit, collaborations have "never been free of concerns that the financial ties of researchers or their institutions to industry may exert improper pressure on the design and outcome of research. This is especially true of research that has as its goal commercially valuable innovations, which is the most common type of industry-sponsored research."
|