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From the Editor: Who Owns Your Ideas?
Lawrence Hanley
Once, professors trafficked in ideas. Now, we create intellectual property. Intellectual property is what happens to ideas once they have been converted into exclusive, saleable commodities, subject to the same legal and economic principles as any other form of property. Whether as course materials or as scientific advances, intellectual property has become important to universities because it generates money. Administrators encourage its creation because it bolsters revenue; for some entrepreneurial faculty, it represents a chance to boost their salaries or grab a bigger share of institutional resources.
The transformation of professors into intellectual property producers entails, however, some serious revision of traditional academic roles and values. For one, collaboration and sharing are the engines that drive academic research. In the “gift economy” of academia, as David Bollier describes it in his essay, individual glory is a byproduct of contributions to a community of scholars and scholarship. Converting ideas into intellectual property, on the other hand, requires the creation of toll booths and watch towers to protect revenue-generating knowledge. This privatization of communal resources can impeach the integrity of scientific research. It can also shrink the value of academic knowledge as a public good.
In his history of the AAUP’s involvement in intellectual property issues, Mark Smith underscores how the conversion of ideas into intellectual property harbors the potential for a fundamental shift in professional identity. Traditionally, faculty have held the copyrights to their work. But if, as some university administrators have argued, teaching and research are “work for hire,” then employers own the rights to work produced by employees. There’s little room for academic freedom or professional autonomy in this scheme of things.
As Siva Vaidhyanathan points out in his article, the rise of intellectual property rights also puts the university in the crosshairs of a troubling contradiction. To sustain intellectual creativity, the university nurtures a free flow of ideas and information; but to turn ideas into intellectual property, the university must restrict access to ideas and information. How can universities reconcile these two necessities? Vaidhyanathan is less than optimistic.
One way to neutralize Vaidhyanathan’s “content-provider paradox” is to reassert the core values that underwrite the university’s historic mission and our professional identities. It is this assertion that stands behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s audacious OpenCourseWare initiative. At a time when many other universities have rushed to cash in on online learning by creating for-profit spin-offs and subsidiaries, MIT announced that it would make its entire curriculum publicly available on the Internet. According to Steve Lerman and Shigeru Miyagawa, as MIT faculty and administrators developed the initiative, they began to see it as a vehicle for extending the university’s commitment to teaching, learning, and faculty expertise into new realms.
If faculty hope to reinvigorate a public commons of ideas, knowledge, and learning, they will have to deal with the fact that the profit motive may not be their only antagonist. Take the case of Terry Meyers. When the state of Virginia banned all sexually explicit material from computers used by state employees, Meyers’s university installed a series of bureaucratic locks on his access to the erotic poetry of that eminent Victorian, A. G. Swinburne. Raising issues of civil liberties and academic freedom, Virginia’s antiporn efforts also complicate the question of who will regulate access to ideas and intellectual property in the information age.
Today, when somebody asks me what I do, I tell them I’m a professor. Soon, perhaps, it will be more accurate to report that I work in the knowledge industry. Hopefully, this issue of Academe offers some alternatives to that fate.
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