The Content-Provider Paradox: Universities in the Information Ecosystem

For universities, the quest to make ideas profitable reveals unexpected contradictions.

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

The university is the conscience of the culture, the most important institution in Western civilization, yet it is failing, and failing in too many ways, in its shattered course system, its dubious and sometimes immoral uses of learning, the political uses of its status and resources, its oppressions of the freedom of the minds, many of its professors becoming researchers, profiteers, and malingerers, its graduates specialized, uneducated, and angry. Serving special interests and special people, the university is becoming the students’ orphanage. . . . like our regulatory agencies, elections, and political parties, the university has been penetrated and overwhelmed by the money culture.

So wrote Ronnie Dugger in his 1974 book, Our Invaded Universities. It was an in-depth examination of how industry—particularly the oil industry—corrupted my alma mater, the University of Texas. He was not the first nor the last Cassandra to warn about the increasing commercialization of higher education.

But with the recent rise of powerful information technology and the widespread belief in its transformative power and inevitable profitability, universities are undergoing changes that Dugger could not have imagined. They are not, however, being corrupted by some outside agent exercising force over them. Instead, they have become eager accomplices in their own corruption. As Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn point out in their March 2000 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Kept University,” we have yet to come to terms with the extent to which such a commercial orientation renders higher education incapable of fighting for the public interest when it comes to intellectual property and information policy.

As universities establish information policies ranging from blocking peer-to-peer file-sharing systems to licensing course Web sites, they make political decisions that have effects beyond the walls of their campuses. Universities are steadily abandoning their role as national parks in the information ecosystem in favor of changing themselves into “content providers.” They have focused too many resources on producing software, services, and information resources that they hope will be marketable. If universities continue along this path, they will soon find their role as sources of research and teaching taxed and limited. The financial and ethical costs of acquiring and using the “raw material” of teaching and research will surpass any benefits universities will generate.

The position of universities as “content providers” has already prevented them from standing up to some overwhelming threats to their operations, specifically the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which severely shifts the balance of copyright policy from public to private interests and enables a new technocratic regime of information regulation. Not coincidentally, since September 11, 2001, few presidents of major universities have stood up to defend the virtues and practices of basic science and research and the free flow of information in the face of panic-fueled governmental restrictions on libraries, scientists, and foreign scholars. The American research university is being held captive and mute, afraid of disturbing the interests on which it increasingly depends.

Knowledge for Sale

“Some of our professors think we should just give it all away, that it should be completely open,” said the university official.

“I just don’t understand that business model,” replied the software engineer.

The second occurred on a commuter flight from Detroit to Ottawa, Ontario, in spring 2001. Two young Canadian business executives were seated next to each other. One had just read a magazine article about the patenting of human genes and was describing the issues to his friend.

“I just don’t understand how these people think they can get away with owning everything,” the friend responded.

These two contrasting conversations reveal the different ways people in and outside of the “content community” view the politics of information ownership. In the first exchange, openness is seen as tantamount to “giving away” something of value. The second shows that people outside the knowledge economy sense that just because something can be fixed and represented does not mean it should be assigned a deed or a price tag.

The prevailing notion within the content-producing community—that if protection is appropriate in some cases, it is justified in all cases—comes from the very top. In the rapidly globalizing information economy of the Clinton years, it was hard to defend the value of quaint notions such as sharing, an information commons, or even fair use.

Bruce Lehman, former assistant secretary of commerce and commissioner of patents and trademarks in the Clinton administration, gave a speech last spring in Madison, Wisconsin, which is undergoing a bit of a boom these days. Unemployment is almost nonexistent. Housing prices are rising steadily. Biotechnology companies are sprouting around the town. In his speech, Lehman derided the value of fair use and other leaks in the information regulatory system. He credited the remarkable growth in Madison and other American university towns to the recent changes in patent and copyright laws that grant confidence to entrepreneurs who seek to capitalize on the commercialization, digitization, and distribution of knowledge.

Lehman sees the radical strengthening and expansion of methods of information regulation as a solution to what ails not only the American economy, but universities as well. According to this view, universities should be partners in the effort to capitalize on the knowledge economy. Lehman and others argue that to forge this partnership and create the incentives necessary to maximize the returns of the information industry, we must create and enforce artificial scarcity through legal, technological, and cultural means.

But what Lehman did not recognize, perhaps did not consider, is the notion that information cities—Madison, Austin, Palo Alto, Rochester, Cambridge, Chapel Hill—might grow because of the “leaks,” or the free flow of information, rather than in spite of them. In information-rich communities, it can be the diner gossip, the barroom conversation, the borrowed book, and the prevailing mood that generate really great ideas. Creativity happens in the unregulated, organic, spontaneous interactions among connected people. That’s why university towns are creative places. If not for the value of these organic leaks and flows of information, then we could all be creative and profound merely by paying a subscription fee to “stream” information at our computer terminals at isolated corners of the Earth. The universities that incubate knowledge depend on that free flow of noncommercialized information to live and breathe themselves.

Academic Entrepreneurship

Unmindful of the long-term cost of aiding such closed information systems, universities themselves have come under the seductive sway of an ideology of academic entrepreneurship. Having lost a sense of mission and duty, they do not recognize that the content-provider paradox binds and limits them over the long term. The effects of academic entrepreneurship are most easily seen in the area of distance education.

Merrill Lynch analyst Daniel McGinn reported in “Biz Men on Campus,” published in October 2000 in a special edition of The Industry Standard, that Americans spend a total of $810 billion annually on “training and education,” making it second only to health care among U.S. industries. Not long ago, public funding and nonprofit organizations supported most educational ventures. But the demand for training and education has always outstripped the ability of the public and nonprofit sectors to provide it. Last year, according to McGinn, for-profit educational companies took in $96 billion. Of that, only $500 million came from online services. But just about everyone in the business anticipates this proportion to grow. McGinn predicted in his article that the online sector would grow at 55 percent a year. By 2003, he estimated, the online market will be worth $7 billion.

Much of the growth will come from nations such as China and India, where demand for higher education far exceeds supply. Within the developed world, corporations seeking specialized worker training offer a lucrative market. In addition, states such as Maine and Alaska, with dispersed populations underserved by the traditional campus model of instruction, have invested in distance education efforts within their state university and community college systems.

The tie between distance education and academic entrepreneurship is best exemplified, however, by Columbia University’s efforts, which differ from those of other institutions, not only in their brand name but in their model and ambitions. For example, Columbia is engaged in multiple online entrepreneurial ventures and has formed partnerships with several for-profit online companies. Some of Columbia’s online programs offer degree plans. Most do not.

Most significant, Columbia has joined a consortium with the British Library, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, the Rand Corporation, the Smithsonian, and others to create Fathom.com, which does not offer degree plans or remedial or vocational classes. It is boutique learning. It features essays on various subjects and reference resources, garnering revenue through links to commercial artners. It boasts of “free access” with registration to all of its “knowledge content,” yet charges about $500 for each full-length online course that carries academic credit.

So Columbia is extending its “brand name” into cyberspace as a way to generate revenue. But at what cost? What are the restrictions Fathom puts on its content? Fortunately, the restrictions are not too onerous yet. From the terms and conditions section of Fathom’s Web site <www.fathom.com>.

Restrictions on Use of Materials.

The contents of the Fathom Sites are protected by copyright and trademark laws, and are the property of Fathom and any and all other owners. Unless we give you express written permission, you may access the materials located on the Fathom Sites only for your personal use. This means you may download one copy of uch materials on a single computer for personal, noncommercial use only, so long as you neither change nor delete any author attribution, trademark, legend or copyright notice. When you download copyrighted material you do not
obtain any ownership or other rights in that material.

Except as stated above, without our prior written consent you may not otherwise modify, copy, publish, display, transmit, adapt or in any way exploit the content of the Fathom Sites. . . . If permission is granted by us and by all other entities owning or holding such an interest, you may not change or delete any author attribution, trademark, legend or copyright notice.

You must abide by all additional copyright notices or other restrictions contained in any of the Fathom Sites.

Links. . . . Other sites may link to any of the Fathom Sites through only a plain-text link. Permission must be granted by us for any other type of link to the Fathom Sites. . . . We reserve the right, however, to rescind any permission granted by us to link through a plain-text l ink or any other type of link, and to require termination of any such link to any of the Fathom Sites, at our discretion at any time.

Information or Commodity?

Schiller’s distinction points to a question central to the content-provider paradox: does the commodification of information necessarily diminish its value as a resource, or as a raw material, for nonmarket social functions such as public education or democratic deliberation? His observation is important in that it lets us view information transactions through political economy. But it is not sufficient to make sense of the “new information economy” and the role of universities in it, because one factor does distinguish information from other resources and commodities: its inexhaustibility. When I share information, I do not lose it. Nor does its value necessarily erode as I share it. In fact, sometimes it increases in value.

By “value” I mean nonmarket as well as market worth. To ensure the market value of information, one must create scarcity. We generally use laws, contracts, and technology to foster scarcity. That is the crux of the paradox: universities must use information as a resource. And they are choosing to use information as a commodity. To accomplish the second task, they are threatening the first. Columbia has chosen to privilege the commodity model. MIT has chosen to favor the resource model.

We need one more distinction to explain Columbia’s actions. Not only has Columbia University failed to see the nonmarket value of information, it—like much of the university community—also consistently seems to conflate education with information. To put it bluntly, information is raw data. It’s stuff. Unless and until it’s commodified, it is usually free and easy to get.

Education, however, is performance. It’s expertise. It’s humane. It’s challenging. It’s loving. It is a function of relationships, trust, patience, opportunity, and environment. The information one gets from Columbia University is available everywhere. The education one gets from Columbia is rare—naturally scarce. Some people choose to go six figures in debt to obtain it. Regardless of Merrill Lynch’s predictions, few people seem willing to pay $500 for text on a Web site, and Fathom still seems to be struggling to define its market and delivery model.

This apparent lack of enthusiasm for purchasing information online makes the controversy over the “control of content” seem irrelevant. Faculty members have voiced much consternation about the claim that universities “own” the content of online courses as works made for hire. Faculty, understandably, do not want to set a dangerous precedent. Many of us earn outside income by writing and publishing. If universities consider our Web pages “works made for hire” instead of “ publications,” we risk the portability of our courses and potential reward for our efforts in designing them.

But in fact, we do not. Copyright law does not generally regulate facts, data, ideas, or incidental performance. And that’s what teaching is all about. If a university thinks it is going to make money off my course outline, my collection of links, and my take-home exam questions, it is sadly mistaken. No one is. They aren’t worth much. People pay for my jokes, my smile, and my wisdom. They don’t pay for the information in my head. After all, most of it came from the relatively open information ecosystem we all have learned to exploit, if not acknowledge.

Nonetheless, we are witnessing a “mad rush” to commodify education, and this rush will have some pernicious results. Until faculties across the curriculum unite to discuss their common interest in maintaining affordable, open access to information, universities will increasingly collude with and act like mere “content providers.” And they will no longer be universities.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University and the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, published in 2001.

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