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Marketing Science, Marketing Ourselves
The quest for external funding dominates academic science. But today's scientists should think about pledging allegiance to traditional academic values.
By David C. Montgomery
Many years ago, I was summoned to lunch by a dean. (That was in another country, and, besides, the man is dead.) I was then a newly hired physicist who had shown a modest aptitude for raising academic research grants from the government, and he wanted my opinion on the future potential for government support of academic research. He had heard that the game was about over, and that such opportunities were becoming increasingly limited. I told him that although funds might be in a trough at the moment, the possibilities were bound to pick up, because the Cold War was still being energetically prosecuted.
I don't know if my views helped to mold his opinion, but something converted him. He became an enthusiast of external funding and took the campus with him. At that institution today, the ability to secure not only government grants but also corporate support is an important qualification for admission to professorial life, as is skill at developing for-profit "spin-offs." I am told that discussions of faculty hiring and promotion frequently do not delve deeply into the details of a candidate's research or scholarship, but rather cut immediately to the person's success at the chase after external money. Student teaching evaluations also receive attention—with an emphasis on consumer satisfaction. To discuss anything else is naïveté, bad manners, or proof of a lack of seriousness.
Some have suggested that this transmutation of values has spread throughout American universities. Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie make an impressively detailed case in favor of this argument in their 1997 book, Academic Capitalism. Academe devoted its September-October 2002 issue to the closely related topic of who owns the intellectual property rights to and benefits from research paid for by external agents, corporate or governmental. Probably every reader of this magazine knows from personal experience how much influence a successful professor-entrepreneur who can pay some bills wields, and how much such a person can affect the agenda, values, and style of an academic department. It would be redundant to develop in any more detail how willingly (or how quietly) the American university is surrendering its insistence on the primacy of values unrelated to the marketability of a "product," whether that be a research paper or a graduate. And this transformation has happened quickly—in less than one long academic lifetime (mine).
During this process, relatively few heavy-handed violations of academic freedom of the kind that the AAUP has so persistently resisted over the decades have occurred. Usually, no one is told what not to teach, what not to think, or what conclusions to reach. Cases that lead to placement on the AAUP's list of censured administrations can seem almost pleasingly classical and simple by comparison with the genteel coercions involved in pursuing government- or corporate-sponsored research. Perhaps we should be thankful that relationships with external sponsors have held out mostly carrots and few sticks. But from the point of view of one whose academic values were fixed forty or fifty years ago, it can seem sad and also remarkable that the once jealously guarded autonomy of the university has been so easily purchased.
Is this the end of the story, then? Perhaps, but I hope not. We need to ask whether we really want or need to proceed further down the market-driven path. Is some implacable economic mechanism forcing us to do so—is the deck stacked? Or is there something in the classical nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century model of the university in America, or the older European antecedents from which it evolved, that might be worth reverse-engineering or breeding back to? What assumptions underlay the earlier model, and do they have any validity for us now?
This article is too short to treat such questions comprehensively, but it isn't too short to suggest some answers. Unfortunately, mine may invoke values and beliefs that lie outside the acceptable academic vocabulary of 2003.
Enthusiasm for the pre-Cold War model can probably not be justified in utilitarian terms or explained as a consequence of economic forces; it may rest on nonfalsifiable hypotheses or even simple aesthetic preferences. But two ideas behind the enthusiasm can be stated in an uncomplicated way: (1) the primary obligation of a university is to acquire, develop, transmit, and protect knowledge in a sensitive and inclusive way, and (2) no one, not even those actually doing the intellectual work, can know in advance to what future humane or inhumane use that knowledge may be put, if any. The responsibility for applying the knowledge lies elsewhere, and it is the academic's job to follow his or her own instincts about what to look at next. Two corollaries are (1) those directly engaged with acquiring and transmitting knowledge are the sole best judges of where and how to invest their own efforts, but (2) they are obligated to separate rigorously their role as researcher or scholar from their equally legitimate roles as citizen, advocate, or consumer. Using the privilege of determining where best to invest one's effort to accumulate wealth, either for oneself or for a corporate sponsor or partner, has no legitimacy under this model. The academic's role in the historically privileged community of higher education is inherently unprivatizable, whether a person gets a paycheck from the public or the private sector: to privatize the role is to destroy it, by robbing the academic of the authority needed to be taken seriously. For the same reason, the magazine Consumer Reports does not accept advertising. Who would believe it if it did?
This formulation presupposes loyalty to a frame of mind, or style, that transcends national boundaries and ethnic or class allegiances. It demands sacrifices and also provides great satisfactions to those attracted to it. It is a bit subversive of any established authority. And it leads to a credibility that is, literally, not to be purchased at any price.
I am not saying that academics are or should be free of human failings. The competitive, often trivial, struggle for status, prestige, and deference to the quality of one's work is a daily fact of life in any university that is not totally somnolent. Universities have always been full of people who achieve nice results for not very nice reasons.
I realized years ago, when I worked temporarily in an industrial laboratory that aspired to an academic atmosphere and output, how minor the distinctions can be that will motivate researchers in such an environment to compete furiously with one another: for example, a private toilet, two paintings on the office wall rather than one, a small rug on the floor. Contests over such items would have been a joke at the corporation's headquarters, where the stakes were higher. But someone had understood that when researchers pursue a subject seriously, it does not take fortunes to motivate them, only a genuine interest in the quality of their output. That the minor distinctions were competed for so intensely reflected a recognition that they were well correlated with quality research. The result was that even in this industrial lab, the researchers' findings acquired tremendous credibility, in academia and elsewhere.
We have inherited a legacy of credibility that may not last much longer if we proceed in the directions we are going. European professors have been revered for at least two centuries; their positions are among the most respected in society. Their American counterparts have been treated with less deference, but even when Hollywood B movies have portrayed academics as absent-minded or socially maladroit, they still usually come across as principled and trustworthy in their areas of expertise.
In short, professors have maintained credibility because most have remained out of the big game by choice. It is difficult to imagine this level of believability being awarded to a politician, a lawyer, or a corporation executive, let alone a car salesman. Wearing the same leather-patched tweed coats every day and driving ancient automobiles (symbols of many of my professors of the 1950s) went with the territory—that of truth telling and the willingness to forgo personal short-term profit as a result of being able to do so.
The present rush on university campuses to channel faculty time and energy toward pursuing marketable products for corporations, or new weapons for government agencies or the military, endangers that credibility. It seems to me sheer folly to blur deliberately the distinctions between, say, an industrial engineering laboratory (which seems, by the way, a wholly proper and legitimate institution) and a university science department. They may look the same on the outside (though they shouldn't), but if they are functioning correctly, what they are after is totally different. Similar distinctions can undoubtedly be drawn between a think tank and a political science department, or an advertising agency and an art department.
We may decide that the creature comforts and access to high places gained by selling the university's traditional capabilities are worth it. But we should not delude ourselves that the final price will not be much higher than has been paid thus far when the bill is presented. When the sole value of anything we do is measurable only in dollars, we will be just like everybody else, scrambling in the economy for what they scramble for and having no more credibility than they do when we step up to sell ourselves to the rest of society.
It is natural to look for the reasons behind the sudden pressure to "marketize" academia. Is there a difference between that pressure and corresponding efforts to privatize, say, drinking water management, Medicare, elementary education, or news broadcasting? Maybe not. When a society lets market values take over as its guide to life, perhaps its leaders feel threatened by any remaining institution that does not concede that the market has the answers to all questions of resource apportionment.
If that is what is occurring, should we be any more exercised about what is happening to academia than to any other area of social activity? For us, the answer would seem to be yes. Yes, because higher education is something we know about and for which we are responsible. We may evade responsibility for the state of drinking water by saying that we do not know enough details to feel confident in our judgment about drinking-water supply mechanisms. But we do know about research and education, and we are responsible for them, if anyone is. We have the standing and a special obligation to "just say no" to further marketization of academia, if anyone can. Sometimes, whole campaigns can be greatly influenced by what happens in local theaters.
David Montgomery is A. Kelvin Smith Professor of Physics at Dartmouth College.
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