by Mark Drozdowski

Welcome to the new age of Universities, Inc., when knowledge is a commodity to be pack- aged and marketed, professors seek only opportunities for personal financial gain, and institutions sell their brands and intellectual capital to the highest bidders. Unbridled capitalism and the lure of the market economy rule, while the education of students suffers. Universities, Inc., you see, values profits, not prophets. Chronicling this seemingly dire but certainly dyspeptic phenomenon has become a bit of a fad given the spate of new books on the topic. In Buying in or Selling Out?: The Commercialization of the American Research University, Donald G. Stein, a professor of emergency medicine and neurology at Emory University School of Medicine and a former provost, offers a collection of essays by presidents and policy analysts. As the title suggests, these essays examine the uneasy commingling of university research and corporate sponsorships.

Stein sets the tone in his opening chapter. When faculty accept corporate funding for research, he notes, their contracts often prohibit them from sharing results with the scientific community. Corporations, in other words, may own the intellectual property, or at least have first dibs on it. Academic freedom and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge for the common good take a back seat to the filling of corporate coffers and pecuniary rewards for the faculty. “Every professor involved in basic research or scholarship,” Stein writes, “eventually has to recognize that he or she is part scholar, part salesperson.”

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