by P.D. Lesko

I NORMALLY DON'T like to write in response to anything published in the current issue of the magazine in which my column appears. However, Brian Caterino's piece on Stanford's Office of Learning and Technology got me thinking. In particular, I'm thinking about Professors Cohen and Boyer, the scientists whose patent brought in a cool $100,000,000 to Stanford. Of course, Drs. Cohen and Boyer earned quite a bit of money from said patent. However, it's hard to look at the difference between a few million dollars and a hundred million dollars and be satisfied that these fellows weren't shortchanged (quite literally). Of course, any employee who brings in $100,000,000 dollars for her or his employer is nothing short of a rainmaker. Employers love rainmakers. Are scientists the only potential rainmakers on campus?

Let's meander over to the College of Arts and Literature and see if we can't find a few more rainmakers. Shall we begin in the English Department, with the Creative Writing program faculty? Professor Usula K. LeGuin, at the University of Washington, has been cranking out sci-fi best-sellers for years. The University could snap up her royalty checks every month and dole out a few bucks to her on a quarterly basis. And what about the other Creative Writing faculty out there? Not every one of them is an Ursula K. LeGuin, but I'm sure the $5,000 dollar paycheck for publishing a short story in, say, The Atlantic, would be of interest to any administrator with a penchant for pinching pennies. Short fiction and poetry sales can add up surprisingly fast. Let's not forget about writing grants and award money. A Guggenheim or Rockefeller award can be worth $40,000-$50,000.

Next, the Law Quad beckons, or at least it should interest the folks who want to make a buck off of intellectual property rights. Who can be sure that Harvard's professor Alan Dershowitz does all of his thinking and writing at home? Harvard should benefit from the fact that its law professors have use of the Law Library and secretarial support. Of course, there are crucial differences between the science and law faculties. The lawyers can sue. As a result, the prospect of horning in on their intellectual property rights may be not only expensive, but time-consuming. It's probably best to leave the lawyers alone.

The Writers? They say that the Pen is Mightier than the Sword. Which college is prepared to weather the storm of bad press generated when that first Fatwah goes out informing the Creative Writing faculty that the University intends to manage publishing copyrights and compensation? I'm sure writing faculty around the country would quit in protest and glut the free-lance writing marketplace before turning over their checks, writing grant money and McArthur genius grant cash to an Office of Learning and Technology. Writers would rise up in support of one and other, much like writers did when Salman Rushdie was the target of his Fatwah. Writers love oppression; hardship nourishes writers, much like matching grants nourish scientists and class action suits nourish attorneys. It's probably best to leave the writers alone, too.

So who's left? Yes, my friends, by zeroing in on the scientists, university administrators have demonstrated a classic schoolyard maneuver. They have grabbed the pencil-necked nerds and shaken them down for their patent money. Smart kids have suffered similar fates for as long as there have been pocket protectors, mechanical pencils and bullies incapable of understanding and remembering common algebraic terms. Naturally, administrators have begun with the science faculty. What, after all, will a bunch of researchers do when faced with an Act of Congress and an Office of Learning and Technology? They will submit to the humiliation, content with time and a bit of money to devote to their cerebral tasks. After all, shakedowns rarely involve the financial annihilation of the victim. Put bluntly, what is a successful "protection racket" without customers in need of "protection?" These universities collect the money generated by an individual's patent and then oversee everything, from filing the patent to marketing the patent. It is a tidy little operation, of which any bully would be proud.

To me, the more burning question is whether or not universities can be satisfied with the money generated by science faculty shakedowns? Will universities eventually attempt to manage the intellectual and creative rights of other faculty members? I think so. However, there are thousands of scientists left out there who can be bullied into turning over the fruits of their research, creativity and labor. What with the booming production of science Ph.D.s, the supply of patent-seeking nerds is virtually endless.

It's a shame, however, that college faculty in the humanities and non-science professional schools are not protesting what is being done to their colleagues in the sciences. Perhaps the other faculty suffer from schoolyard jitters. After all, there is nothing so unnerving as watching a bully shakedown a smart kid for his patent money. After all, if a bully can take away $95,000,000 dollars from a really smart kid, what's the bully capable of doing to the other kids? It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure it out.