Public Engagement

I’ve been reading “Pursuing the Endless Frontier�, a collection of essays by Charles M. Vest written during his tenure as president of MIT from 1991-2004 (MIT Press, 2005). Those years were eventful ones for higher education in general and MIT—with its heavy focus on the STEM disciplines and research agendas strongly shaped by industry as well as federal funding—in particular. Vest’s ruminations on those events, and the underlying principles by which they should be understood and managed, are well worth reading.

In the public engagement/technology transfer context, I was particularly interested in Vest’s reflections from 1993-94 on the changing relations between industry, government, and research universities. In this period, he writes (pp. 75-76), such relations were rapidly changing.

As the cold war faded into history, military security as a dominant motivation for federal support of university-based research and advanced education faded with it. The challenge of the highly competitive global marketplace drove fundamental transformation of the R&D function in U.S.-based corporations. Industry generally ceased to do research with moderate or long time-frames and absorbed R&D directly into its product-development process to accelerate product cycle times and improve manufacturing quality and efficiency. Various federal policymakers and appropriators sought to focus more university research on near-term application and commercialization; policy debates raged about the relative merits of “applied research� versus “basic research�.

This turmoil gave universities a rare opportunity to respond to changing national needs and to sort out and clarify the relative roles of industry, government, and universities in funding and performing research and development. We needed to form a broad consensus that it is a necessary function of government to support the conduct of research of a fundamental and/or a long time-horizon to potential application, and to seek recommitment to the U.S. system in which universities are the primary performers of such research. The elegant system in which federal dollars do double duty—supporting the research and creating the next generation of researchers and scientific and engineering leaders—needed to be reaffirmed. Modern industry, fast-paced, innovation-driven, and globally connected, presented fascinating new intellectual challenges to engineering and management researchers. Industry and universities needed to find new ways of working in partnership, ways that would add value to each other, enhancing education and filling the developing national void in research that has medium time-horizons. While doing so, universities needed to reaffirm and adhere to basic academic values, and to establish sound and effective policies for avoiding conflicts of interest.

It’s interesting to read these paragraphs in the context of the critique by Jennifer Washburn that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Vest clearly believes that universities have a responsibility to work for the betterment of this country, and one important way of doing so is to work with industry. This is so not primarily for economic reasons, but rather because the research problems—if properly chosen—are basic and important; new areas of research and teaching are opened up; and students are given an education about the real-world issues that they’ll face when the leave the university.

In later essays Vest recurs to this topic and presents some ideas that would deal with Washburn’s worst criticisms. First, that applications of intellectual property rights should be flexible, so as not to impede basic research. Second, that more than one company from an industrial sector should be involved in university-industry collaborations. This would help to mitigate some of the biggest concerns with the deals that UC Berkeley has made, with Novartis some years ago and with British Petroleum just recently.