University of Washington president Michael Young gave a ten-minute talk in February 2012 at the opening of a business incubator on the UW campus. The talk is fascinating as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups to investors for UW profit. I am providing annotations to draw out the implications of the talk, in a series of posts. President Young’s talk is in purple and my comments follow in brown, in square brackets.
Here is a fifth installment:
The by-products of that are extraordinary. The by-products are jobs, are businesses, are better lives in so many different ways. Um, there are also extraordinary educational opportunities. Universities, uh, tend to do things well if they keep a very clear focus on their core missions of teaching and research and as, as, as Linden so eloquently suggested, as we draw our students into this process, they often become themselves the interface between the professors and the business community. They themselves often provide the manpower and woman power for actually creating um, uh the value-added that is necessary to really move this, this, this idea from workbench to bedside, uh to move it out into the stream of commerce are extraordinary, tremendous opportunities uh for our students and as they do that they come out much better equipped to operate in the world we are launching them into.
[Comment: The "that" in the first sentence above appears to be "a partnership with the business community that takes things out of the university into the lives of real people" (distinguished from the imaginary, imposter lives of those who work in the university). The point here is not that stuff gets out into the lives of real people, but that the university partners with investors backing startup companies holding monopoly licenses to university-owned patents and willing to pay a big upside to the university if they ever get sold to a new round of investors, and that's how things will get out. The partnering will create companies, jobs, and better lives. It's a nice thought, isn't it?
Mr. Young continues, then, with the theme that students, not faculty, are the object of attention. Students can become the "interface" between know-nothing faculty and productive speculative investors looking for a hefty return on their investments. Mr. Young goes further, however, and speculates that it is the students that create the "value-added." I am sure some students have indeed created "value-added." But so have faculty, so have research staff, so have volunteers. But strangely, those students appear not to be compensated so well as the university for their efforts, at least according to policy. The university shares its royalties with inventors, not with any old student doing "value-added" work by helping speculative investors cover their risk money.
Look at the situation carefully. Students who would be in line to receive royalties if they worked on inventive research within the university are coaxed to go work for the startup company, where they get paid a pittance and don't get any share of income for inventions they make in the startup. Maybe they get equity--but if the company fails, they have pieces of paper and, oh, loads of experience. And maybe they don't get equity, or a share of royalties--just hourly pay. Does the university have any protections in place for such students? Any way of ensuring that their academic programs are not disrupted by all that time adding value in a company to help speculative investors recover their money, and more? It would be interesting to see UW's written policy on this aspect, if UW has one.
Again, it's a nice thought, that students create the key value, and get some learning out of their efforts, and are important. But there is another word for it: exploitation. The students do the work, the inventors get a bit, and the university takes the lion's share. I can see why this would be an extraordinary educational opportunity.
A few moments earlier, Mr. Young was joking that the students were coming to the university to train the faculty. Now Mr. Young imagines that students, working with companies will learn good things, and that, not university instruction, is what the university will "launch" them out into the world with. Mr. Young may have a point. If so, Mr. Young is all but saying that the money being spent on STEM education is not worth nearly so much as students working in early stage startup companies. Perhaps the state should just give UW credit to entrepreneurs and a degree when they have logged four years in a company.]
