Who hoards technology in the Ivory Tower?

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 for the narrative it presents for UW to attempt 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 are in brown, in square brackets.

Here is the second statement and comment:

Now. For hundreds of years universities, um, assiduously courted the title of ivory towers—ah work hard doing great research and, uh, teaching terrific students, um, all designed to do good, uh, but largely hoarding within the university, uh, the knowledge that was generated and created.

[Comment: "Ivory Tower" applied to universities appears to date from the 1930s and has seen a range of uses. Prior to being applied to universities, the phrase was applied to artists, as any place where creative types might go to be creative, disengaged from the fussy world. Early applications to universities involved faculty stepping up to fight fascism and thus leaving their places of creative work, and later, after the second world war, scientists speaking up on civic matters and not remaining isolated in their happy industrial-military-academic complex. 

That is, the Ivory Tower was not something that universities "courted" at all, and had nothing to do with universities for "hundreds of years." When "Ivory Tower" was applied to universities, it was by people calling for (or applauding) the participation of faculty in civic matters. The problem was that by not having a place to withdraw to, to remain isolated from pressures of commerce, strife among nations, competing ideologies, and the like, scientists were being drawn into political debates, and tempted to use their scientific standing to pronounce on debates that had no resolution in science--but which may very well affect, say, funding for science.

According to Shapin (linked above), by the 1970s, "the Ivory Tower was judged to be an almost incontestably Bad Place" (23)--certainly not a place that university administrators would want to be thought to inhabit. Thus, from a historical perspective, Mr. Young's account does not hold up.

But Mr. Young appears to be using the phrase in a new way, to rhetorical effect, and for this effort he does not need a knowledge of the past. Mr. Young uses "ivory tower" to mean that scientists discovered things and then somehow hoarded the knowledge, which, in Mr. Young's figure of thought, was not communicated by instruction, publication, patenting, or consulting. This is an odd thought for a university president. 

There were no accusations of university "hoarding" of discoveries in the 1960s or 70s that I know of. "Publish or perish" comes to mind, as does the oft-repeated argument that research informs instruction (and therefore tuition ought to cover research costs, too). No, if university hoarding has happened, it is the result of the misrepresentation of the Bayh-Dole Act by university administrators. These administrators argued that the Bayh-Dole Act forced university ownership of inventions made with federal support, and mandated that universities seek to "commercialize" the results, with the strong suggestion that universities should use exclusive (that is, monopoly) license strategies, as exclusive deals were so much better than non-exclusive arrangements or mere publication in "bringing research discoveries to market." If anyone is hoarding research technology, it is university administrators.

If anyone has assiduously courted the idea of hoarding, it has been university administrators. If administrators must give formal permission before anyone can practice the inventions made by faculty (and others), then if there is any hoarding happening, it is not the faculty who are doing it--at the University of Washington, the hoarders are the administration in the form of the Center for Commercialization. 

That is, Mr. Young has it backwards. The faculty, and in particular the science faculty, have long been outside the "ivory tower," making contributions to society, industry, community, but university administrations have all but forced their inventions, software, data, and business ideas back in. The administrators' actions have created a huge problem, one that is becoming apparent after three decades of technology hoarding in the hopes of making a pile of money from licensing IP rights.]