Friends! Canuckistanis! Countrymen!
Lend me your… (er, you know, I’ve always found that metaphor a bit gross, so let’s just keep your ears on the sides of your heads where they belong, shall we?). But for the love of Beelzebub could you please make up your Zarking minds! Do you want universities to be an independent source of well founded information on societal issues? Or would you prefer that universities shill for a buck on the business model just like everybody else? I’ve heard the stirring speeches. I’ve read the noble mission statements (note however, that I haven’t drunk any Kool Aid since I was in 8th grade). "Universities are the brain trusts of society, serving the public interest with scholarly gravitas." Or noises to that effect. You seem to want that. I sense the weariness and mistrust of the lobbyists, and the PR flunkies. And the ad men – don’t get me started on the ad men. You seem to feel a great thirst for unbiased information. For reasoned analysis. For (to use the populist phrase) ‘straight shooting’.
And we’re here for you. Really. I mean where can you turn for solid info on the toxicology of hamster effluent? Industry groups? Who is going to give you the straight goods on the role of Hamster capitalism in precipitating the crash of 1929? A Think Tank? Most of my colleagues would like nothing more than to tell the world what they know about these subjects. Because we want you to actually know. Because we think democracy works better when people know and not just think they know.
(You know, now that I think of it, maybe I did drink a little Kool-Aid back in grad school.)
There was a case here in Canuckistan a few years back. Doctor at BigCentral R1 down in Trawna was working on a new drug, and her research was funded by Big Pharma. Her data showed it had nasty side effects. She went public. Big Pharma went ballistic. Yadda yadda Much nastiness etc. but in the end she won, and I think most people see her as a minor hero. Because she gave society the straight poop. That’s what a publicly funded university does.
So why in the name of the Great Green Arkleseisure do you keep insisting that universities have to pay their own way? Why the steady drip drip drip of Op-Ed pieces telling us the system is broken? That there’s no more fee ride. That we need to be self supporting. That we need to be businesses. Or partner with businesses. Or work for businesses. Every time I turn around, funding for ‘pure’ research is being cut and ‘re-aligned’ to some sort of public private partnership (PPP) or research partnership program (RPP) or some other form of PeePee (I’m sorry. I’m a little worked up. Awful joke. I beg your pardon). It’s no longer enough for scholars to do solid research into meaningful questions. Now we have to have ‘end users’, ‘stakeholders’, and Zarquon only knows what all else besides. And always the stakeholders are defined not by their membership in our democratic society, but by their willingness to pony up big buckets of cash.
And I suppose we can go that route if you want. Most of us would rather pound our testicles (or other bits) flat with a hammer. But then again, most of us are smart cookies. We could probably turn a buck in the free market. I suppose I could get into bed with GerbilCo, or GlaxoSmithHamsterPartz, or whoever else and make out OK. So why not make it a free market? We’ll all just do whatever makes the most moolah. That way (so the libertarian whackoffs tell us) universities will end up doing the most valuable research possible, because by definition the most valuable research is whatever someone is willing to shell out the biggest bucks for. And we could make a lot more dough than we make now, if we switched to doing something other than providing solid, unbiased info to a stingy and ungrateful citizenry.
See, here’s the thing. Proffies can only go up against Big Pharma when they aren’t dependent on Big Pharma. When they have a modest but secure position at a publicly funded university. If you want us to earn our money from Big Pharma (or GlobalCorp, or whatever), then they become the boss.
Not you.
So you see gentle reader and fellow citizen, if you want Universities to have ‘customers’, then you have a choice to make. Either you are going to pony up the funding through your democratically elected representatives, and actually be the customer. Or you are going to sit down and shut up and let us get on with serving the interests of someone who is. I know which one of those I’d prefer.
How about you?
I remain etc.
Rosencrantz A. Guildenstern
Department of Hamster Husbandry
University of Tuktoyaktuk
PREACH IT, BROTHER, PREACH IT!!!
ReplyDelete-J
Word.
ReplyDeleteAmen.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the humanities, and there's nobody interested in funding those. Anywhere.
There was a really interesting article in the New Yorker recently about Stanford's affiliation w/Silicon Valley (and the fact that it makes some of the folks there uncomfortable). Granted, Stanford is private, but the article raises some of the points you're talking about.
If interested: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta
I feel your pain.
DeleteI haven't read the NYer article, but it seems to me that universities (in Canuckistan -- for American English, press "1") have bought into this devil's bargain. Business is interested in cheap R&D -- and we provide it. Business wants something that can be sold today, not the pure research that may produce benefits in years to come.
OTOH, every year, business complains about the lack of basic literacy and reasoning skills amongst recent graduates. Yet, has anyone in English or Philosophy received funding from major corporate donors?
One thing that universities could do is to assert its traditional values and goals in its negotiations with business, so that, for example, of the $Bajillion dollars Worldwide Widgets wants to donate, 25% will be slated for the traditional disciplines that form the foundation of the university. But of course, that won't happen.
I'm afraid I do write from a STEM perspective, and our main funding agency is definitely pushing the 'serve business' school of scientific value. And admin has bought in. One of our Adminflakes even went so far as to suggest that if we don't increase the regional GDP, 'we've failed in our mission." BAAAARRRFFFF!
DeleteAs you can perhaps guess, I've been testdriving "Dear X, Please make up your Zarking mind" as a new schtick (similar to Hiram and being baffled). I've got one simmering for future deployment asking business whether they really want us to train their future employees or not.
Amen. And of course this is at least equally true south of the Canuckistani border.
ReplyDeleteThe other (and, I think, related) issue that those of us who teach students to evaluate sources (which should be most of us, methinks) are going to have to face is that there's both more and more good, peer-reviewed work published directly to the web (in part as a reaction against the tendency of for-profit database companies and publishers of some academic journals to try to profit outrageously on their products), and more pseudo-academic, poor-quality, only nominally peer-reviewed (the problem, of course, is who qualifies as a peer, and what qualifies as review) work being published in newly-founded academic "journals," some of which seem to have made their way into the commercial databases (but not as yet, so far as I've seen, the ones from scholarly presses). These are both results of the commodification of "scholarly sources," which has been fed in large part by our (librarians' and professors') entirely well-intentioned attempts to teach "information literacy" in a fast-changing landscape. Instead of telling students to "use the library databases" (which is beginning to make me feel like a shill for corporate publishing interests), we're going to have to teach them to understand how knowledge is made, reviewed, edited, etc., etc., and how to judge the quality of both journals (of which they're barely aware, if at all) and databases (with which they're much more familiar). In a way, I find this an exciting prospect, but it's also daunting. Thoughtful curators of collections of information sources (i.e. good librarians willing to question the commercial pitches they, like doctors and nurses and pretty much every other professional these days, receive) will continue to be in demand.