Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103040279
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESTER C. KROGH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Corporations are making arrangements with universities for patentable ideas and trained workers. Federal and state governments are turning to them for extension services and to develop new ideas for industry. Foreign governments and companies are reaching out to our campuses for early access to research findings and for training their students.
Many universities, in turn, are aggressively marketing an ever-broader range of services. Georgia Tech advises local businesses through its Industrial Extension Service. Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Manufacturing Engineering Applications Center develops products for subscribers. Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley maintain active industrial-affiliate programs. Similar examples abound.
Many of these arrangements provide valuable educational opportunities for college students. Yet if universities become too eager in their pursuit of new revenues, they could lose sight of their main mission - the training of the next generation. That would be disastrous not only for universities and students, but for all of us.
As Princeton President Harold Shapiro has pointed out, universities only recently have been expected to make a dollars-and-cents contribution to economic growth. Over the past eight centuries, their main product has been their graduates, who go on to influence the economy through their daily working lives, reshaping society without fanfare. The day-to-day job of education is less glamorous than campus research that wins Nobel Prizes, but it represents technology transfer at its most profound and lasting.
There are many reasons why university administrators have begun looking beyond this traditional mission and marketing new services. They are struggling with post-baby boom enrollment declines, rapidly rising administrative and facilities costs, and shrinking pools of government support. Most universities also sincerely want to help government and business make better use of good ideas developed on campus.
Nonetheless, at least some universities are now in danger of becoming victims of their own sales pitches. They endlessly cite a few notable successes - Silicon Valley in California, Boston's Route 128 and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina - as evidence of the economic leverage of their own proposals. These marketers risk becoming mercenaries if they advertise too direct a relationship between higher education and higher profits.
For professors, the pursuit of new sources of research funding may be the inevitable outgrowth of a "justify your existence" mentality. The vicious academic cycle of "publish or perish" puts pressure on them to constantly write new research proposals - or write up their resumes. This mind-set has helped make teaching careers so unattractive that U.S.-born professors are now a rarity in some disciplines, particularly in science and engineering. Teaching has taken a back seat to research because it simply doesn't pay for universities or professors. This shift away from teaching threatens to prevent our daughters, sons, employees and other students from getting full value from their education - and from our education dollars.
Make no mistake; university research is essential for generating new ideas, discoveries and technologies. But it is not a sure-fire ticket to prosperity. The openness of our university system is essential to intellectual vitality. Yet it also ensures that research findings, in many cases funded by our government, can be picked up easily by foreign companies. There is no guarantee that the benefits of university research will remain in the United States. We can be much more certain that our students - the real product of our colleges and universities - will invest their careers in our country's economy.
So as they seek to meet rising expectations with declining resources, universities should be temperate in their promises of economic return. And companies and governments must avoid raiding universities for their intellectual breakup value. We can enhance our national industrial competitiveness only with careful planning, patient effort and hard work. We should expect no magic potions from campus labs.
The real return on our personal and collective investments in universities is the career-long contributions of our graduates. We cannot put too high a value on their training, and we must not forget that the university's focus should be on people, not profit.
by CNB