The Institutional Pressure to Become a Professor-Entrepreneur

Abstract

The pressure on faculty has continued to escalate to produce, that is to bring money into the university. The Bayh-Dole Act came with a requirement to submit any novel idea as a patent application. While not enforceable as a regulation, this guidance to professors, along with funding opportunities from companies, state seed funding for companies and small business categories of federal funding have pressured faculty to think like entrepreneurs. However, the culture of the university has not adapted. The administration is still reaping the benefits of tax-exempt status, near-immunity from lawsuits, while maintaining an illusory Ivory Tower status. To keep the best of both worlds, university administrators have insulated themselves from the problem of research ethics. They do what they are required to, but many cases are dismissed without an inquiry. Can the majority of cases really be frivolous allegations? There is no doubt that the pressures to seek funding are taking a toll on faculty and affecting the ethical climate. Universities have focused on productivity above all else and since the federal regulations have put them in charge of adjudication, there is a brewing crisis.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite – that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

– Mark Twain, Letter to Helen Keller, 1903