The Corporatization of Academic Research: Whose Interests Are Served?

The following article is the text of a speech given at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in January 2005, which has been edited and footnoted for publication in the Akron Law Review

Review of the book [The marketing of higher education: The price of the university's soul]

[Excerpt] These commercialization trends have been the focus of recent scholarly commentary from such fields as history, sociology, education, and law. Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University and former Dean of Harvard Law School, joins the debate in his book Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, inquiring "why this [commercialization] trend has developed, what dangers it poses for universities, and how academic leaders can act to limit the risk to their institutions." Bok defines commercialization as "efforts within the university to make a profit from teaching, research, and other campus activities.' He begins his study of commercialization trends with the oldest of commercialized university activities athletics-and then expands the discussion to include more recent commercial activities that involve research and teaching

Confronting the Privatization and Commercialization of Academic Research: An Analysis of Social Implications at the Local, National, and Global Levels

Globalization and Education Symposiu

Faculty in the Corporate University: Professional Identity, Law and Collective Action

Over the past two decades, major social and legal developments have made an enormous impact on U.S. universities' core functions of research and teaching, leading to a move away from the traditional "public interest" model of the university towards a "corporate" model of higher education. Such trends toward "corporatization" include the commercialization of academic research, as universities have enthusiastically embraced federal legislation giving them the right to patent and license federally funded research results, thereby cementing university-industry ties. Universities have cut back on tenured faculty lines, which provide lifetime job security, and have instead expanded nontenure-track faculty, including teaching by adjunct faculty and graduate assistants. Universities have created for-profit corporations offering distance education courses. In each of these developments, faculty have played key roles in either promoting or resisting the changes. This article seeks to explain these responses, in two parts: first by studying the faculty's professional identity, and second, by addressing the question of whether the faculty's professional identity shapes their responses to these important changes in universities