Given this standard, the argument in favor of closer relations between corporations and universities is fairly straightforward:
1. The development of commercial-izable technologies automatically tends to further the public interest.
2. Closer relations between corporations and universities will tend to further the development of commercializable technologies.
3. Therefore, closer relations will tend to further the public interest.
Professor Bowie presents this argument on p. 96, and it is repeated by Simeral of Du Pont (p. 114), Gray of M.I.T. (p. 122), and Schneiderman of Monsanto (p. 139). Versions of the argument are also found in the Pajaro Dunes Conference statement (p. 160), and the Ben Franklin Partnership document (p. 176).
In my view this argument is the central issue in the debate. If it is accepted, there are a number of significant problems that would still need to be addressed, including the potential conflicts of interest faced by university researchers and administrators as a result of closer connections with the corporate world, the potential threat to the unique ethos of academic life, and so on. As serious as these problems are, however, they do not call into question the institutionalization of closer business/university relations. They simply suggest as that as these interlocks increase certain safeguards must be put into place; for instance, academic researchers ought to disclose any financial interests in the outcome of their research, and strict limits ought to be put on the time the results of research can be kept secret. In this sense these matters must be regarded as of secondary importance, and I shall not address them here.
I also shall not address the second proposition in the argument. Some fear that closer ties between the corporate sector and university research will hurt the development of commercializable technologies in the long-run by leading universities to concentrate on product development. This would imply a neglect of the basic research from which so many commercializable technologies eventually spring. But as Professor Bowie notes, most corporations do not want universities to compete with them in the development of commercializable products. They want universities to limit their investigations to basic research, albeit basic research that is more targeted to areas of potential commercial relevance than hitherto has been the case. I do not see why a shift to more targeted basic research in itself will tend to lead to a slower rate of development of commercial-izable technologies in the long run. At any rate, I shall here accept the second proposition for the sake of the argument.
This leaves the first proposition. Most defenders of this thesis appear to regard it as obviously true. After all, the development of commercial-izable technologies tends to lead to economic growth, the creation of new jobs and the preservation of old ones, the fostering of new skills in the labor force, increased state revenues, and the introduction of new products to better satisfy social wants and needs. It would seem self-evident that all of this furthers the good of society as a whole. There is,however, a compelling reason why the above thesis cannot be taken as obviously true: when considering whether a development furthers the social good the social costs of this development must be taken into account along with any social benefits. This implies that the mere fact that the development of commercializable technologies has certain social benefits is in itself not sufficient to justify the assumption that this development tends to further the public interest automatically. The social costs correlated with this development must first be considered before any adequate assessment can be proposed.
What have been the social costs connected with the development of commercializable technologies in the last decades? This is an immense question, of course, and this morning I can do no more than sketch an extremely compressed account of a very complicated story. I shall limit my remarks to the characteristic technologies of the information age, information technologies. More specifically, I shall examine three of the social contexts within which information technologies have been employed. In the non-financial sector of the economy, perhaps the biggest impact of information technologies has been the ability of giant corporations to organize production and distribution on a global scale. Second, in our social world the leading market for information technologies has been the financial sector, where hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested so that trades in stocks, bonds, and currency can be made instantaneously with a few keystrokes. And, of course, information technologies have revolutionized the media that transmit information to households, bringing us cable television, satellite transmission, the internet, and so on. I would now like to describe three processes of social change connected with these three technological developments.
First, we have moved closer to being a two-tiered society. In the last decades technological developments have helped bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of power between capital and labor. With the enhanced ability to control produc tion and distribution on a global level, it has become easier for corporations to shift production from regions with relatively high wages, good benefits, and strong labor organizations to areas where wages and benefits are low and labor organizations are weak or non-existent. The result is a long-term tendency for levels of inequality to increase significantly. According to Business Week, the top 1% in the United States now owns around 18% more net wealth than the bottom 90% put together. Just below we find symbolic analysts, including the knowledge workers who develop and manage the information technologies. This twenty percent of the work force receives $1,755 billion a year in income, more than the bottom four-fifths combined. The trends affecting the remainder of society are well known: real wages that now stagnate or decline even in periods of economic expansion; a shortage of permanent jobs with the rise of part-time and temporary employment; forced overtime such that Americans now work longer hours than they did forty years ago, prior to the information age. (According to Harvard's Juliet Schor, work time has increased by 163 hours over the past decades, the equivalent of an extra month of work a year.)
Does it further the social good to move towards a world where the top twenty percent withdraw into townships and urban enclaves, with good schools and world-class health care and a vast army of private security guards to protect their ever-more privileged lifestyle, while education and health care decline for the remainder of society? Isn't there a point where levels of inequality are so great that notions such as "equality of citizenship" and "equality of opportunity" become meaningless, no matter how much lip service continues to be given to them?
Second, if in the present social the development of commercializable technologies has furthered economic inequality, it would be naive beyond belief to think that this would not effect the political realm. Concentrated economic power inevitably tends to be translated into disproportionate influence on the political process. Is there anyone who doesn't understand that the vast sums required to run for most political offices means that elected officials tend to depend upon contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations? (Note that in the 1996 election, as in previous ones, business outspent labor by 7 to 1, according to The New York Times.) Is there anyone who really believes that this dependence will not tend to lead to legislation that disproportionately favors the interests of these wealthy individuals and corporations?
More subtle is the way information technologies have played an indirect role in the erosion of popular sovereignty. Wired magazine recently published an extremely interesting interview with Walter Wriston, who reigned for 17 years as chair and CEO of Citicorp/Citibank. Referring to sites where financial capital is transferred electronically across the globe - such as the Clearing House Interbank Payments System in New York, which handles a trillion dollars a day - Wriston remarked:
What annoys governments about stateless money is that it functions as a plebiscite on your policy. There are 300,000 screens out there, lit up with all the news traders need to make value judgements on how well you're running your economy. Before the Euromarket and floating exchange rates, the president could go into the Rose Garden and make a statement about the dollar, and the world would quietly listen. Today, if the president goes into the Rose Garden and says something dumb, the cross rate of the dollar will change within 60 seconds . . . The huge volume and speed of the international financial markets has put a break on the ability of sovereign governments to do a lot of things they used to do. (October1996, 201-02)
The problem here, of course, is that these financial speculators get to decide what counts as "dumb," and this will surely include whatever goes against their private self-interest. Information technologies have in effect given them something approaching a veto power over state legislation in a manner that has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of democratic debate and decision making. The result is a social world where taxes become ever more regressive, more and more public revenues are devoted to tax breaks and subsidies for corporations, fewer and fewer revenues remain for public transportation, public education, public health care, and more and more people retreat into cynicism and indifference towards the political process. I am deeply skeptical that anyone could formulate a plausible argument to the effect that any of this furthers the public good.
Third, advances in technology have greatly increased the capacity to produce commodities. After all, the name of the game in capitalist society is to accumulate as much capital as possible within a given period of time, and this requires the production of as many commodities as possible within that period. Hyperproduction, of course, demands hyperconsumption; capital cannot be accumulated unless the produced commodities are sold. This raises at least two profound problems regarding the public good:
Ä Hyperconsumption may well generate intractable environmental problems for the human species connected with the depletion of natural resources, the emission of pollutants, and the generation and disposal of waste.Ä Hyperconsumption is also correlated with the colonization of everyday life by an immense system of corporate propaganda. Robert Lane, a sociologist from Yale, has established that once people reach a minimum level of wealth further increases in consumption are not necessarily correlated with increases in happiness. Happiness is much more a matter of job satisfaction and the quality of one's relations with family and friends. This helps explain, I believe, why Americans according to Business Week have on average 3,000 advertisements inflicted upon them each and every day, each of which has as its sub-text the demonstrably false notion that the purchase of more and more commodities will bring more and more happiness. This onslaught is so all-pervasive that we hardly notice it any more, yet from an objective standpoint it surely must count as the most extensive and intensive propaganda system in the history of the human species. (Of course no one ever admits that these ads have any effect on them, but if that is the case the men who run corporate America are exceedingly stupid, wasting billions of dollars on something with no effect. Also, a system of propaganda obviously remains a system of propaganda even if it is not one hundred percent effective.) Does it further the social good when the single most pressing issue in the development of new media technologies is how to employ them to further this propaganda system?
Countless other examples regarding the social consequences of commercializable technologies could be discussed in this context as well, from the rise of large-scale hog confinement in Iowa to the devastation inflicted upon the African-American communities twice in the twentieth century as a result of technical change (once when the mechanization of agriculture destroyed the stability of their communities in the rural south, leading to the greatest internal migration in U.S. history, and again when the automation of manufacturing destroyed jobs in the urban areas where African Americans had relocated, leaving a vacuum that has yet to be filled). But I believe that what has been said thus far is more than sufficient to establish the thesis that the development of commercializable technologies cannot be automatically assumed to further the public good.
What conclusions follow from this analysis? It is important first of all to note what does not follow. The above line of thought does not imply the neo-Luddite assertion that technical change is wrong in and of itself. Nor does the argument imply that those members of the university community who have chosen to work closely with corporations are morally bad people, or that there are not many examples of products resulting from university/business cooperation that unequivocally do further the social good. But if in the present social context there is a general tendency for commercializable technologies to further social inequality, undermine popular sovereignty, generate environmental crises, and colonize every nook and cranny of everyday life with corporate propaganda, then we ought not to assume blindly that closer university/business links is necessarily compatible with the public good.
What corporations desire is a form of socialism in which an exceedingly small level of investment allows them to leverage a vast amount of public funds, thereby displacing the financial risks associated with basic research to the public. But this is a perverse form of socialism, combining the socialization of risks, the privatization of rewards, and the imposition of profound social costs. The more university research is integrated into this perverse socialism, the more pressure will be put on the university as a place of rational inquiry. As the search for technological breakthroughs with commercial potential gathers intensity, university administrators and researchers will be more and more likely to deny any responsibility for the rationally foreseeable social results of the very technical change they foster; heightened technical rationality will be combined with more and more social irrationality. The University is in danger of becoming like the muscle bound freak with tremendously developed biceps who has let the rest of his body and mind atrophy. Corporate funds are the steroids.
There remains the question what ought to be done. Like the addict who must first admit there is a problem, university administrators and researchers must first simply admit that the development of commercializable technologies cannot be assumed to automatically further the social good. After this admission, there are a number of steps that could greatly improve matters in the short-to-medium term. Closer university/business relations should not be allowed to proceed unless they are accompanied by closer relations with other social groups. Representatives from a broad range of citizen groups must become part of the process of ensuring that university research meets social needs, including labor organizations, environmentalists, minority groups, family farmers, consumer rights organizations, and so on. These groups have a right to be part of the process of determining what university research is most compatible with the public interest. If they are excluded from this process by the university it means that power, the economic power of capital, is what really is calling the shots here, and all the talk of the public interest is no more than meaningless rhetoric.
Second, whenever any private firm benefits from University research supported - however indirectly - by public funds, they must be held to higher standards than vague promises of creating jobs and new products sometime in the future. They ought to be required to make a legal commitment to pay a livable wage, to keep the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in the 7 to 1 range we find in Japan and West Germany, to encourage work place democracy, to never use the threat of capital flight to influence state policy, to meet "best practice" environmental standards, to refrain from the most manipulative forms of advertisement, and so on. If such measures are not taken, once again it means that power, the economic power of capital, is what really is calling the shots here, and all the talk of the public interest is no more than empty rhetoric.
Finally, I cannot refrain from stating that I believe the problem of ensuring that technological research furthers the social good is ultimately intractable unless we move to a new form of community, where the indisputable advantages of market societies are retained while the vast concentrations of economic power generated by capitalist market societies are avoided. I cannot share the profoundly pessimistic view that the collapse of the Soviet model means that social evolution has ended. But that is a topic for another day.