Field Notes

"It's not about the money." When University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman said this at the annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), held in February in Phoenix, Arizona, spontaneous applause broke out across the room. It was not unanimous applause. It was more of a scattering—the sort that reveals pockets of approval for a controversial statement.

Coleman's point was that technology transfer—the process of patenting and licensing academic inventions—is not just about generating revenue. Rather, it exists to support the university's mission, and the measure of its success should be whether it helps universities generate and disseminate knowledge, educate students, and improve society. How much money technology transfer offices pass on each year to university presidents, department heads, or individual faculty members, should, Coleman argued, be a secondary issue.

In the twenty-five years since the Bayh-Dole Act explicitly encouraged U.S. universities to patent the results of federally funded research, technology transfer offices have appeared in more and more universities across the country and around the world. These offices are largely responsible for ever-higher numbers of patent applications. They also generate the kind of unrestricted funds beloved of university administrators. (Under the act, income remaining after payment of royalties to the inventor and expenses must be used "for the support of scientific research or education.") According to AUTM's annual survey of its members, academic licenses brought in over $1 billion in 2003.

Yet President Coleman was trying to turn attention away from technology transfer's impressive revenues and the perception that it exists to make universities (and faculty inventors) rich. Several prominent universities have been criticized for the kind of aggressive patenting and licensing practices more often expected of businesses. In 2002, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reflected this perception when it refused to give Duke University a research exemption for unauthorized use of an invention. The court stated that Duke's use was "in keeping with [its] legitimate business" and that the University's status as a non-profit educational institution was irrelevant. A continuing controversy over the financial conflicts of interest that can result from academic technology transfer and several recent books on the commercialization of universities have echoed these concerns. I had gone to the AUTM meeting to find out how those who actually do technology transfer react to these and other criticisms.

If the sessions and ensuing discussion at the meeting are any indication, the growing perception that universities are behaving like businesses is leading some technology transfer professionals to rethink their mission. I heard Coleman's deprecatory remark about money often repeated by panelists and attendees. Yet this kind of rethinking may be a luxury few can afford. At lunch one day, I sat next to a man who said he had been hired just a couple of years ago to start a technology transfer office at a small engineering college. When I asked him what the college's motivation was for entering the technology transfer game, he replied in one word: "Money."