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  • The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University
  • Albert H. Teich (bio)
The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University. Edited by Hans Radder. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. vi+350. $50.

The Commodification of Academic Research consists of a set of essays originally presented at a workshop held at the Faculty of Philosophy of VU University in Amsterdam in June 2007. In addition to philosophers, contributors include sociologists, a political scientist, several bioethicists, and an epidemiologist. A reader might be tempted to ask why one should use the somewhat awkward term “commodification” rather than the more common “commercialization.” The editor and workshop organizer, Hans Radder, provides an answer in the introductory chapter, noting that commodification [End Page 650] is related to commercialization, but is broader, reflecting a “long-term social development” in which “all kinds of scientific activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria” (p. 4).

Radder leaves little doubt as to how he feels about commodification, using as an introductory example a reorganization plan from his own university under which his field, philosophical research, was incorporated into two large interdisciplinary institutes. The university administration apparently overruled faculty opposition based on the nature of philosophical inquiry in favor of the plan, which it felt would attract more external research funding. The book does not pretend to be a balanced discussion of the influence of economic criteria on the academic world. Most of the authors are sharply critical of commodification, believing it is harming the university and needs to be regulated.

Mark Brown of California State University, Sacramento, writes of “Coercion, Corruption, and Politics in the Commodification of Academic Science,” stating “that university-industry partnerships fail to generate widespread public benefits” (p. 259) while corrupting not just individual researchers but the entire university. David Resnik, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, catalogs the various ways in which private money can affect the norms of science—leading researchers to “cook” or “spin” their data or sometimes to falsify it completely. Unlike Brown, however, he feels that keeping external financial interests (both commercial and governmental) out of universities is neither realistic nor desirable and suggests strategies for living with them “as best we can” (p. 85).

While the stated focus of the book is on academic (i.e. university) research, some authors interpret the concept rather broadly. A chapter on “One-Shot Science” by James Robert Brown of the University of Toronto presents an extended epistemological critique of evidence-based medicine and randomized clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical firms and physicians in clinical practice, rather than at universities. In the end Brown calls for putting all of medical research into “public hands” (presumably the government) and eliminating all intellectual property rights in this field (pp. 106–7). While this radical prescription would have far-reaching effects on universities, Brown’s argument is based mainly on problems he sees occurring in settings outside of academia. Similarly, the chapter by Albert Musschenga, professor of philosophical ethics at VU University, and two colleagues on “The Business of Drug Research” also seems only tangentially related to the book’s central theme. Musschenga is concerned largely with what he and his colleagues regard as “the dominance of drugs within medical treatments, especially mental disorders” (p. 122). He calls for curtailing the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical practice—arguably a good idea, but a bit off-topic for what might be expected from this book. [End Page 651]

Some chapters are clearly aimed at an audience of philosophers and will mean little to readers in other fields. University of Warwick (UK) philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller’s “Capitalism and Knowledge” is the most extreme example of this, demanding that one cope with terms such as “epistemic racism,” “transcendental subjectivity,” and “indigenization of knowledge” (pp. 278, 281).

Daniel Lee Kleinman’s chapter on “Commercialization of Academic Culture and the Future of the University,” on the other hand, provides a readable antidote to some of the more abstruse parts of the book. Kleinman, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes how deeply rooted and pervasive...

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