Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine by Elizabeth Popp Berman (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine by Elizabeth Popp Berman
Academic research is feeling the crunch. National Institutes of Health funding has steadily decreased since 2009, and it appears that grant funds will continue to decrease by 1.6 billion next year (Troop, 2013). To compensate for these losses, many institutions are pursuing grants from private industry, and the pressure is on for researchers to produce patentable discoveries to help bring in revenue for their institutions. While commonplace now, in the 1950s industry partnerships and patenting were considered to be in conflict with the spirit of scientific discovery. What caused this change?
In Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine, Elizabeth Popp Berman investigates the historical events that led to the commercialization of academic science and technology research, and how market logic grew to dominate the field of academic science.
She thus joins the ongoing debate on the role of private industry in academic research. Some stakeholders argue that patenting is in tension with scientific ideals such as open communication and the public good. Institutional affiliates, from students to trustees, may also have negative reactions to institutional engagement in market activity. Additionally, commercialization can distort research agendas, lead to conflicts of interest, and encourage a secrecy that is detrimental to scientific progress.
Proponents of industry partnerships, however, claim that the market can maximize the impact of research knowledge by bringing discoveries into wider use. They also feel that financial rewards are appropriate for scientists, and that scientific innovations contribute to economic development. Berman clarifies that her intent is not to settle this debate. Instead she strives to illuminate the historic events that led to the rise of market logic in academic science by dissecting academic sources, government policies, media sources, and institutional documents. By thoroughly examining three practices closely associated with this shift—faculty entrepreneurship in the biosciences, the patenting [End Page 188] of university inventions, and the creation of university-industry research centers—Berman shows us how academic science moved to the market.
Berman grounds her study in institutional logic theory (Friedland & Alford, 1991), an organizational studies theory developed to explain how broader belief systems in an organization affect how actors in the organization think and act. Berman argues that within the institution of academic science, the logic of science, or the belief that the search for knowledge has intrinsic value, was gradually surpassed by market logic—the belief that the worth of science stems from its economic value.
Conventional wisdom states that universities became more involved in the marketplace when budget cuts forced them to search for alternative funding and industry engaged universities to perform the more basic research it was no longer conducting. However, Berman argues that universities changed their relationship with the market for two other reasons. The first is that the government encouraged universities to treat academic science as an economically viable product and incentivized institutions to engage in small-scale market-logic activities through a series of policy shifts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second is that the basic concept that scientific and technological innovation serves as drivers of economic growth spread throughout the policy arena and eventually universities’ own understanding of their role in the economy.
In Chapter 2, Berman sets the stage for this shift by describing the relationship between academia and the market during the Golden Era of higher education. During the post-World War II expansion, academic science was seen as an economic resource, a base of knowledge that industry could draw from, and the logic of science was strong in academia as it strove to meet the nation’s needs. The fame of the Manhattan Project led to abundant federal funding for the sciences and, for the first time, made academic science thoroughly dependent on federal funding. Berman shows us that market logic was present in academia in the postwar era and that institutions were largely willing to engage in market activities if...
