I’m looking for any case where a public U.S. university has transferred ownership of a center or institute to another entity. Searching with words like ‘spin out’, ‘divest’, ‘transfer’ just provides me with irrelevant results related to the more standard meanings of those words. And I’m not referring to transferring scientific research intellectual property.
Example: A University creates a center that provides some service. It later decides to transfer the function and ownership of that center to another entity, like a non-profit, or foundation, or maybe even a for-profit company.
THis may be as close as we can get, but I was looking for a case that was not spinning out research or technology. I know University research gets ‘spun out’ to companies all of the time; but maybe this “Research Institute” might be the closest there is.
Just maybe to help explain. Here are a bunch of ‘centers and institutes’ at Cal-tech.
lets say someone said “lets take the Linde Institute (https://lindeinstitute.caltech.edu/) and transfer it to its own free standing non-profit.” Or maybe as far as, “let’s transfer it to a for-profit entity.”
Has this ever happened for a U.S. public University?
Oregon Health & Science University started life as the University of Oregon Medical School. It became an independent institution in 1974. Is that the kind of spin out you’re looking for?
There are numerous public universities that began life as a branch campus or extension of an existing university. I don’t know if these really get at what you’re going for, though, because both entities continue to be “owned” by the state.
Maybe more in line with what you’re looking for (but not at a public university), Duke University used to host a Parapsychology Laboratory from 1930-1965. Eventually they came to their senses and the lab was moved off campus and reestablished as a nonprofit, and the university cut all affiliation. It’s still operated as the Rhine Research Center.
Argonne National Laboratory, in suburban Chicago, started out in 1942 as the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which was part of the Manhattan Project, and created the world’s first nuclear reactor. After the war, the Metallurgical Laboratory was re-chartered as the U.S.'s first national laboratory, though it is still operated, in part, by the University of Chicago.
Would a campus radio station count as “a center that provides some service”? If so, there are more than a few that cut ties with their host campus and started broadcasting independently or joined their state’s public broadcasting network. E.g.:
That’s exactly what @Dewey_Finn’s example of SRI International is - a non-profit research institute spun out of Stanford. Draper Labs is a similar non-profit research institution spun out of MIT. Neither organization was spun off for the purpose of commercializing intellectual property. Of course neither Stanford nor MIT are public universities, but neither is Caltech.
So would something like SRI or Draper spun out of say UC Berkeley meet your criteria?