Is American academia in crisis?

[Kimstu]

Apos: * Certainly, the life of an industry employee and an academic aren’t all that different when it comes to sitting down and actually doing research, but I wonder if their incentives and legal constraints are different in ways that will affect the character of scientific research more and more as industry takes over more and more of the share of things like biomedical research, not to mention ownership and control over journals.*

Well, some say that research is definitely being affected, not in a positive way. The “corporatization” of academic research has a lot of benefits in terms of bigger budgets, more opportunities for academics in industry, etc., but it has also raised some troubling questions about distortion or suppression of research by for-profit sponsors. A January 2005 American Prospect article commented:

Today, market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education as never before, causing universities to look and behave more and more like business enterprises. […] Faced with declining government funding, they are avidly seeking to enhance their role as “engines” of economic growth, promising state legislators and governors that they will help drive regional economic development by pumping out commercially valuable inventions. […]

As a result, schools now routinely operate expensive patenting and licensing operations to market their faculty’s inventions, extracting royalty income and other fees in return. They invest their endowment money in risky startup firms founded by their professors. They run their own industrial parks and venture capital funds. They publish newsletters encouraging faculty members to commercialize new research by launching independent, faculty-owned companies. Star professors consult for, or hold equity in, the same firms that manufacture the drugs they are studying, while also often accepting generous fees to join corporate advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus. Sometimes these professors even hold the patent to the drug or device being tested. […] So pervasive are such ties that journal editors now frequently complain that they can no longer find academic experts who do not have a ?nancial interest in a drug or therapy the journal would like to review. […]

In the past, for example, it was common for university scientists to initiate the research protocol. Now, studies are frequently conceived and designed in the company’s own pharmacological and marketing departments, thus removing this formative stage of the research from academic hands almost entirely. The company then shops the study around to various academic institutions (and a growing number of competing for-profit subcontractors that run clinical trials) in search of investigators to conduct the research. […]

Industry also encourages the use of ghostwriters on scientific papers. This means an article or review bylined by a prominent academic might in fact have been written by a medical-communications company working for the drugmaker, with the “author” paid an honorarium to attach his or her name to it. […]

Scientists who perform industry-sponsored research are also asked routinely to sign legal contracts requiring them to keep both the methods and the results of their work secret for a period of time. […]

Industry also manipulates academic research by suppressing negative studies altogether. […] How prevalent is such corporate meddling? The question has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, but what research does exist is not encouraging. One survey of major university-industry research centers in the field of engineering, for example, found that 35 percent would allow corporate sponsors to delete information from papers prior to publication. […]

A vast body of work suggests that industry-funded research is far from impartial. In 1996, Stanford researcher Mildred Cho co-authored a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found that 98 percent of papers based on industry-sponsored research reflected favorably on the drugs being examined, compared with 79 percent of papers based on research not funded by industry. […] More recently, a systematic review of 1,140 clinical trial studies, published by researchers at Yale in 2003, concluded that, from cancer to arthritis to cholesterol, the evidence is overwhelming that when research is industry-sponsored, it is “significantly more likely to reach conclusions that [are] favorable to the sponsor” than non–industry-funded research.

When the people holding the purse strings are financially motivated to pursue short-term profit over traditional academic goals of objective analysis, teaching and publishing, and professional reputation, that poses perhaps a more serious danger to academic research than a shortage of grad students.

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

I think one could argue we have a surplus of higher education in the United States. If the U.S. becomes a less appealing destination for foreign students, I think what will happen (long, long before the system hits “crisis”) is that such students will mostly be drained away from the middle-tier institutions. There are still many foreign bodies to go around among the leading institutions for science, and I suspect there will be for some time. That may not bode well for the Middling State University who used to be able to woo a handful of chinese students each year, but Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin and Princeton and such? They’ll still have foreign students flocking.

I’m a little skeptical about any sort of “higher education crisis” because these things go in cycles. Lots of doomsaying about a trend or problem, then the Pew Charitable Trust sets up a commission to look into it and AASCU and ACE write something, and a couple of people publish books on it, and then the focus switches to something else.