Defining Values for Research and Technology: The University’s Changing Role

Since the end of the Cold War, federal funding for research at American universities has sharply decreased, leaving administrators searching for a new benefactor. At the same time, changes in federal policy permitting universities to patent, license, and profit from their discoveries combined with the emergence of new fields that thinned the lines between ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research to make universities an attractive partner to private industry. This reorientation from public to private funding has created new challenges for the academy. In thirteen insightful and wide-ranging essays, Defining Values for Research and Technology examines the modern research university in the throes of transition. Contributors discuss the tensions of research versus education, public funding versus corporatization, and the academic freedom of open discussion versus the secrecy needed to ensure financial gain. Will universities and their professors pursue industrial imperatives at the expense of traditional academic values, or will they harness the energy of industry to advance a mission of research for the public good?
Defining Values for Research and Technology, while acknowledging potential dangers, argues that university-industry partnerships have the potential to both benefit industrial expansion and enrich academic life. In doing so, it raises important points about the connections between ‘pure’ science and industrialized technology more generally, and the role that policy plays in science. Both those interested in the evolution of the academy and scholars of the history and sociology of science will find something worthwhile within its pages.