This project explores how university administrators have used commercial language and how industry managers have drawn upon academic codes in their efforts to describe, justify, and explain the activities in their respective domains, examining change over time in this trading of codes. Intellectual merit The premise of this research is that the nature of university-industry interaction is considerably more complicated than the debates about academic-business relations suggest. Through an analysis of periodicals read and written by academic administrators and science-based industry leaders, the PI intends to explore the subtle and varied changes that the cultures of US academia and science-based industry have experienced as a product of their interaction over the period between 1960 and 2000. Broader impact With the advent of the biotechnology revolution in the 1970s, concern grew that university research agendas would be increasingly be set by industry and that the free flow of information characteristic of academic science would be stifled. Indeed, since the 1970s calls for policies that protect the relative autonomy of university science have been repeatedly called for by academic scientists and administrators and state and federal policymakers. The PI will disseminate results to academic and non-academic audiences. Findings will inform debates about the virtues and the drawbacks for academia and industry of the blurring of university and commercial cultures.
People tend to think about higher education and industry as distinct realms governed by different values and practices. In the 1980s, scholars and policymakers found evidence that business-related norms and practices were shaping academic science. Many writers asserted that this incursion was novel. In historical work, I found that business values have long had an influence in higher education. In more contemporary work, I found that academic values had infiltrated some high technology industries. In neither case was my investigation systematic. Thus, I initiated this study. The aim of this project was to understand how and to what extent commercial norms have found their way into higher education and academic norms have found their way into science-based industry between 1960 and 2010. With a graduate student, I systematically analyzed periodicals read by higher education leaders and by industry research managers. We found that the incursion of values from one realm into the other occurred unevenly between 1960 and 2010. While business values have affected academia, they have not overtaken it. Those in higher education have accepted certain business practices that are not inconsistent with academic values (e.g. strategic planning) and have pushed back against others (e.g. treating students as consumers). Our work on the industry side of the equation is ongoing, but it is looking like academic values and practices have found their way into certain industries, but inconsistently and by no means stably. In terms of work product, we have submitted two scholarly articles for publication, and we continue to work on two others. I have presented this work at lectures at two universities, and the graduate student working on the project presented the research at last year's American Sociological Association's meetings. In terms of broader impacts, the knowledge I have gained from this project has allowed me to contribute to policy debates at the University of Wisconsin in my new role as the associate dean for social studies in the Graduate School. Next fall, I will participate in a discussion about the future of the humanities at the University of Illinois where the knowledge gleaned from this project will be valuable. Finally, this project has allowed me to train a graduate student in social science methods. That student is now planning a dissertation on trends in US higher education, and he is likely to be a voice in higher education policy debates for years to come.
