Today's (Sunday, Sept. 7) New York Times has an excellent article on how the mission of many unversities has been distorted by their focus on "tech transfer", i.e. their quest for patents and licenses resulting from federally financed research. NYT writes that "In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today’s universities function more like corporate research laboratories."
The article continues to say that "In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America’s universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses."
I have often wondered if GMUs quest to become a top research university has led it to channeled resources away from other academic departments. While institutions of higher education may not be structured like a business, it appears that their goals are the same: making money.
Here is a link to the Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/technology/07unbox.html
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