Here are twelve arguments that push back on public university claims to ownership of faculty-made inventions.
1. State control of scholarship. So much for academic freedom.
2. Eminent domain. Taking private property without just compensation for public universities.
3. Not needed for compliance with federal funding. See Stanford v Roche.
4. Institutionalization bad for innovation. Universities have a lousy record on compulsory ownership, actually.
5. Violates employee-inventor protection laws (in WA, CA, IL, DE, KS, MN, NC, UT). Claims more than faculty are employed to produce.
6. Undermines an independent faculty. The rationale for federal funding in the first place.
7. Starves the commons, the primary source of opportunity for university research. Anti-innovation.
8. Destroys diversity of opportunity. Multiple agents for different tasks.
9. Peddles scholarship to speculators. A destructive habit in the service of money.
10. Creates university trolls. Eventually, they would rather sue than use.
11) Use of resources no basis for ownership claim, especially resources paid for by sponsors, donors, and tuition. Most universities don’t even *review for use of resources*!
12) Faculty instruction, research, and public service is not for the administration. “Employment” is narrow: it is only what faculty permit the administration to assign, direct, review, and approve.
Any one of these ought to do it. Why is it that there is such a strong desire by the state to control faculty scholarship at the critical point where a patent might attach to it, or a copyright? Why is it that that control is justified by a desire to make money for the university? Why is that desire often *greater* than any comparable desire on the part of the faculty inventors themselves? Why is the university’s money-seeking expressed primarily in terms of selling off IP to speculative investors to the exclusion of broad access and use? No, none of it makes any sense at all, other than a repressive, self-interested love of authority, process, and a bureaucrat’s thumb in every pie.
Enough is enough. Time for the Gilded Age of American university tech transfer to pass, and the robber barons who rather like the administratively pleasing repressive version of the Bayh-Dole Act to be sent packing. There are good reasons for a university to have a tech transfer program. Compulsory ownership is not one of them. University faculty can start by creating a working committee to investigate their university’s IP policies, practices, expenditures, metrics, and outcomes. Staff that committee *only* with faculty. Then get on with it. There are people ready to help. There’s a great world of opportunity, of freedom, of innovation, of societal impact awaiting. Time to restore faculty to their rightful place, leading innovation with their research, their instruction, and their public service. Something to plan for in the new year, yes?