University of Washington president Michael Young gave a ten-minute talk in February 2012 at the opening of a business incubator on the UW campus. The talk is fascinating as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups to investors for UW profit. I am providing annotations to draw out the implications of the talk, in a series of posts. President Young’s talk is in purple and my comments follow in brown, in square brackets.
Here is the seventh and last installment.
So, thank-you for being with us today. Linden, thank-you for what you do and the remarkable leadership you’ve shown in this, in this entire enterprise. Uh, and we look forward to continuing to work with all of you, uh, in in all of this. Thank-you. [applause]
[Comment: Linden Rhoads, the subject of Mr. Young’s admiration in 2012, as of July 2014 no longer directs UW’s C4C, though she remains, apparently, running the W Fund (a private company that UW has invested in) and continues on UW’s payroll as a special advisor. A UW review committee found that C4C was not so happy a place. According to Xconomy, the committee’s report begins:
For the UW to become an entrepreneurial ecosystem, the culture of the institution needs to change to encourage commercialization, and the systems by which the university operates need to change to encourage rather than inhibit commercialization.
Two and half years ago, according to Mr. Young, C4C was doing so well, and now, despite doubling the number of startups (by C4C’s own secret counting method), apparently C4C was more fluff than stuff. Venture folks, according to the Xconomy article, still like C4C’s work–and why not? C4C was subsidizing their investments, or at least trying to.
What are the motivating figures of thought behind this speech? Faculty are rather helpless beings, motivated by hot cars, hampered in travel by their reliance on bicycles, incapable of dealing with business. Students desire educational opportunities in which they add value to university-owned inventions, front for faculty with business, are smart coming in and get trained by companies, prior to being launched by the university into the world. The activity of innovation is itself conceived of as a process run by administrators, for which there are no other options.
This is the message provided to the investors in the audience, put in the form of a thank-you: you have to work with the university administration because we have closed off all other avenues. In return, the university offers low rent, inconvenient siting, slow-to-develop companies, and an invitation to participate in bashing other universities for their programs, which by any reasonable measure are doing as well, or better, than Washington’s.
It is understandable that a university president might make a hash of the fundamentals of research enterprise and innovation. These are not activities that university presidents these days seem to have a great deal of experience with, though a number appear to dearly want to believe that by owning patents, the university administration will build great working relationships with industry, attract wealthy speculators, and make a ton of money in the process. The moral compass that might otherwise guide such a leader spins wildly, so that seeking money can be turned into a public mission to do good. I am sure it is, and somewhere there is a reading of Adam Smith that argues that even public institutions, by seeking their own self-interest rather than a public interest, somehow contribute to the public good. We might paraphrase thus:
It is not from the benevolence of the public research university that we expect good in the world, but from the university’s regard for its own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their public mission but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
The by-product of administrative process to take faculty and student property on behalf of speculative investors is public benefit. By subsidizing the risk capital of venture investors, the university fulfills its research mission and does good in the world, if only the venture investors realize a return on their investment. That appears to be the proposition that Mr. Young placed before his audience.]