Paul Feyerabend, in the next to last essay of Farewell To Reason, responds to some of his critics, who state that they “believe in the autonomy of art, thought, and feeling over money.” Feyerabend is characteristically incisive in his reply.
So what do you mean by autonomy? Do you mean that an artist should do without money and starve, or live in a rathole? Do you mean that he or she should be fed and housed but without money being involved? On the basis of barter, for example?
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And here and now money is of the essence. Money is not inherently bad; it is a means to an end.
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So, our artists will use money, but he will not revere it like a God. Who will pay him? Perhaps a rich sponsor. In this case the artist may have to adapt his art to the wishes of his patron. Now when speaking of “autonomy” do you mean to say that the patron has no right to make his wishes known? Because the artist by the very fact of being an artist is above judgement by other people? That is sheer elitism. I reject it and I reject the contempt for others it implies.
The implication of Feyerabend’s argument is that the artist, in accepting money, provides something responsive to the desires of whoever has the money to provide. The artist is not autonomous in such an economy, but also has no need to place money above “art, thought, and feeling.” The artist can’t be bought out, perhaps, but also cannot be utterly independent of those who provide for the artist’s expenses. Of course, if art is so vastly independent of the mere mortals who consume it, then payment to artists might better be called a gift to the gods, to be managed on their behalf by the artist-priest. Feyerabend calls this “sheer elitism.” He doesn’t argue that elitism is “inherently bad”–he simply states that he rejects it. He continues:
I reject elitism even more emphatically where public money is involved: a person who is paid from public funds must be ready to accept public supervision. I have the uneasy feeling that when speaking in your abstract manner about “autonomy,” miles removed, apparently, from anything so low and filthy as money, you actually want the public to pay artists (and scientists, and great “feelers”) to live and work as they, the artists etc., see fit, i.e., as parasites: academics, using the magic hood of “academic freedom”, have succeeded, long ago, in making parasitism respectable–no the artists want a piece of the action. I am against parasitism (unless agreed upon by all parties) and this means that I am against academic freedom and, naturally, against any corresponding “artistic autonomy.”
Feyerabend rejects academic freedom as a failed form of “autonomy”–he calls it elitism, parasitism, a “magic hood” that implies contempt for others–for those who provide the funding. He bundles up artists, scientists, and academics in this critique–parasites, unless they are responsive to those who are paying: “a person who is paid from public funds must be ready to accept public supervision.” This gets at the root of it–that with money comes accountability. Feyerabend rejects the idea that money might somehow be stripped of the right to influence carried by those who control the money. In the case of a wealthy patron, one can see it. But what happens when the wealthy patron is this abstraction of “the public”? Who then does the thinking and expressing on behalf of “the public” when public funds are involved?
This question is also basic to the discussion about what to do with intellectual property created by faculty at universities. Feyerabend argues that an artist ought to be responsive to those paying his or her way–not autonomous and not merely a slave to money. Feyerabend argues that supervision comes with the territory. But he does not argue (though perhaps he might have been induced to take it up) that the artist also must hand everything the artist creates over to the patron who pays for his or her keep. Does the artist then “work for hire” for the patron, producing art that only the patron will own? Or does the artist produce art that tracks the patron’s interest, and only some of it comes to the patron, and some the artist keeps, and some goes to others–such as to public displays and collections or is purchased by others for their enjoyment?
The two poles–autonomy and slave to money–are easy to argue but hard to maintain in practice. Autonomy, as Feyerabend has it, reeks of elitism and contempt. Slavery, on the other hand, reduces the artist (or scientist, or academic) to the service of the whims of whomever has money–which itself is another form of elitism and contempt. In between–a moderate position, as it were–might lie something more workable, though less administratively convenient.
It’s not possible to do a decent job tracing “funding for scientific research” in an article such as this, but let me sketch a few connections. Start with the Royal Society, formed in the mid 17th-century. The Royal Society took subscriptions from members and supported the conduct of experiments and especially the reporting of scientific results, with the British monarch as a primary patron. From the mid-eighteenth century on, the Royalty Society has received a grant from the British government, to be used to support scientific research–research of interest to the government, but allocated outside the administrative politics of government proper.
One might wonder just how “public supervision” works out in such situations. Why should government give up direct oversight of how money for science is spent to an independent (but clearly also dependent on patronage) society? Feyerabend argued in Against Method that separation of state and science was of greater importance than separation of church and state. Perhaps even politicians accepted the idea that politicians made lousy patrons of science–that the influence of politics leads science down unproductive roads.
Move across the pond, now, and consider the development of the Smithsonian Institute in the United States. The Smithsonian is created with a bequest to the United States government from James Smithson, an English scientist who died without heirs. At the time, the $508,000 his estate was worth amounted to over 1/50th of the US Government’s annual expenditures. It would be the equivalent of a modest billionaire leaving his estate to the government to be used to create an institute for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” As the Smithsonian’s own web site reports it, there followed a ten-year debate over whether the money should be accepted, what it should be used for, and how everything should be housed.
Again, the basic idea is that the government supports an independent organization that in turn supports the work of scientists. One of the bigger fights over the control of the Smithsonian was who should be in charge of disbursing funds–politicians? citizens? or scientists? Behind the question are real questions: Are scientists the best–or even good– judges of the direction of scientific inquiry? That is, are scientists good patrons of science? Does a training in science confer any special insight into the directions that science might turn next? Or is the practice of science another form of social behavior, one that cannot be usefully abstracted by the label “science” to mean something special that only “scientists” can comprehend? For the history of the world, most of what we have by way of knowledge has not come from scientists, and certainly not from them alone, even recently. Engineers, technicians, workers, explorers, artists, poets, musicians, and disc jockeys have also made contributions not just to general knowledge but also to the technology that we use every day.
Next up, Frederick Cottrell and The Research Corporation. In 1912, Cottrell, a faculty member at the University of California (then, only at Berkeley), working with DuPont, invents a method for removing soot from factory smoke–the electrostatic precipitator. With encouragement from his industry patron, Cottrell patents his invention. The question then becomes, what to do with the patent? Cottrell hits on the idea of creating a private trust, a foundation, a corporation directed by industry and aimed at presenting the inventive work of faculty inventors to industry for development and use. Cottrell describes his thinking behind this “experiment” in an article published in a chemistry journal. Research Corporation would take assignment of title to patents and then license rights to companies looking for new technology. Royalty income would be split between the inventors, Research Corporation, and the Smithsonian Institute, which would fund further scientific research throughout the country, consistent with its public–and government-confirmed–mission. Research Corporation would be the inventor- and industry-facing side, and the Smithsonian Institute would be the academic- and research- facing side.
Cottrell, in essence, proposed a further separation, not just of government and science. He separated the deployment of rights arising from research from the allocation of funds to support further research. Again–a kind of independence. University administrators were not deciding what to fund, nor were companies, nor the government–but rather the Smithsonian. The inventive results of that funding, however, would not come back via the same funding route–not to the Smithsonian, for instance–but from the inventors to Research Corporation, creating an economic cycle. In later years, Research Corporation funded research directly, as well, becoming a patron not just of inventions but of scientific research as well–but perhaps with an eye for research that might create more inventions. In any case, the board of Research Corporation was composed of industry representatives. This was an important move, because that was not the case of the university-affiliated research foundations that sprung up on the model of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation–and which set up the idea of marketing patents to industry, rather than marketing patents within industry. “Technology transfer” was not merely the extraction of patent rights from inventors to be licensed by administrators to companies–it was the placement of patent rights in an organization that was already embedded in industry. Even to take ownership of such patents indicated that industry was ready to consider licensing the inventions for its use. This is not “subtle”–it’s basic.
Perhaps it matters, as well, that Cottrell’s electrostatic precipitator was an environmental technology–a tool that could be used by any company with a smoke stack to clean up its air pollution. A company could make its own precipitators or buy one from companies able to manufacture them. There was no need for a monopoly on either use or manufacture. The gain was in widespread adoption, not in focusing the rights with any one company in the hope of maximizing a financial return or simplifying administration. Again, having an invention management corporation directed by multiple industry representatives means that there will be a great preference for making an invention available on non-exclusive terms. The question for the corporation is what the terms of access should be, to maximize industry adoption and participation in the program of licensing. That question does not come up in a monopoly management setting. Instead, it is replaced by concerns about timeliness of development and fair market pricing (as with the current debate in Congress over march-in rights for pharmaceutical product pricing–something that Bayh-Dole stripped out of federal agency oversight of privately managed patents on inventions made with federal support).
The management dynamics of Research Corporation, while having a superficial resemblance to that of the “research foundations” that spread across American universities, were fundamentally different from those of the foundations. Research Corporation was industry-backed, was national in scope, pushed proceeds to an organization with a mandate to support research nationally, and in this way disengaged university administrations and companies alike from a monopoly interest in the work of scientists. Research Corporation offered a pathway of public supervision, as it were–an industry “public” for rights directed at industry actions. Originally, this pathway was voluntary. Later, university administrations made it compulsory. Later, they created their own versions, lacking the national scope and industry participation, and made these new versions compulsory.
It may be that who the patron is matters a great deal to the directions that science takes. The debate was renewed when Vannevar Bush proposed that the U.S. government create a “National Research Foundation.” This proposal became the National Science Foundation, created in 1950. The NSF is modeled in part on Bush’s experiences leading technology research during World War 2 (see Modern Arms and Free Men) and partly on the models of Research Corporation and the Smithsonian Institute. The NSF would receive funding from the federal government rather than from patent royalties, and would use the money to fund scientific investigations that would in turn produce the raw materials that could be drawn upon to challenge established orders. That had been the idea behind the development of military tools–radar, bomb sights, Monte Carlo modeling of aircraft dodging anti-aircraft fire, atomic weapons and propulsion–and Bush thought that the medical establishment was ripe for similar treatment, with communications next after.
The creation of the NSF was not taken as a wonderful new thing for university funding. Eisenhower worried the effect of the federal government and the “industrial-military” complex moving in to direct (and in effect, dictate) the directions of academic science:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Eisenhower’s worry about research drives to who the patrons should be. Neither the military’s alliance with industry, nor a “scientific-technological elite” should control–and with the federal government swamping out private funding for research, and even industry funding for research, the government all but becomes the primary patron of science. As one director of sponsored projects told me, with his institution receiving 75% of its research funding from the federal government and less than 5% from industry, it would be great if there were no industry funding at all. This, the view of administrative convenience–better to focus on complying with the government’s requirements than on those of industry sponsors. Better, too, to give up the smaller funding source than the larger one. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the federal government adopted a rule that it would never fund more than 49% of the research at any given university? That would spread the work around and make other patrons–real patrons–more important in the direction of scientific work.
To get a perspective on the difference between patrons, consider Carl Sagan’s book (and the related movie) Contact. The storyline follows a scientist on a quest to detect signals from space. The NSF advice is “give up and follow an acceptable scientific career.” By contrast, a wealthy industrialist adopts the scientist, provides funding and helpful technology, and lets events play out. Yes, it’s just a storyline–but it is also a commentary on scientific patrons by one of the leading public scientists of his time.
Or, put it another way, I am told that in the early 1960s, the chemistry department faculty at the University of Washington voted unanimously not to take any federal funding, as it would politicize research and take over control of research directions. One cannot easily sustain a career in academic science and not follow the federal money. If the theme of the day is cancer, then one studies cancer; if the theme is global warming by human-caused CO2, then one imagines all the horrors that such a thing might entail. To go against–or even to ignore–what the government has endorsed is nearly impossible, unless one has a patron.
Again we find a concern for the separation of government and scientific patronage. What’s left open, among other things, is what to do about rights in discoveries. It sounds easy to argue that public supervision of scientists naturally means that whatever the scientists discover or invent or make or gather should be owned by “the public.” But that would mean no intellectual property rights and no ownership rights at all–everything would be “public domain.” But that’s not what university administrators (most of them, anyway) argue. They argue that the universities should own, and that they (the administrators) should control what is produced. Essentially, that IP administrators should be the beneficiaries of scientific research (on behalf of their institutions, of course–but their positions and often their salaries and unit budgets depend on licensing income).
What is often not discussed, of course, is the public supervision of university administrators, such as those involved in forming IP policies, taking ownership of faculty inventions, and then seeking to license patent rights in these inventions–often and preferentially exclusively to a single company and more frequently now to speculative investors who require a monopoly position. Are administrators the new “elites” of federal innovation policy? Is that the status that they believe the Bayh-Dole Act gave them?
It is also easy to argue that somehow scientists, like artists, should value truth over money and be “autonomous.” If we return to Feyerabend’s rejection of academic freedom as elitist and contemptuous, we also see that he leaves unaddressed what public supervision of science might entail, given that elsewhere he argues against government control of science. How does the public-as-patron express its interest in science? And how does this expression of interest become a legitimate influence?
Consider the beginnings of research that led to warfarin–a farmer drives his truck through a snowstorm with a dead cow and a bucket of blood to the University of Wisconsin to find out what is killing his cows and ends up at the lab of Karl Paul Link. That’s the start of it. Something moral, if you wish. A public influence on the direction of research.
Francis Bacon, one of the motivating forces behind the formation of the Royal Society, argued that science should be conducted for the benefit of society, for charitas, as he called it, not for fame or money or “for its own sake.” Scholars have poo-pooed such talk as only a political necessity to make science appear palatable to a suspicious public, but there’s nothing in Bacon’s argument that would appear to be secretly an agenda to set up a parasitic academic elite. The Morrill Act, which set up land-grant colleges in the United States in 1862, aimed to support colleges “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.” The idea is that the discovery and diffusion of knowledge was to help people do their jobs–essentially, charity in the Baconian sense–not autonomy in the parasitic sense.
So what do we do with “academic freedom”? If we take academic freedom to mean autonomy from all public influences, the Feyerabend has a point. But Feyerabend also does not argue that academics, scientists, and artists should be servile to money. The patron should expect to have an influence, and the artist or scientist should expect to adapt to that influence. But the patron should not expect to control the artist, or own all that the artist creates, simply for providing support. This is where the administrative mind loses its way, and loses interest therefore in the discussion. Anyone in a position to “administrate” research also necessarily becomes a patron of that research. It is easy, then, to align with a statement of federal interest in faculty research by claiming that the patron–the government–desires that administrators step in and take ownership of faculty work, so that patents can be obtained and licensed to the highest bidders–or, given that there are almost never multiple bidders for a university technology–to whoever is willing to take an exclusive license (and even that is rare–and much rarer yet that a product is actually made and sold commercially).
The academic freedom that shows up in faculty handbooks itself has a varied history. In some versions, academic freedom asserts that faculty should not use the power of their positions to impose their religious or political views on their students, and instead should present the various arguments around an issue and let students decide for themselves. In other versions, academic freedom becomes the right to work independent of the religious or political views of university administrators. Even if we think that’s a good thing, that faculty should not have to serve university administrators, does such a thing extend to intellectual property? In one sense, the answer is yes, of course it must extend to intellectual property. A person cannot author a manuscript and expect to provide it to a publisher if the university claims to own copyright in the manuscript. Nor can a person discover a farming technique and teach it to area farmers if the university claims to own the invention and patent rights and asserts sole authority to decide who can use the invention. Any such things are intrusions by administrators into the decisions of individuals, based on what they have discovered, invented, made, or gathered.
In another sense, one might argue, as I have, that faculty may have academic freedom but they do not necessarily have economic freedom. That is, they are paid a stipend to provide relief from having to rent themselves out for additional work to make ends meet. The university has its roots in the “guardian class” moral syndrome (as Jane Jacobs puts it) that puts itself at a distance from matters of commerce and money-making. There are university administrators, of course, who want universities to adopt a commercial mindset, guiding by money as an index of effectiveness, excellence, and efficiency. Yet here too we find this gulf between autonomy and servility. Ownership of intellectual property does not mean that the owner must seek profit or that a return on what one has made (such as royalties from publishing a novel) are inappropriate. Furthermore, ownership of intellectual property does not require simultaneous control. A university might own patents but permit inventors to control how the patents are deployed. That would be some attractive patent policy!
These are key distinctions. Ownership does not imply profit-seeking (one can own to curate or to ensure broad access without charge). Ownership does not require control (control can be delegated, or licensed). Academic freedom, in the form I argue for, creates a “bill of rights” for faculty relative to the university and its administration. It does not free faculty from public accountability for the use of public funds, nor does it make faculty autonomous. If faculty members discover or invent, what obligations do they have to the patrons that have supported their work? To the general public? To their “employers” at the university?
Of course, we can create a simplistic answer: faculty members have the obligations that they agree to with their university, first, and to their grant sponsors next, and to the general public last, as they feel like it with whatever remains that isn’t already claimed by the university and sponsors. More thoughtful answers consider what individuals will do or should do when they have created something of substantial value, whether that is an invention or a screenplay or a new variety of raspberry. (What gives a thing “value,” anyway?–just that an investor will pay for it?) The premise behind university ownership of faculty work is that administrators acting on behalf of institutions and corporations should have more say than individuals thinking for themselves or in their relationships with others.
This discussion is about what ought to be the case. Should university administrators demand ownership of faculty-developed intellectual property (and NIPIA-non-IP intangible assets)? Should patrons of university research make such demands? It may be that a university or an organization sponsoring research is a good place for intellectual property rights to end up, but the starting point is with the researchers themselves, not with an institution or sponsors. If there’s to be an arrangement, it should be voluntary. That is, it should involve judgment. It should be in that middle ground between autonomy and servility–a middle ground that’s difficult for administrators to apply “management techniques”; difficult to write one set of procedures to cover all cases.
Consistently the best IP management, the best IP policies, and the best IP outcomes–financial and impact and otherwise–have arisen from a voluntary approach to university involvement in faculty inventions and will continue to do so. A university might limit an inventor’s financial interest in IP, and a university might enforce an agreement over IP previously (and freely) entered into, but taking all IP on the premise that servility is the best alternative to autonomy is a poor alternative. Academic freedom, then, does not mean freedom from accountability but rather freedom from administrative meddling.
The primary point that Feyerabend makes apparent, however, is not the problem of elitism in academic freedom but rather that if patrons of research should be expected to have an influence over the activities of research, then the quality of one’s patrons matters a great deal. In that respect, public money may be among the least interesting and productive of all the patrons of scientific inquiry. Adding a patent-everything component to public funding (as Bayh-Dole gives freedom to university administrators to do) all but assures that faculty scientists cannot create a public commons from their shared discoveries, even if they want to. They can’t let people use their inventions without first persuading the university to allow free use. It’s as if Bayh-Dole was created to turn federal funding for university research into an engine to support university administrators, rather than as a means to allow federally supported inventions to participate in a private invention management network when the inventors choose to use that network. It may be, then, that the most important consideration in university research is the choice of patron and beneficiary. If both of these turn out to be, as a matter of policy, the university, then we have a rather dull program of innovation.