Robert Cook-Deegan drew my attention to an essay by Josh Weitz at The Tree of Life blog. Weitz discusses his adventures with colliding claims for ownership of future inventions between two universities. It is well worth the read. Weitz makes a series of excellent points with regard to the problems of demanding assignment of all inventions as a condition of visiting faculty use of facilities. The University of Arizona is not the only institution with this problem. Weitz also reveals a way to resolve such matters, one that ought to be a starting point rather than something that happens after overreaching and arbitrary form agreements are put in front of folks.
More than that, if universities did not make overreaching and arbitrary claims to inventions anyway, then much of this bureaucracy would simply vaporize, things would get a lot more reasonable, and folks could focus their energy on things other than useless, grasping paperwork. Wouldn’t that be something.
As universities make expansive, future demands on inventions–and define inventions broadly to be most anything that an administrator thinks might be worth something sitting behind an institutional paywall–then even collaborations among faculty at different institutions are threatened with all manner of bureaucratic controls. It really does become a form of gridlock, a stagnation, not directly of research–that’s a different problem–but the kind of stagnation that comes about because to do anything really fun, first you have to drink a lot of sour administrative milk. It is odd to have administrators insisting that they are doing all this souring of milk for the benefit of the faculty. If every university demands that all future inventions are automatically assigned to the university–and some even demand that for a period following separation–then what? This is one place where universities should most definitely not run “more like a business” and should run a lot “more like a university”: freedom is a very good thing, you know.