"Something to think about"
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Today, it is fashionable to criticize academic culture for its inefficiency and failure to move ideas more rapidly from the laboratory to the marketplace. What's forgotten is how effective this same culture has been in furnishing society with valuable public goods that markets do a poor job of producing on their own: a reliable and ever-expanding body of scientific and technological knowledge; a well-trained cadre of students and workers; a richly endowed public information commons; and an educated citizenry. Historically, the vitality of this academic research culture has always stemmed from its nonmarket reward structure, a system predicated not on money, but on "priority of discovery," where professors are continuously racing against one another to be the first to unearth and publish new inventions and theories that advance the state of knowledge in their fields of expertise. This system does a remarkably good job of speeding the creation of new discoveries, hastening public disclosure, and enabling peers to evaluate and replicate new research findings to ensure their accuracy—all of which helps to broaden the stock of reliable public knowledge that is available for future research and innovation. Academic investigators have traditionally enjoyed a high degree of intellectual freedom and autonomy—and also collegiality, because academic publication requires them to disclose what they are working on publicly, including their raw data and methodologies. In industry, by contrast, results are often closely guarded and judged by narrow, short-term commercial and production criteria. Industry scientists also tend to conduct their work in a far more regulated, hierarchical environment.
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(op. cit., p. 195)
O problema surge quando as Universidades tentam imitar as empresas. Tentando ser mais papistas que o papa, fazendo incursões em campos para os quais não estão vocacionadas (uma tentação exacerbada pela diminuição das verbas que o Estado consagra às IES), tudo isto só pode resultar na perda de importância da missão principal, o Ensino, e na redução da importância da investigação nos campos culturais e científicos que não rendem dinheiro vivo. Apesar de o texto citado acima não se referir à realidade portuguesa, por vezes parece que, por cá, se quer imitar o que lá fora (EUA) já está diagnosticado como um erro. O livro donde retirei a citação, cuja leitura recomendaria a todos os que enveredaram ou estão em vias de enveredar pela administração das IES, é precioso para uma clarificação das ideias, evitando algum simplificação na análise dos problemas da mudança em curso. Um pouco mais à frente, a autora continua:
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The emergence of a utilitarian, market-model university, combined with a loud drumbeat calling on schools to spur national and regional economic growth, now threatens to obliterate the distinctiveness of this academic research culture. Over the course of a generation, there has already been a profound shift in the cultural norms of the academy: the reward structures professors follow; their perceptions of the intrinsic value and relative importance of various types of research; and the appropriateness of putting their research into the public domain. According to Irwin Feller, over time the emphasis on patenting and generating royalties alters the "signals as to what constitutes productive allocation of faculty time, .. encouraging professors to pursue research that has patentable commercial ends. This proprietary orientation also threatens to tear apart the delicate fabric of an academic culture that has long rewarded cooperation and collaboration. As Paul David noted in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences, "Cooperative relationships are readily undermined by alternative systems of exchange based on the ownership and control of property." The two communities of open and proprietary science work best, he said, when "they are separate, but imbedded in a larger system. When you try to put the two reward systems together within one institution, one either takes over and destroys the other, or it corrupts its functioning."
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(op. cit., p. 196)
Jennifer Washburn (2006). University, Inc. The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. Basic Books, New York. (pp. 352)