The Corporate University Grinds On
With all due respect to those who have just noticed, the corporatization/privatization of universities public and private, in California and elsewhere, has been going on for a long time. Way back in the late 1970s I was the only journalist and the only intellectual property lawyer who participated in a semester-long seminar on the problem at Stanford sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We focused on the effect on scientific research of what were potentially high-profit new technologies then under development in university laboratories. Central to the discussion was the biotechnology industry, then just beginning its migration from labs at Stanford and UCSF into lucrative companies like Genentech. -more-