I'm a practitioner, not a theoretician. I run the Technology Licensing Office at M.I.T. M.I.T. is involved in a very interesting experiment right now with regard to research. With the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a lot of universities started to look to industry to help make up for what they thought was going to be a catastrophic fall off in federally funded research. But that decline hasn't happened. And despite the concerted efforts to raise industrial funding, the percentage of industrially funded research in American universities has risen only from about 6% in the 1980's to a little less than 8% in the late 1990's--not that great in relation to the whole pie.

At M.I.T., however, if you look at our on-campus research (that is, omitting Lincoln Lab) in about fifteen years we went from just 6% industrial funding in the early 80's to close to 25% at the end of this century. This high a fractional change has the potential for significant cultural change. The question is whether this change can be done mindfully, in a way that does not injure the academic process and the dissemination of knowledge. I believe it is the responsibility of the more elite schools, those with more potential access to industrial funding, to take the lead in holding that line.

The situation at M.I.T., with its transition from industrial support being a relatively minor fraction of the research budget to being almost a quarter of the budget, is instructive. If you go back about seven or eight years ago, the administrators at M.I.T. were being berated for their inflexibility in insisting on such "absolutes" as freedom of publication and payment of full costs. We insisted that we would not delay publication beyond about 30 days (in rare cases 60, and sometimes less than 30 days in the more rapidly moving fields.) Even that delay in publication was only for the purpose of identifying inventions on which patents should be filed and filing them. No restraint on the content of the publication of our results was (or is) allowed. We also insisted that we would not get into that other race to the bottom caused by bargaining on indirect cost rates ("Well, you've got the lab anyway so don't charge industry overhead".) And we reiterated our belief in the primacy of investigator-initiated projects and those that would allow meaningful participation by students.

We were berated by our faculty for all these stands and warned that "industry would go elsewhere"--to more "accommodating" schools. Instead, the opposite happened. Our research agreements with industry now total over $80 million a year and climbing. Why? Because we have been able to explain to industry that "You want us because we are different; and if we become like you, you won't want us or need us as much. We keep our stature in the research community, we keep the vibrancy of our culture, by doing things our way and making it work for you and with you."

I now want to beseech our brethren in other universities to do the same: hold the line on academic principles for our sake, for yours, and for the public, while explaining to industry that you can find ways to work with them. Right now, most of the major universities are holding the line on freedom of publication and related academic freedom issues. But they are being threatened repeatedly that industry will "go to other universities" [that need the money more]. The elite universities therefore, I believe, have an obligation to act on behalf of the more needy universities to show that the line can be held.

M.I.T. recently had a consortium with a number of other universities involving what we considered egregious intellectual property terms. After trying literally for years to resolve the issues on fair terms, in the face of major amounts of money promised which made it very, very difficult for our more needy brethren to say "No", M.I.T. was finally forced to walk away--unilaterally because the other university administrators were under too much pressure to accept the terms. The end of the story though, was happy: a second leading university then threatened to join us in walking away, and the industrial funders realized that they could not continue an advanced program without the scientific leaders. We all came back to the table and negotiated an acceptable agreement.

We need to hold the line even in the face of large dollar volumes. And we hold it best by asking ourselves "Why do we want to grow bigger and become what we aren't and don't want to be?" We are not measured by industrial standards. Growth for its own sake has no value to us if it doesn't allow us to be better at what we do best.

On individual contracts, University administrators also have to take a stand because the individual faculty members often don't have the power to do so. The individual faculty member may need that money so that her lab can get supported, so that she can do those experiments that will get her tenure. She must therefore be told by the administration, in the face of temptation to bend the rules or not even to read the agreement, that she cannot sign that agreement. "We will not let you sign it, we will not honor it." And note that I don't mean to imply that the individual investigator seeking to sign the agreement is of lower moral character; it's that she doesn’t have funding, and is to some extent desperate. University administration (and that means senior faculty, not just the "paid staff") must get more involved in policy, and in explaining to junior faculty that "the terms matter". And it may be the responsibility of the "civilian administrators" (the technology transfer folk and the lawyers) to protect the faculty from themselves and from being lured off sides.

That's my big speech. My little speech is to tease Peter Gosselin about that GAO report. I think that when you actually get into the data, you're going to find that there were two major sins that led to the non-reporting of federally funded inventions, or the supposed non-reporting, to the government. It should be stated upfront that it does the university no good whatsoever to keep that information secret, so the sins are not done on purpose. Instead, the vast majority of non-reporting is simply caused by underfunded technology transfer offices. You have to have the staff to do the reporting and then you've got to teach them how to do it. Another major cause of "non-reported inventions", though, is not the fault of the universities at all--as illustrated by 39 incidences for which M.I.T. was recently cited for non-reporting. For every single one of those 39, we were able to prove that we had reported them and the government offices had lost the reports. Nuff said.

Thank you.