How Sources of Support Divide Scientists

U. of Nevada at Reno

The growing phenomenon of tailoring academic science to commercial outcomes is well documented, but little has been written about how that trend affects the way scientists view their work.

In A Fractured Profession: Commercialism and Conflict in Academic Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), David R. Johnson, an assistant professor of higher-education leadership at the University of Nevada at Reno, seeks to remedy that. He explores the experiences and attitudes of “commercialists,” who seek industry funding, obtain patents, and create technology start-ups intended to advance financially rewarding societal goals, and of “traditionalists,” who concentrate on “pure science” that explains how the world works.

Commercialism does hold “a risk of suffocating curiosity-driven research that doesn’t have an obvious application in sight,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. Through his book, he hopes to encourage discussion of how to balance research priorities during a period of reduced federal support for science and what he calls an “unprecedented interface between the academy and industry.” He asks, in effect, “Are universities getting carried away in their emphasis on commercialization?”

During the interviews he conducted with scores of research-university scientists, he said, he was not surprised to hear concerns about such issues as how commercial success may lead to unequal salaries and working conditions for professors, or may even act as a sort of peer review that generates pressure on researchers to seek commercial rather than more-traditional scientific success.

Some traditionalists, he found, spoke of feeling as if they were “being pushed out of science because they don’t want to tie their research, or don’t see a way to tie it, to some sort of societal outcome.” Also disheartening for such scholars, he says, is that they know that many societally and commercially profitable discoveries emerge, unforeseeably, from basic research.

Among findings that surprised him, Mr. Johnson said, was that few universities make a significant amount of money from commercial science, even if many administrators believe or hope that it can solve research-funding woes. He cited data indicating that, between 1996 and 2008, the 10 universities with the highest licensing income earned only 0.3 percent to 4.3 percent on their total research expenditures.

Also surprising, he said, was to find that while making money does motivate commercialists, it does so no more than a quest for status. “If you’re in a department of chemistry at one of the top universities in the country,” he said, “one of the things you can do to stand out, if everybody has funding from the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, and everybody is published in Nature or Science, is through major honors.”

“But another,” he said, “is being able to say that you developed a product that has affected thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals.”