When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder

I ran into a great NYTimes article describing the changing face of the hard sciences at Universities, and their tanglings with massive bio/tech corporations. It boxes in creativity and innovation, and pushes the distorting effects of the market into one more aspect of academia (and apparently is actually a money losing proposition for most schools!). And while the article doesn't bring it up, let's not forget how much this is encouraged by having the very same corporate CEOs and VPs on our Boards of Directors/Regents. From the article:

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today's universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely sharing techniques and results, researchers increasingly keep new findings under wraps to maintain a competitive edge.

What used to be peer-reviewed is now proprietary. "Share and share alike" has devolved into “every laboratory for itself."In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America's universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses.