If the history of debased ideals and betrayal of implied contract at the University of Chicago does not commence with Donald Trump, when does it begin? What are its causes? I focus on the two most important ones, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and the stunning change, which commenced largely in the same era, in which America began to conceive of education as a private, personal good, to be measured solely in terms of increase in lifetime earnings.
The Bayh-Dole act provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.
In all fairness, it should probably be said that the Bayh-Dole Act achieved in some narrow sense what it intended. In 1979, on the eve of Bayh-Dole, American universities received only 264 patents. Within a quarter of a century, applications for patents by universities had increased to more than 7,500, thousands of which were licensed to private corporations for commercial application.
But the Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI. What could go wrong?
For one thing, building facilities and competing to hire the same experts in order to do the same projects at the same time as one’s peers is incredibly expensive. The University of Chicago has now borrowed $6.3 billion, more than 70 percent of the value of its endowment. The cost of servicing its debt is now 85 percent of the value of all undergraduate tuition. (This is not normal. No peer institution has a debt-to-asset ratio greater than 26 percent. Perhaps that is one reason why Chicago’s tuition is so high and yet it wants to spend so little on education?)