In the decade of the 1960s the world economy grew at the rate of five per cent. In the 1970s the real growth rate dropped to 3.6 per cent. By the 1980s the rate had dropped to 2.8 per cent and continued this decline in the 1990s when it fell to two per cent. In two decades capitalism lost 60 per cent of its macroeconomic momentum. Capitalism stepped out of the "golden age" and into the "great stagnation."

This decline is associated with a fall in the rates of profitability and productivity. The corporate sector responded with demands from labour and the state to improve the conditions necessary to restore profitability and productivity rates. The state responded with neoliberal (compression) changes where the state has selectively withdrawn from activities that interfere with accumulation, neoconservative (maintenance-intervention) where the state's role has been selectively to protect activities that serve accumulation, and with new, more invasive, activities that reshaped institutions in order to meet the demands of restored accumulation.

No institution was left untouched by this process, including post-secondary education. Neoliberal cuts to university funding created fiscal uncertainty forcing universities to redefine their mission. Responding to these realities, Sheldon Krimsky (Science in the Private Interest, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) asks a number of questions that face universities in the United States. How do you stay competitive when federal budgets are not secure? How do you protect yourself from fluctuations in core funding and government-sponsored research? Where does the money come from to pay for state-of-the-art research facilities in frontier areas in science, engineering and medicine? Under these circumstances what can the universities do to prevent faculty from leaving for more lucrative jobs in the private sector?

Critics of the university's attempts to adjust to the new political economy of post-secondary education have characterized the universities as having become commodified, corporatized and commercialized. How do we know if this is true? Among other things, we look for evidence of increases in corporate funding of universities, increased faculty involvement with for-profit intellectual property and consulting, and growth in university-corporate partnerships.

Donald G. Stein's Buying In Or Selling Out? The Commercialization of the American Research University is an important contribution to this critical literature. Stein provides us with a different kind of evidence - namely the testimony of those who have done the deed. Roughly half the contributors to this volume are or were senior administrators in American universities. While this book compiles evidence of corporate funding, for-profit faculty involvement and university-corporate partnerships, the book's character is defined by its author's acceptance of the reality that American universities have become commercialized. Some of the authors celebrate the fact, but others believe the job is incomplete, while still others express concern about the fate of the university and the public good as a result of "things having changed so dramatically in the past decade."

Stein identifies that the common theme among participants in this book is that commercialization is the current reality for American universities and "that it has progressed too far for us to return to the good old days." (p. 9) Having sold the shop, most of the authors believe that guidelines governing commercial activity should be established to ensure that core university values are protected.

Stein points out it is no longer uncommon for a researcher at a professional meeting to be vague about his or her research because it is under patent review. (p. 7) The corollary to this is the call to publish or patent. (p. 8)

Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University, provides the numbers behind the enticements for the rush to commercialize and a discussion of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 which gives American universities the intellectual property rights to federally-funded discoveries. That is a talking point of many of the papers in this volume. (pp. 134-137)

For Mary L. Good, a dean of engineering at the University of Arkansas, the increase in university-industry interactions has greatly benefited the U.S. economy and is a cause for unqualified celebration.

James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, suggests the marriage of industry and university is against nature - a relationship between two organisms with vastly different characteristics and objectives. University values involving, among other things, freedom of inquiry and the open sharing of knowledge are simply not compatible with the corporate preoccupation with return on investment and shareholder value. (p. 72)

Ronald Bohlander, director of the commercial realization office at Georgia Tech, celebrates the fact that, at his institute, faculty members are not tenured and must be committed to the service of their clients, upon whose "soft money" they depend. (p. 78)

Karen A. Holbrook and Eric C. Dahl, respectively the president of Ohio State University and vice-resident at the University of Georgia, accept that tenure remains an essential feature of academic life. That said, they make a plea for the tenure and promotion process to embrace academics' contributions to entrepreneurship and patent development.

Marcia Angel, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a lecturer at Harvard University, asserts it is only in the last few years that "to a remarkable extent academic medical centers have become supplicants to drug companies." (p. 128) She informs us the Harvard Clinical Research Institute originally advertized itself on its web site as "being led by people whose experience gives HCRI an intimate understanding of industry's needs, and knowledge of how best to meet them." (p. 130) The sentence was later dropped, but she doesn't suggest a similar fate for those so committed to industry's needs.

Arti K. Rai, professor of law at Duke University, concludes that because of the enticement of commercial gain, "The lesson to be drawn is that universities, and particularly university administrations, cannot necessarily be trusted to take sustained collective action in the public interest." (p. 123)

Former Harvard president Derek Bok warns that commercialization can lead to professors being hired for the wrong reasons and students admitted for the wrong reasons. Pressures to commercialize may mean student educational quality will be sacrificed and the grading process may be tainted. (pp. 36-38) For Bok the profit motive means the goal is to raise prices and lower costs - inimical to the commitment of every educational institution.

He echoes a recurring theme in the volume about the new profit preoccupation of the universities, namely how few of them will actually make substantial profit. (p. 36) He goes on to note that corporate research support means secrecy, which disrupts collegial relations and erodes trust. It also promotes waste, as investigators must duplicate work already done, retarding the course of science, dependent as it is on the ability to build upon the work of other researchers. (p. 40) For Bok the university's reputation could well be the cost of commercialization. (p. 43)

The university's reputation is one thing, but what about the social costs of commercialization? Ironically, even productivity and growth are likely to suffer with this research and development strategy. The private sector with its preoccupation with shareholders' rates of return and competition has a short-run time frame and therefore tends not to invest in advancing basic knowledge. Tying the universities to the short-term, profit-oriented preoccupations of business will eventually be counterproductive even for the corporate sector. Instead, basic research supported by public funds and operating in a context of academic freedom and independence holds the most promise for scientific advance and hence for applied breakthroughs in the long run.

More important, what about the more general progress of society? What happens to the university's capacity to provide independent knowledge in the public interest? Where the government and university administrators are increasingly concerned with commercialization and attracting funds from the private sector, what happens to the commitment to knowledge for its own sake, to generating critical perspectives on the current social order, to understanding the environmental, health and the social impact of this corporate-led growth?

There is a long history of corporations hiding and defending the effects of their products, production processes and political actions. Professors have a long history of being on both sides of this divide. The consequences of buying in or selling out go well beyond the concerns of the reputation of universities.

Robert Chernomas is a professor of economics at the University of Manitoba.