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From The Faculty Chair
What do Amgen, Dupont, Ford, Singapore, Microsoft, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Cambridge University, Merrill Lynch, and Merck have in common? The answer is, us. Each of these organizations has signed either a memorandum of understanding or a contract to form a major alliance with MIT. These alliances differ in various ways, but they all fund a variety of research and educational initiatives. Our ties to Microsoft and Cambridge University were announced this academic year, and it is safe to assume that there will be more such agreements in the future.
These new relationships differ from "business as usual" for MIT in several ways:
In the past, MIT has entered into agreements with other organizations where some of the above has been true. The large number of recent agreements in which virtually all of these issues have been important, signals the emergence of a new model of research funding, called strategic partnerships. We at MIT have, in fact, invented a distinct, new mode for supporting our core mission of education and research.
But having invented something new, we, as a faculty, need to understand the rewards and risks of strategic partnerships, and, as importantly, invent the appropriate governance mechanisms that maximize the benefits and minimize the risks.
Let me begin with the obvious benefits of strategic partnerships. In an era of flat, or in many fields declining, research support, strategic partnerships offer an infusion of stable, large-scale funding. When appropriately constructed, these relationships can engage us in important new areas of inquiry that might otherwise languish. The truth is that research is expensive, and without funding it often cannot be done.
In addition, there are considerable benefits in diversifying our funding sources. Any system totally dependent on support from a single source - the U.S. government - is arguably unstable. It is unlikely that there will come a time when our government isn't the single largest source of funding for on-campus research. However, with some imagination, one can envision a future in which as much as half of on-campus research comes from a wide range of other sources. In my view, as long as our contractual relationships with these other sources are consonant with our core values as an educational institution, a more diversified set of sources would be far better than our current over-dependence on the federal treasury.
Beyond the sheer monetary advantages of these partnerships, they offer the potential for working on new problems of real relevance to society. Corporations are the means by which discoveries and innovations are migrated from interesting science to affordable products and services. This is how new drug treatments become actual pharmaceutical products and how electronics innovations become new computers and communications technologies. Working collaboratively on long-term ideas with industrial partners can accelerate this process of adoption of innovations. Our industrial partners can provide real-world examples of product design and diffusion that can enhance the quality of our educational programs.
Our partnerships with foreign universities and the governmental sponsors of those relationships reflect the globalization of knowledge and research. These relationships offer our faculty and students real experience with different places and cultures that would be difficult to obtain otherwise. The Cambridge University partnership, for example, will offer as many as 50 MIT undergraduates the opportunity to study at Cambridge each year. Most of the agreements involve informal exchange of visits and, in some cases, deep engagement of our faculty and students with counterparts in our partners' organizations.
The risk side of strategic partnerships is more complicated. By its very nature, industry wants to see measurable benefits from its expenditures. Funding research at MIT requires those companies to sustain a long-term view of such benefits. As an institution, we are not, and should not be, set up to respond to quarterly or annual profit measurements or rate of return calculations.
Our tradition of publicly disseminating new discoveries is integral to our mission and culture. Any relationship that undermines this core value threatens the very nature of the research university. Our current agreements with our strategic partners reflect this by ensuring complete rights to publish our work and disseminate it widely. However, in the future there may arise forces that require us to be vigilant in sustaining that tradition.
The need for these relationships to be negotiated in relative secrecy poses yet another threat. MIT makes decisions through a complicated balance between administrative leadership and consultation with the faculty. We, the faculty, have traditionally accepted that the senior administration should have the authority and flexibility needed to move the university in directions that serve our long-term interests. In turn, the senior administration historically engages the faculty in serious discussion whenever major decisions are being made. This careful, and largely implicit, balance of powers has served us well, and the occasional faculty-administration disputes that have arisen have almost always come about when this social contract was violated.
Still another potential side effect of strategic partnerships, is that the faculty's involvement in them may take time away from other activities, particularly ones focused on our current base of residential students. Faculty time is our scarcest resource, and we should make sure it is being dedicated to activities that best serve our mission. Some partnerships may actually free up faculty time by reducing the resources we put into seeking funding from other sources; others may divert attention from our core mission. We need to judge each one separately on its individual merits.
It is clear (at least to me) that negotiation of major strategic partnerships will require a somewhat different model of faculty-administration balance. Generally, these agreements reach the faculty as "done deals" rather than as "works in progress," with consultations limited to the chair of the faculty (through membership on the Academic Council) and circumspect discussions with small groups of faculty who are directly involved in the partnerships. Our more open style of consultation in the regular faculty committee structure or in open debates at faculty meetings won't work particularly well in creating strategic partnerships. We need a new governance mechanism that strikes a reasonable and realistic balance between the need for confidentiality in the early phases of partnership formation and the legitimate role of consultation with the faculty in major decisions.
I have discussed this issue extensively with members of the senior administration, and they agree that we need to build a better way of engaging the faculty in these partnerships before they are finalized. I propose we do this by creating a subcommittee of the Faculty Policy Committee that would be part of any negotiation process involving strategic partnerships. The group would operate as follows:
This proposal leaves open the question of how, after such consultation, irreconcilable differences of opinion between the faculty and the administration might be resolved. This isn't a unique situation for MIT's governance system, and it rarely causes significant problems. As an institution, such issues are resolved in part by good faith negotiations and in part by a clear understanding that MIT works best when the administration leads in directions that the faculty wants to go anyway. Ultimately, any major divergence of views might be resolved through the involvement of the Corporation. One of MIT's best features is that such mechanisms rarely need to be used, and everyone understands that something has gone seriously wrong when they are needed.
In my view, we have already demonstrated that we can create strategic partnerships that are wholly consistent with our traditions of open research and dissemination of new knowledge. MIT is uniquely positioned to create strategic partnerships, and our recent experience suggests that there is a wide array of opportunities for us in this new arena. We already have invaluable experience. With some further fine-tuning that institutionalizes governance processes to ensure we continue to remain true to our mission, this expertise will be an enormous comparative advantage that will allow us to continue our leadership role among research universities.
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