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Arnold Kling draws a parallel between the contemporary university and the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, casting Harvard President Larry Summers as a reluctant Martin Luther:
The Catholic Church in 1500 was a debased, corrupt monopoly. It collected onerous taxes, which people paid because they believed that there was no alternative if they wanted a decent afterlife. However, inwardly people seethed at the amount that the clergy extracted and the debauched uses to which the funds were put. It is a fascinating thesis, particularly pointed for us defenders of market society and intellectual property. Academia, with its affiliates in the foundation world, is the center of opposition to market society and the property rights that make it possible, preaching the gospel of the New Commons, or, in the phrase of Eben Moglen of Columbia, Dot Communism. It is especially hostile to markets in intellectual property. (See, e.g., here and here.)
Of course, a certain hypocrisy is involved, because the administrative and business sides of universities are as rapacious as any robber baron. Harvard’s $20 billion+ endowment is happily invested in businesses and markets of all sorts, and the University of California is a relentless collector of patents. The professoriat lives high on the system that it treats with contempt -- another parallel to the pre-Reformation church, by the way, which owned a huge share of the dominant factor of production of its age. The Church in England in the early 16th Century held one-third of the land.
Kling sees rebellion as coming from the consumers:
Colleges and universities are in a similar position [to the Church] today. They . . . they certainly extract onerous tuitions, taxpayer support, and alumni contributions. Parents pay because they fear that to do otherwise would condemn their children to a hell of low status occupations and spouses.
However, inwardly, the customers are seething. . . . Parents would seethe even more if they could see the administrative bloat on campus and the princely salaries of tenured professors. He, like this blog last week, raises the possibility of salvation through the Church of the Internet:
The conditions may be ripe for reformation of the academy. The Internet, like the printing press, has the potential to broaden the availability of scholarly work. Just as the printing press allowed people to study scripture outside the traditional Church, the Net makes it easier to study outside of the traditional college. Just as the Protestant denominations catered to a Biblically literate public, perhaps a competing system of higher education will arise to cater to people who are used to tapping into expertise via the Internet. He might cite another factor, too. There was an economic dimension to the destruction of the power of the pre-Reformation Church, which was hostile to the rising merchant and entrepreneurial classes and had to be constrained to give these forces room to breathe. Still in print are the classics on this theme: Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
I wonder when the power centers of the tech world will notice that the anti-IP assumptions of academia are badly damaging their interests. Most obviously at odds with the "New Commons" approach are the great content industries -- movies, music, publishing, games, photography. But in fact any industry is at risk if has the economic characteristic of having high fixed and low marginal costs, so one can add pharmaceuticals, telecom, and, in fact, most of tech.
(Tech? This may not be obvious. But tech is subject to the same dynamic as pharmaceuticals, where it takes $800 million to make the first pill, and 10 cents to make the second. Building a chip fab plant and making batch #1 costs about $3 billion; batch #2 comes a lot cheaper. So chips are subject to the same argument that is made by academics with respect to movies and music: That they should be priced at marginal cost, which is approximately zero.)
So will Summers, who is known for his relentless rationalism, take on the reactionary irrationalities of a complacent academia? Not likely, really, but he could do worse than emulate the response attributed to Martin Luther when he was told to recant: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me."
posted by James DeLong @ 12:17 PM | Academia
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