In Rex’s post about FLOSS he argues that Open Source is so popular among academics because it is, in fact, modeled on the ideal of academic discourse. Of course, academics rarely achieves its own ideals. I still smart at the memory of my lowest grade in grad school (a B!) – when a physical anthropology professor marked me down for suggesting that Karl Popper’s theory of scientific knowledge was based on an idealized notion of how scientific institutions actually work. His theories, I argued, require a kind of idealized speech community, not unlike what we find in Habermas. In actual fact, scientists often work for companies or institutions which seek numerous ways to restrict the flow of knowledge through copyright (i.e. AIDS drugs), secrecy (i.e. corporate secrets), and even misinformation (i.e. the tobacco companies).
Fortunately, academics has often remained much closer to the ideal. This is why, I believe, most major pharmaceutical innovations still come out of universities rather than from drug company labs. But as universities and corporations get into bed with each other, I think FLOSS will be more and more important to defend the academic ideal against further encroachment from attempts to restrict speech. (See this 2002 article by Nathan Newman in The Nation.)
My example is not, in fact, one of corporate encroachment, but it does show one example of universities attempting to restrict speech. It comes from my father’s university, Stevens Institute of Technology, where my dad has been at the forefront of a battle to make the school’s fiscal practices more transparent. Some alumni set up a web site to give greater attention to the issue, called UnEvenStevens.
The latest news comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The American Association of University Professors has sharply criticized the Stevens Institute of Technology for its proposed institutional code of ethics, which the association said constitutes a serious threat to academic freedom.
The code of ethics, which was drafted by the private New Jersey institute’s Board of Trustees over the summer, would prohibit faculty members, administrators, officers, and trustees from communicating directly with members of the news media, credit-rating agencies, or accrediting bodies without “prior authorization” from the university’s vice president for development and external affairs.
Some faculty members consider the code to be a gag order, an effort to quell dissent amid increasing controversy over the university’s strained finances and rising presidential compensation.
Under the draft code, official authorization would be necessary to “ensure that the institute’s board-approved message is relayed consistently and accurately.” Failure to adhere to its provisions would result in disciplinary action, the draft says, and any public comments found to be derogatory would be considered a “breach of the duty and loyalty” owed by faculty members and others to the university.
This is really a story about academic governance. And the heart of the story is the attempt of non-profit institutions to implement practices more commonly found in corporations. In fact, because universities are non-profits there are often less oversights over how they handle their finances and administrative affairs than there are on corporations.
It is true that once academics recline in a library chair and open a book they are engaged in a kind of FLOSS debate with other academics, I think we should also be aware of the desire of institutions to impinge on that freedom. While perhaps I didn’t pick the best example (motivated as I was by personal reasons to give some publicity to my dad’s endeavors – you can see an interview with him if you watch the TV clip on the UnEvenStevens page!), I think it is still possible to see how a particular licensing scheme may be important in the long run, even if right now we personally don’t feel any institutional pressures restricting our speech.
Everyone talks about how great it is that Intel and Microsoft are hiring anthropologists, and I don’t begrudge anyone a paycheck, but I do worry about what the future might hold if I become the McDonald’s Chair of Anthropology at Big Phrama U.
UPDATE: It just occurred to me that most universities retain copyright of virtually everything you do while you are their employee. I think for most social scientists this never becomes an issue, but it is something to think about. If you put something online, can you really put it under an open source license if you university decides otherwise? Questions of university ownership of intellectual property were the focus of a lawsuit won by the CUNY teacher’s union this past summer.
SOmewhat incidental to the main gist of this post, but:
Aren’t we all, at least potentially, members of the news media? I mean, leave aside that academics publish primarily in periodicals intended to bring their markets up to date on the ideas and events that shape their field (our own newsletter is even called “Anthropology News”), many academics write op-eds, science news, and book reviews for local and national newspapers. Are profs at SIT supposed to get permission to talk to each other? Can they talk to themselves without a letter from their administration?
The other issue brought up here, copyright ownership, is an interesting one. If you listen to commercial copyright advocates, you would be led to understand that copyright is the only thing that protects content producers — writers, musicians, artists, etc. — and allows them to make a living off of their work. Although I have no idea what percentage of publication is academic in nature, I assume that academic writing makes up a reasonably large chunk of the overall whole, and yet academics rarely a) make a living from their writing, or b) hold their own copyrights. Universities hold some copyrights; publishers hold most of the rest — ever notice the “used by permission of [some journal]” credit in collections of previously published work, even when the article is by the author of the book him- or herself? Yet, somehow, with neither copyright protection nor profit potential, academics keep publishing at an apparently tremendous rate. This suggests that there is a kind of “dark matter” of rights and control that is independent of formal copyright — some body of informal incentives that continue to operate in the absence of formal rights. The argument often used against FOSS advocates like Stallman is that the model is unsustainable outside of a marginal subset of code-writers (some “marginality”, to have essentially built the Internet and the Web!) but the academic world would seem to dwarf the FOSS community significantly.
I have found that open source project modeling has been so popular among academics due to the value of patents and discovery. Your average cell phone takes about ten thousand patents to make. So the value of any one is very small. What’s more any invention you do end up making is easily reverse engineered and duplicated in a way that gets around patents (in computing especially). So the question is: why bother?
In fact, open source has a large number of advantages to it such as rapid development and prototyping (read the cathedral and the bazaar http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain). As well as the kind of economic advantages that are especially useful to academics on tight budgets.
What’s more large portions of the open source community are not academics, but still seek out the advantages of open sourcing.
This is not to say that you aren’t still right in your view of academics, but there is almost no reason for someone in an academic position not to open source. Especially with most Universities retaining a right to said patents.
Publish or perish?
Fear that material previously “published” on the Internet will be rejected by the refereed journals where articles have to appear to be counted toward tenure?
Fear of being criticized—altogether realistic in a domain where (OK, I’m exaggerating) “critique” seems 99% of what most people learn to do—reinforced by the one near universal experience from schooling, competing for grades and being afraid of making mistakes?
I breifly return from my months of silence to elaborate!
Popper, among other scientists has a sort of optimism about what science is and should be, that I share in a way. It’s easy to see science as potentially a sort of beautiful human endeavor, collaborating to create useful knowlege about the world. It’s unfortunately also easy to ignore the real circumstances of how science is conducted and how that’s contingent on our economic system. Right now science can’t exist without funding, so it’s obvious usefulness is bent to the will of outside economic forces that control how it’s used and how the work proceeds.
This is most obvious when considering Feynman’s account of his work on the atomic bomb. At the time, it certainly seemed a moral cause, and when it worked, there was this joy among the scientists that they had succeeded. It took some time for the implications of how his work was going to be used to sink in for Feynman, and he leaves a sort of morbid account of his inability to comprehend why people would even go on about their daily lives in the face of such obvious impending destruction.
Scientists, hopeful ones at least, across all disciplines seek the sort of culture that promotes free exchange of information in the production of knowledge for the sake of the benefit of humanity.
Things like physics and chemistry are easier to bend to economic means than anthropology, and so within them that culture has been constrained to a much larger degree.
I myself find it pretty scary that business is creeping in on anthropology.
Now, back to my reading assignments.