It is undoubtedly part of the university’s mission to “focus on fueling Iowa’s economy and building a sustainable future.” The first goal listed under this heading is to “lead the nation in the number of new patents awarded, [and] licenses issued.”

The unquestioned assumption appears to be that the extension of intellectual property rights necessarily tends to further the public good. This assumption should be questioned.

Though the patent system does provide a spur to innovation in some respects, it hampers it in others. Innovative activities are discouraged whenever they might infringe on enforceable patent rights.

The Economist magazine has pointed out that this danger is especially salient with complex technological systems that incorporate a number of sub-systems, suggesting that the proliferation of property rights in software may be hampering developments in the computer sector.

When innovations developed with public monies at Iowa State are patented and commercialized, the people of Iowa must pay twice. First, they pay to socialize the costs of research and development that the private sector does not wish to pay itself, and then they must, in addition, pay the monopoly prices that those who hold or license those patents are able to charge.

For these and many other reasons, we believe that Iowa State University should not make the continuation of the present patent regime a central focus of its strategic plan.

A public university of science and technology has a responsibility to critique the assumption that the public good is best furthered by the relentless privatization of ever-more publicly funded knowledge. Sheldon Krimsky (Tufts University), author of Science in the Public Interest, has stated that “the threat to the objectivity of scientific research is reaching crisis proportions” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

A public university of science and technology ought to have a strategic plan that explicitly commits the university to protecting the independence of scientific-technical research from pernicious corporate influence, rather than one that abstracts entirely from what may well be the single most serious problem faced by research universities in the 21st century.

Tony Smith

Professor and Chairman

Philosophy and Religious Studies