Word: ridgeway
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...RIDGEWAY sees the central fact about modern American universities as being their conversion into centers of industrial activity. "The professors." he concludes, "are less interested in teaching students than in yanking the levers of their new combines so that these machines will grow bigger and go faster. The university has in large part been reduced to serving as a banker broker for the professors' outside interests. The charming elitism of the professors has long since given way to the greed of social and political scientists whose manipulative theories aim only at political power." The body of The Closed Corporation seeks...
...Ridgeway examines every phase of the university's incestuous involvement with industry and government. He discusses the inevitable interlocks between university corporations and large industrial corporations. As university trustees are generally businessmen, predictably enough, they run their institutions like businesses. "Princeton controls . . . the two main hotels, the movie theatre and stores on the main street of Princeton. . . . Its representatives are on both banks. The treasurer of Dartmouth college is chairman of the Hanover Trust Company where Dartmouth has an account. The University of Michigan helped finance the building of a Howard Johnson's . . . Both Harvard and MIT have their representatives...
Universities do not confine their business activities to their nearby environments. Ridgeway describes how some have turned themselves in major beneficiaries of profits from drug discoveries made in their laboratories. Indiana University holds the patents on Crest toothpaste, Rutgers on the drug Streptomycin. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the University of Wisconsin provides the university with over $2 million annually, much of it derived from royalties on inventions made in the Foundation labs. (Warfarin, a leading rat poison, is the best known of these...
...context of university financial ventures, Ridgeway brings up Harvard's stockholdings in Middle South Utilities, the holding company which controls electric utilities in various Southern states. He quotes Pusey's comment when questioned about the racist management of the company's southern divisions: "If there are discriminatory practices, then the company should be prosecuted under federal law. . . . Our purpose is just to invest in places that are selfishly good for Harvard. We do not use our money for social purposes...
...should do more to break the ties that bind their schools to Government and business. But they do not suggest how to replace the vital advantages of Government-financed research that they disapprove of-the money for equipment and professors' salaries that might not be otherwise available. Instead, Ridgeway offers ethical safeguards. If colleges continue to operate as quasi-corporations, he says, they should be subject to public scrutiny, just as publicly owned businesses are. They must "cease being the firehouse on the corner answering all the alarms, many of them false. To recover freedom of choice takes...