The purpose of this research is to examine an article discussing how universities are becoming business entities in various ways. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal ideas contained in Ovetz's "Entrepreneurialization of the Universities," to discuss the positive and negative elements of the piece, and then to make recommendations that would appear to have a salutary effect on the clarity with which the ideas might be presented.
The argument of "Entrepreneurialization of the Universities" is in the nature of an analysis of the extent and character of corporate presence in the realm of higher-education research and development. The author views that presence negatively, not only because of the apparent conflicts of interest built in to the variant agendas of corporate and educational enterprises, but also because in its various constituent parts, the corporate presence appears to have had a negative impact on the potential for noncorporate academic and socioacademic agendas to arise and develop within the university structure. The article as a whole can be described as advocacy research for the reason that the intent of the paper seems as much to persuade as to inform. The author himself offers the term adversarial research (31).
The author appears to make an assumption that corporate and academic interests are diametrically opposed, and his thesis is that corporate interests are detrimental to the academy. This thesis--which may be perfectly true--is developed from a variety of viewpoints, but the very variety lays bare problems of focus and argument. For example, Ovetz says that owing to systematic federal and state defunding, universities have adopted development strategies under the banner of privatization of entrepreneurialization.
The principal difficulty with the thesis is that it is inconsistently presented. When the author wants to prove that the corporate presence on campus is too great, he cite...