s UT's position as the seventeenth largest recipient of corporate funds and the need to stop the looming technopolis plot (12). When he wants to prove that universities don't benefit from corporate investment, he complains about the paucity of funds: "Corporate research contracts have remained steady at about 6% in 1991 even [sic] since the 1980s, leaving huge deficits in campus financing" (11).
Ovetz comments that corporate partners piggyback on university R&D, profiting from technology transfers to the private sector. He says that funding shortfalls "attest to the level at which capital still refuses to invest in the universities, whether it be for high tech or cultural studies" (11). Yet he suggests significant corporate participation in university R&D as his discussion continues:
This may explain the intensified interest in tech transfer and spin-offs that take almost no corporate investment and grow almost unilaterally on university donated land used for incubators or research parks and centers, low paid graduate students, unwaged student "interns" that work up to 30-40 hours a week, paid faculty that do everything from advising to running the companies and state monies in the form of tech transfer advisory services and centers, R&D grants and financial incentives. (11)
What is unclear from the text is where the R&D grants come from--government, which Ovetz says has systematically defunded assorted programs, or the corporate sector, which he says avoids financial commitment. Then, citing DOD research money, he declares the entrepreneurialization of UT-Austin a fait accompli and a symptom of things to come for even smaller schools (12).
The reader is not sure what the objection is. Is the author complaining that there has been investment, that there has been too much investment, that the investment has come from the wrong source, or that not enough investment has been made? Or is the complaint that investment from a vari...