As I crossed paths with many of my fellow '15s and their families this past weekend, I fondly recalled that moment when I first showed my parents my acceptance letter to Dartmouth last year. It was the first college I had heard back from, and I was hard-pressed to hold back my excitement as I handed over the green and white envelope to my mother.
"Darth...mouth?" she vocalized slowly, confusion coloring her smile. "Where is that again?"
Many of us here probably have had a similar experience. Despite the consolation offered by the words of Daniel Webster, I still couldn't help but feel some tinge of curiosity. With such a multitude of alumni in so many facets of the public sphere from CEOs of multi-national corporations to the treasury secretary it seemed odd that the College remains sequestered so far away from the public eye.
Members of Dartmouth faculty, however, have proposed a number of new policy initiatives in hopes of remedying Dartmouth's lack of visibility. In his lecture last Saturday during the Project Z conference, professor Tillman Gerngross of the Thayer School of Engineering described the need to develop a school of publicly visible innovators instead of a solely inward-looking community. Rather than cultivating an environment for our own Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, Gerngross argued that Dartmouth is simply developing a steady stream of graduates who are content with flowing toward the next big start-ups instead of testing out their own business ideas.
The major thrust of Gerngross' proposal is predicated on a revised system of incentives, offering Thayer faculty full patent rights to any of their major discoveries while allowing the College to maintain a consulting role to support these research efforts. This would be a monumental step away from the current policy, in which the College retains ownership of patentable inventions developed from assigned faculty duties. Royalty income is similarly skewed, with the College receiving 75 percent of earnings and the inventor receiving only 25 percent. Doing away with this model could improve our competitiveness with schools like Harvard University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in obtaining top-tier faculty. However, I have reservations about what such a drastic change might entail with regard to academic and campus culture.
One of the things many students value about Dartmouth is the opportunity we have to develop personal relationships with our professors. Being able to ask a question in class, receiving a three-page email response or even having dinner at a professor's house are experiences that are unimaginable at research-dominated universities. With so much more additional weight being placed on research under Gerngross' plan, there might be a detrimental effect on our faculty's style of teaching. There is much to be said about learning from an industry's leading innovators, but do the best inventors really make the best teachers?
Similarly, decreased patent connection to the College might create a greater flow of innovators from Dartmouth to the private sector once they make a discovery. Selection bias once again plays a crucial role, with the most successful faculty members more likely to take advantage of lucrative offers by private firms. If the College were able to maintain some leverage in patent rights, the draw for faculty members to make this shift would be diminished. At the same time, however, last year's Supreme Court ruling on the Stanford University patent rights case (Stanford v. Roche) revealed the limits of university ownership of patents. Even though a university holds the patent rights to an invention, the inventor still maintains both ultimate ownership and the ability to transfer those rights.
To be sure, Gerngross' proposal represents a very interesting opportunity for the College, potentially providing yet another niche for our institution in which to thrive. At the same time, however, the costs to student-professor relations and staff turnover should not be ignored. Before undertaking such a drastic shift in college policy, we need discussion forums involving all parties graduates and undergraduates, faculty and alumni. While gaining a stronger foothold on the global stage is important, we would do well to watch where we step.
