Research & Teaching: For the Public Good

Research is selfish and leads to a monopolizing of intellectual property by the researcher and the financial backer. Monopolies do not serve society, so they need to be broken. In the world of academia, the monopoly buster is the classroom, where the results of the research effort are distributed for free to the public through students.

This is the key argument of Professor Steve Fuller's opinion piece, "Is Academic Freedom Worth the Price?" (available online at the Taipei Times). And once the original findings of one's research are disseminated to the public through the classroom, the researcher and the financial backer are forced to engage in more research, an effort to keep the selfish monopoly alive.

For universities, therefore, this means "allowing access to knowledge to students who lack the intellectual, political, or financial resources that might have enabled them to produce it for themselves."

Of great relevance to too many professors in Taiwan is Professor Fuller's admonishment that universities can only perform as they were naturally intended to do when academics "speak and write plainly, demystify jargon, present their ideas in alternative media and stress applications to domains that do not concern the academics themselves."

It is a lesson we all need to learn and remember.