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says, "are joint research programs, industrial
companies who will come to us
as affiliates or send visiting lecturers,
continuing programs in professional education,
joint conferences, opportunities
for consulting and faculty work in
industry, joint efforts to address national
problems like pollution, productivity,
automation. All of those we ought to be
playing an increasingly important role
in, and we've got to do it in partnership
with industry."
About three years ago, with such ideas
in mind, Rhodes created the Corporate
Liaison Committee, composed of highlevel
executives in industry, many of
them Cornell alumni. Robert G. Engel
'53, vice president and treasurer of Morgan
Guaranty Trust Company, and
Charles F. Knight '57, chief executive
officer of Emerson Electric, are cochairmen
of the committee.
According to Knight, committee
members see their job as one of helping
the university "interface" with industry,
for the benefit of both sides. "The channels
of communication get better and the
money gets spent more effectively," he
says, emphasizing that the committee
has merely made suggestions, and that
any actual accomplishments in improving
industry-university cooperation
should be credited to university staff.
Rhodes credits the committee with
helping to restructure the office of the
vice president for research, bringing
graduate and post-doctoral education
and patents and licensing under its jurisdiction.
The committee is to meet again
this spring, and Rhodes hopes it will,
among other things, look at ways Cornell
can contribute to continuing professional
education for industry.
Others, like Prof. W. Donald Cooke,
Chemistry, who retired last year from
the research vicepresidency Barker now
holds, point out that industry-university
ties used to be very close, but have faded
since the federal government began to
supply massive funding for basic research.
Barker agrees. "Most chemistry departments
thirty years ago had lots of industrial
connections," he says. "Some
of them have kept a few, but they became
less and less important as the federal
money poured in." He sees what's
happening now as a "pendulum swing"
back to the old ways. Both agree that a
number of changes in society over the
last few years have helped move the pendulum.
Among them:
• Industry is becoming more and
more dependent on high technology,
both for its products and the methods of
manufacturing them. The time lag be-
CORNELL ALUMNI NEWS
President summons
alumni to plan
new avenues
of cooperation
with companies
tween basic discoveries and marketable
products is growing shorter.
• Engineering colleges are doing more
research, in addition to teaching.
• Industries themselves are doing
more, and better quality research. This
means a company will have more scientists
on its staff who have some sort of
relationship with university scientists.
• Industry depends on the universities
to train future workers, and today they
must be highly trained in science and
technology. They get this training by doing
and being exposed to actual research,
so it's in the best interests of industry
to support that research.
• New technologies, especially biotechnology
and semiconductors, have
caught industries napping, without any
research base of their own. Most of the
advances in biotechnology so far have
been in universities, so industries are going
to the source.
• Increasing numbers of university
scientists are being tied up in exclusive
contractual relationships in their offcampus
hours with one company or another.
Getting industry funding for oncampus
research seems preferable.
• When Congress cut back on research
funding, it also increased tax
credits to industry for research expenditures.
Industries can often get "more
bang for the buck" by financing outside
research than by doing it in-house.
Campus research relationships with
corporations lead to corporate giving in
other areas, according to Ron Stone.
"We would not have received $12.8 million
in corporate philanthropic support
last year," Stone says, "if it were not for
the history of faculty ties with companies.
We are known to many of those
companies because of the research ties."
Stone's job is to keep in touch with
key people at some 200 corporations to
which Cornell might turn for specific financial
needs. He doesn't handle research
funding, which is Barker's responsibility,
but he sees research relationships
as one of many entrees—he
uses the word "ports"—through which
he might approach a company, along
with, say, student recruiting or alumni
who work there.
Corporate philanthropy, like research
funding, is based on enlightened self-interest,
Stone believes. "Corporations
are not in business to give away
money," he points out. "In fact, they
are in business to keep it. That they give
at all is somewhat amazing!" They do
give, he says, because their lifeblood is
tied to the educational process and to its
product.
Industry representatives agree. Richard
Darragh, PhD '57, director of product
development for Procter & Gamble,
says, "I think most corporations realize
corporate citizenship is important. If society
is not healthy, we can't maintain a
healthy corporation."
Not everyone welcomes the industry
connection, however. When the biotechnology
center was brought before the
Faculty Council of Representatives for
approval, there were about eighty
"ayes" and four or five "nays" in the
voice vote. According to Barker, the dissenters
argued that there are such different
philosophies guiding the university
and corporations that the two cannot interact
without one perturbing the other.
Barker adds that "the people putting
forth that argument perceived that all
the perturbation would be in the direction
of the university. You could argue
that it might all flow the other way."
Prof. Walter Lynn, Environmental
Engineering, director of the Program on
Science, Technology, and Society (STS),
and Prof. Franklin A. Long, Chemistry,
emeritus, a member of STS, have studied
industry-university interaction in
some detail and written two articles on
the subject. Lynn suggests several concerns
that he feels must be dealt with if
the university is to work more closely
with industry.
First, he worries that emphasis at universities
may shift away from basic to
applied research. Even when they support
"basic" research, industry funders
will be looking for practical applications,
at least somewhere down the road,
and not all basic research comes with
built-in justification. For example, Lynn
says, "If I want to study the stars, I really
have to struggle to explain what use
it's going to be. The interest of astronomers
is really just to understand something.
The object of basic research is to
try to understand what nature is about in
extraordinarily lavish detail."
"The training of graduate students,"
he adds, "is intimately tied to the research
those students do. If they do ap-