Counterpunch Weekend Edition
June 18 - 20, 2010
Daniel S. Greenberg's Tech Transfer
More Academic Fun
By CHARLES R. LARSON
Tech Transfer: Science, Money, Love, and the Ivory Tower
By Daniel S. Greenberg
Kanawha Press, 270 pp., $11.45
Although Daniel S. Greenberg’s Tech Transfer is ostensibly about
the spurious ways that professors at major research universities
hype their discoveries and sell them to industry (Big Pharma, for
example), Greenberg’s satire is so broad that his rambunctious
story is as applicable to the humanities as it is to the sciences.
His focus is on the promotion of major scientific breakthroughs
that universities--with coordinated help from both professors and
administrators--rely on to generate royalties from discoveries
once they have been transferred from the institutional research
laboratories to industry, i.e., tech transfer. No one who has ever
taught in higher education will fail to be amused by Greenberg’s
hilarious romp.
When Kershaw University’s doddering and beloved president finally
dies, the faculty fears that their days of neglectful oversight
will come to an end. Obviously, there has to be a search for a new
president. All of the applications for the position are left
unopened because the search firm has its own short list. Then, the
head of the firm warns the trustees that it’s virtually impossible
to find a candidate who is totally clean. “Consider that with
computer hacking and the cell-phone camera and other intrusive
devices now universal facts of life, derogatory information can be
just a few clicks away. And once it’s found, anything about anyone
can be displayed on the Internet, including presidents of
universities.”
Then, the clincher: “There was a very admirable young man—Harvard,
Rhodes Scholar—running in a Congressional primary last year. Just
the kind of person we’d all like to see in politics. I won’t say
where this happened, but somehow a video of him picking his nose
and then a minute later shaking hands with voters showed up on the
Internet. And it was all over for him. That’s the new digital
world for you.”
The problem, then, is how to find an untainted person to be the
next president of Kershaw University. In a wonderful scene
involving the board of trustees and the search firm, all the
outside candidates are eliminated, including the candidates chosen
by the firm itself. Never fear. There has to be some candidate
from within the university, some nebbish professor who is so
undistinguished and so unimaginative that there is no blot on his
past. Enter Professor Mark Winner of the economics department, the
Chauncey Gardiner of Kershaw University. Though he’s been at the
university for years—his research is described as “above mediocre”
and he’s an expert on vending machines--hardly anyone knows
anything about him. He has, in fact, left no mark on the
university. In other words, he’s the ideal candidate for the job.
Of the economics department itself, Greenberg writes, “The
department, like others at Kershaw, had a geriatric tilt because
of the federal law against age discrimination, which restricted
forced retirement. In the absence of incontestable dementia or
other disabling infirmities, professors were assured life-long
employment, as long as they could get to the campus. The
department housed multiple sects of economics: Keynesianism,
mercantilism, monetarism, Henry George single taxing,
libertarianism, and neo-Marxism. There were Friedmanites, as well
as gold and sliver nostalgists, flat taxers, and a non-repentant
bi-metalist. Randomly present among these adherents were various
personality disorders, including hair-trigger, uncontrollable
tempers, chronic sulkiness, and irremediable grudge-bearing. In
combination, the beliefs and the personalities had long ago
spawned bitter conflicts, both in the columns of learned journals
and in face-to-face encounters at scholarly conferences and chance
meetings, on and off campus. Many of the economics professors,
like their colleagues in other departments, were months, sometimes
years, late in delivering articles and reviews promised to
professional journals, and many were years overdue in fulfilling
book contracts. Nonetheless, conflict took priority.”
That utterly delicious passage is applicable to university
politics everywhere. I am in awe of Greenberg, who has never held
a full-time academic appointment yet is dead center in his
understanding of the pettiness and the excesses of university
faculties. There are dozens of equally revealing passages about
academia’s worst excesses in Tech Transfer, many of them so brief
you wonder if the narrator (and probably Greenberg himself)
wouldn’t make a good stand-up comic. Of one faculty member with a
whiz-bang reputation for getting federal grants, he observes, “He
was notable for acquiring research grants, because he was notable
for acquiring research grants.” And of the sorry state of
post-docs he quips that a time will probably arrive when there
will be the designation “post-doc emeritus.”
The central plot concerns a celebrated professor at Kershaw who
discovers a formula that—when fed to rats—transforms them into a
state where sleep is no longer necessary. The Army has
surreptitiously funded the research under the hope that once the
drug is used on soldiers, it will keep them fighting forever--with
an “unexpected bonus of [never] eliminating human waste.”
The secret research (and its implications for warfare) can only
have negative ramifications for the university’s image. Once
Kershaw’s new president gets wind of the research project, Tech
Transfer becomes a gut-splitting page turner.
Sit back and enjoy Daniel S. Greenberg’s wicked roller-coaster
ride through the halls of academe. The satire is woven throughout
every scene in this clever academic novel—the most engaging I’ve
read in many years—but like all good humor, the sharp edge is just
below the surface, barely hidden, but capable of cutting deeply if
you grip the book too tightly.
Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American
University in Washington, D.C.
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