Wisconsin Public Television University Place Future of Public Higher Education  March 30, 2012 UP711  cc >> Sara Goldrick-Rab: The topic of the next session is The Narrowing of Public Interest: How Universities Became Economic Engines. And we have with us Elizabeth Popp Berman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Albany at SUNY. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California Berkeley in 2007, and she studies how social institutions make decisions about how to organize the relationships with the marketplace in higher education and elsewhere. She's written a great book called Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Becomes an Economic Engine, which was published this year by Princeton University Press and received the President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association. I am really excited that she's here. As it turns out, we were Spencer Dissertation Fellows together a decade ago, and I can't believe I'm old enough to say that now, neither one of us should be. I am really happy to have her here. And then we're going to hear, also, a perspective on her talk from Sheila Slaughter as well. So this should be a very stimulating session, and I appreciate you all being here. >> Elizabeth Popp Berman: Thank you very much, Sara. 

So topic of the larger conference today is the public interest in the future of public higher education in the 21st century. I'm going to talk primarily about the scientific research function of the university, and I'm going to talk mostly about the 20th century and not the 21st. I'm going to try and move that into a point where we're saying what does the things that have happened over the last 30 years or so say about where we are now and where we're going to be going in the future. Just to give you a quick sketch of the talk, this is my book that just came out, Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Really, the main thing that I'm trying to do here in this book is, to borrow from Sheila Slaughter's term, explain where did academic capitalism come from, and in the science end at the university in particular. So why did US academic science move toward the market? And I'm going to try to make three main points during my time here today. One is to give you a brief explanation of why did universities make this shift. Just sort of the empirical answer to that. Then to kind of connect back to some of these larger questions, what has this meant in the long run for universities, and then, in particular, what are the implications for the future of public higher education specifically. So those are the three main things that I'm going to try to talk about today. 

The main research strategy of the book is I look at three different practices that are pretty widely seen as representing this shift and can look at those historically as case studies. And so I examine the emergence of university patenting, the expansion of university industry research centers, and, finally, the emergence of faculty entrepreneurship, particularly in the bio sciences. And so the larger strategy here is that these are all practices, obviously there's some overlap and some intersections between these, but they each developed on a relatively independent trajectory. And, thus, you would assume that if there were some things that they share in terms of why they emerged at the time that they did, what caused them to emerge, that's indicative of some kind of larger trend about why universities have moved in the direction that they have. My initial sort of oriented question here was try to evaluate the relative roles of universities, industry, and government. In driving this, my initial expectation was that a lot of this was going to be about universities going out and looking for new resources that particularly, in the '70s you had periods of cut-backs, that universities were kind of actively seeking new ways to make money, which would make sense. What I found was actually that it was really policy decisions that were the most important thing driving these changes, much more than universities actively saying we're going to go out and find new sources of money. And so that kind of lead to a second round of research because the policy decisions that made a difference here were really quite diverse. More diverse than I was expecting. And, in addition to some of the ones that you would expect, like the Bayh-Dole Act, there were also very important ones. 

Big capital gains tax cut made a big difference for the emergence of biotech entrepreneurship. Things as obscure and seemingly unrelated as changes in pension fund regulations, which really transformed the venture capital market and again, made a very big difference to the emergence of biotech entrepreneurship. So it was this very eclectic group of decisions that went beyond just things that appeared to directly affect or be aimed at universities or academic science. What they did share, though, was that they all happened within a relatively narrow time frame. So we're looking at about 1978 to 1985. So that was one clear similarity. And when I really went into the politics of these decisions, what I found was that arguments about the economic impact of technological innovation were really critical to making these policy decisions. And so, I won't go into the details of all this, but I looked at 10 decisions overall, all but one of which were made in that time frame. That one there on the bottom happened a little bit earlier. But of these 10 decisions, in 9 of the 10 of these cases, you can see a really strong evidence of a lot of arguments saying that we're going to make this decision because the US economy is in the tank, and we need to figure out how to turn it around. 

The way to do that is to encourage technological innovation because we know that technological innovation drives economic growth. So 9 of the 10 it's very visible. In 6 of the 10 you can actually make a pretty reasonable case that introducing these arguments was decisive. Usually the evidence for that is that you had people trying to promote the policy before that. This is the case for the Bayh-Dole Act. They had been trying to push is for a while. It wasn't until they sort of actively switched strategies and started framing the proposal in terms of the economic impact of innovation that it was able to become politically successful. So that's kind of the core argument of the book and of what I'm going to say today is that what was really critical here was coming to think about science and technology as specifically an economic input and that that was something that was relatively new. Now, from where we stand today, it's kind of hard, I think, at times to imagine how you could not see science and technology as an economic input. That seems kind of almost self-evident based on how we see the world today. 

One thing that was kind of important for me early in this project in sort of realizing how much things had changed was I went to visit the archives at the University of Illinois. This is a picture of ILLIAC, which was one of the first supercomputers at the University of Illinois in the early '60s. And in Illinois in the early '60s, the governor asked the president of the university to try to figure out what the university could do to help regional economic development. And if any place should have been in a good position to do this, Illinois should have been great. They had top 10 departments in chemical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, I think chemistry. They had the resources to be able to do this. So he appointed a committee. He had faculty members from economics and some of the different sciences and from regional planning, I think, and they met for a year and a half to try and figure out how can university help drive regional economic development. At the end of it they came out with the most lackluster report you can imagine. They had no idea what the university could possibly do. 

They made some sort of halfhearted suggestions that maybe we can have night classes for engineers, maybe we can do some more consulting, and they made the great classic academic suggestion that perhaps we could study regional economic development. But they really didn't have any way of thinking about what is the university's economic contribution specifically. If you fast forward, just by my good fortune, the university got a very similar request 30 years later in 1999 from the governor to evaluate, again, what it could do to help leverage its economic impact. And this time it had a quick answer. They created a vice president for economic development. They titled their annual report the University of Illinois: Engine of Growth or something like that. It was something very similar. They expanded their technology transfer office. They started an incubator program for new start-ups. They had a whole different framework for thinking about what it was that the university did in relation to the economy. 

So that's kind of one example of how much things have changed in terms of how we think about what the science end of universities does. The second example, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the report on Science: The Endless Frontier, but for those who might not be, this was written by Vannevar Bush, published in 1945, kind of the document that laid out post-war science policy. A few years ago, economist Paul Samuelson acknowledged that he actually drafted much of the report. So if you would think that anything sort of laying out science policy would kind of have an economic competent to it, it would be a report that had been drafted by an economist. But if you look at it, very little mention of anything that is explicitly economic. There's a brief mention that science can create new industries which is going to create jobs, but I went through and counted the amount in which they talk about economic issues. It's about 3% of the whole report. So a very minor theme. And so these are just some examples of how the way we think about science and technology has changed over time.  And that I just said. 

So, one thing I want to emphasize here, though, is that moving towards thinking about science as being important because it does drive economic growth and economic development also means that you necessarily have a shift away from thinking about some of its non-economic impacts, its other kind of impacts to the extent that they don't necessarily always line up with economic development. So if you think about where this shift came from, why did we start to think about the issues in these terms, it didn't come from university administrators. They did sort of jump onto this relatively early, but that was not the origins of this change. It actually emerged with economists. Economists started really talking a lot about the role of innovation in driving growth starting in the late '50s, certainly in the 1960s, and you can even see it among economists who were pretty prominent in policy circles. So this was out there among policymakers in the '60s, but it wasn't a message that got a lot of resonance at a time when innovation in the US seemed to be doing pretty much just fine, and people weren't that concerned about the economy and the state of the US and the larger global marketplace. It really wasn't until the 1970s when the economy is really going downhill, we start to have a pretty concerted push by people largely from large R&D intensive companies to really emphasize this innovation issue and to push this to something that the US needs to fix. And so by about 1977 or so, this has become a prominent enough issue that it's starting to become seen among policymakers as almost common sense. That we need strengthen technological innovation to help the economy. This is something that is popular with both republicans and democrats. 

It's not a terribly controversial thing at the time. Everybody kind of is able to get on board with this. Republicans and democrats, of course, have very different ideas about what it is that you should do to do that. Republicans generally want to cut taxes, deregulate, strengthen patent rights, and loosen antitrust regulations. Democrats are much more interested in doing something that looks more like industrial policy. But they're both really agreeing on this core idea that we need to somehow improve innovation. What ends up happening is that you have, basically, you have all these different sorts of policies. Again, some of them these things that are pretty directly aimed at universities or at science, but some of these policies that are really in other policy areas, like tax policies and this pension policy issue, that are framed in terms of their ability to harness innovation or to improve innovation. And certainly not every policy that somebody says is going to improve innovation passes, but the policies that are able to be framed that way just kind of have a little bit of a political edge at a moment when that's a particularly compelling argument. And so these policies, again, they're not exclusively sort of conservative or right leaning. 

They're really somewhat mixed. You do have a lot of industrial policy kinds of things mixed up in here, but they're all more or less sold in these terms of driving innovation. Now, university administrators, like I said, they're not at the cutting-edge of this, but they kind of get on board with this program relatively There's a couple of reasons. One, even though I did not find that these policies or these practices were emerging kind of in direct response to seeking revenues. A lot of these new practices were coming out of areas that were doing pretty well financially. There was a lot of money for the bio sciences. It wasn't like they had to go become entrepreneurs because they didn't have any research money. Nevertheless, universities were relatively strapped, and so once it became clear, especially by the late '70s, about 1979, when it's becoming clear that biotech really is going to be very lucrative for a certain set of people. The universities are starting to see this as something they should figure out how to take some advantage of financially. The other issue is that it's becoming increasingly clear the policymakers really care about this. 

And so even if this might not necessarily have been many university administrators first choice of the language that they might want to frame their own, what the value of science was in, it's pretty politically convenient to be able to do this. So you see a pretty rapid shift of university administrators towards getting on board with this sort of language of the purpose of science and technology is a specifically economic one. And, in a lot of ways, this was a successful decision. We talked a lot over the last, I guess, day and a half about many of the problems that universities have seen, but there has been a lot of money that has gone into trying to figure out how to leverage science and technology in these economic ways, and that's a place that I think money still is available at a time when a lot of other kinds of money aren't. So, strategically, this has been a pretty good decision. So, I want to move from there to talking a little bit more about where we are today, how that affects where we find ourselves now. So, what have the long-run effects of this been? I think to some extent, it had been mixed. I don't think that things have turned out quite as badly as some people thought they might, and I don't think the promise of using science and technology to drive development has been quite as wonderful as other people thought it would be. One microcosm of this, perhaps, is patenting where the fear has been that universities are sort of going to patent everything, and it's going to have a really hindrance on people's ability to use that knowledge to do additional research. There have been some effects. 

Fiona Murray has done work on the anticommons effect, so the extent to which patenting stuff prevents other people from using it down the road. And there is a modest effect. It's not that large. On the flip side, though, you can also say, well, patents, the number of patents being issued to universities has been pretty flat for about the last 10 years. So it's not like people are just patenting more and more stuff and it's going to take over everything. So, again, not as extreme, perhaps, as either side initially might have thought, but there are some issues, some significant issues. One of the most significant, I think, is what's happened in medical research, partly because clinical medicine, it's very difficult to evaluate what treatments actually do sometimes, and there are so many people now who have some sort of financial interest in the outcome. You had the emergence of a whole industry related to the pharmaceutical industry whose job it is to manage publications which means that when you've got a whole set of people whose job it is to ghost write articles and attach them to other people, you really sort of reach a point where you sort of run the risk of undermining the whole enterprise of believing the stuff that's out there in peer-reviewed journals. So that's one place that it's really more problematic than others. Another is that it's just difficult to measure but there has been some shift. 

If you're shifting towards funding, areas that are more commercially relevant. That means necessarily there are going to be other things that you're not necessarily funding as much. One example of this might be in agriculture where there's a good bit of money for funding a handful of commercially dominate crops but much less money for funding something like sustainable agriculture or more minor plant varieties that it might makes sense to have investment in but just aren't going to be particularly commercially valuable in the short run. The other thing to keep in mind here is just that, again, at a time when budgets aren't really particularly increasing, to some extent this really is a zero sum game. If you're pulling money away from one particular type or if you're putting money into one particular type of research, there's something else that you're not supporting at the same time. I'll give you one example, sort of a contemporary example of how this can kind of play out when you shift towards focusing on the economic impact. NSF, I don't know how many of you guys, some people at least are aware of this, but in the last year or so NSF has been undertaking a review of the criteria by which it awards grants. And so about 10 years ago, or a little bit more, NSF added a criteria where in addition to sort of talking about the intellectual merit of your project, you have to talk about its broader impacts. This is pretty well established at this point, and so people incorporate that into every grant. But about, in 2010, as part of the American COMPETES Reauthorization Act, which is an economically oriented science and technology policy if there ever was one. 

They asked NSF to reevaluate these criteria, and the America COMPETES Act laid out a set of goals for science. And so it had a list of goals that kind of fall into two main categories. One is sort of an economic set of goals. Increase competitiveness, development of a globally competitive STEM workforce, increased academic industry partnerships. Then there's sort of a more educational set of goals, both at the K-12 and undergraduate level. They kind of threw in national security at the end there for good measure. >> Why not? >> Yeah, why not? But what NSF had proposed as of last summer when it published its proposed revised criteria for comment was that for broader impacts instead of saying what your impact on society would be which is kind of a general open-ended question, you'd now have to address one or more of these specific goals. And while there aren't necessarily anything wrong with these specific goals, it's a very limiting idea of what one's broader impacts might be. So if you just think of all the things that might not count as broader impacts, that would include something like helping food security or helping with improving health, you're preventing or mitigating climate change, you could think of all sorts of things that don't fall into economic competitiveness, education, or national security that might be important. Now, NSF got a lot of push back on this, and I don't know anything about the internal politics behind it, but they have since moved back towards retaining more of a benefit to society language rather than tying the merit criteria to these specific goals. 

So perhaps this isn't going to, this doesn't look like it's going to play out the way that it did initially. But the thing that I wanted to highlight here is just the kinds of language you use about what your priorities are really does have real effects in terms of what's going to get funded and what's not. If you're going to focus on funding stuff that is clearly economic in nature, there are other things that aren't necessarily going to be justifiable anymore. So, coming back for a few minutes here to kind of tie this back to what does this mean about the future of public higher education, in particular. In some ways, a lot of the changes that I've talked about here apply more or less to public and private institutions, generally. If NSF changes their merit view criteria, obviously that's going to apply to both public and private universities. Probably the biggest difference, I think, though, in how this affects public versus private institutions is that this is certainly not new, this has been going on since the '80s, but you really have an ongoing state level push to try to figure out how to use universities to drive regional economic development. And so, again, sort of coming from the assumption that in a time of non-growing budgets, at best, this is a zero sum game. To the extent that you're putting your money into trying to figure out how to use science and technology to drive regional growth, there's other places that you're not putting it, maybe most notably undergraduate education. This is my own institution, SUNY Albany. 

The governor of New York has put $800 million over the last decade into a nanotech center which, I checked the website, I think it's 53 undergraduates it enrolls. It was in the 50s. So almost entirely a research center intended to drive regional economic development totally not focused on undergraduate education, and this is at a time when the university is not only cutting budgets but actually closing departments. So it's a real shift in priorities. Other universities have seen a lot of this as well. This is UCSF, Mission Bay campus. One of the few areas of growth in the University of California over the last decade has been these couple, there's four institutes for, what are they called? Institutes for science and innovation that focus on different specific sciences. There's a quantitative biology one and a nanoscience one and an information science one and so forth. These are large scale public/private partnerships. The point is to leverage state dollars with industry contributions. 

At Wisconsin, the equivalent of this is probably the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery. Again, large scale public/private partnerships. Certainly, public/private connections can be useful and worthwhile, and I don't mean to suggest that the people who are in these institutes aren't doing valuable science, but the point again is if you shifted this direction, you're necessarily shifting away from other priorities in a way that we don't necessarily always talk about completely explicitly. So, if you want to say what are some things to think about what this means is that this shift is happening simultaneously with this investment in undergraduate education. And another probably equally important thing is that, certainly, while science and technology drives economic growth in some sort of broad sense, it's much less clear that universities can effectively leverage it to drive regional economic development. There's a handful of places that have done this very well, but they've also had a lot of, think of the Stanfords and the MITs, but they've also had a lot of advantages. It's much less clear that a place like Albany or even a place like Wisconsin is going to get the kind of pay back it's hoping for by making this kind of investment. So to come back here at the end to this question that we talked about so much yesterday about the Wisconsin Idea. The Wisconsin Idea, and I have to admit, not being from Wisconsin, I lifted this from, I think, Wikipedia, which don't tell my students. So perhaps this isn't the best summary of the Wisconsin Idea, but universities should solve problems important to the state and its citizens. 

That seems pretty consonant with what everybody was saying yesterday. That's a much broader vision than for universities to serve as an economic engine. And being an economic engine might be once piece of that. That might be one way to serve, but that's a very limiting set of possibilities that you have. And many of the kinds of ways that people talked about the University of Wisconsin possibly serving the state, some of them were economic, but some of them were much more practical, much more directly oriented toward solving problems or educating future citizens. It was a much more diverse mission. I will just leave with something that's a little bit more speculative, but I thought it was something that would be at least a little bit controversial. I think it's also arguable that sort of shifting toward this economic kind of thing plays out on the educational side of universities as well as on the scientific research side. If you think of the extent in which we sort of move towards thinking about education as investments in human capital. I think, again, it's a very similar, it's an analogous kind of shift where we see the purpose of education as being it's ability to give people this, it's an investment that you undertake because it's going to give you a long-run economic return. 

And I think there's some implications of that that maybe we would not always be so crazy about, or at least that kind of move away from the traditional sense of what a public university is. One is, for example, that this tends to go along with an assumption that we're going to shift toward individuals bearing more of the cost burden of their education, generally through taking on more debt. I realize that human capital theory doesn't have to imply that individuals have to bear all the costs and you can have positive externalities and all that, but the way people actually talk about it often ends up like this. I think when we shift towards trying to think about how do we leverage the impact of education with specifically economic goals in mind, it's a long-term idea, it should be over somebody's lifetime you're going to have this payoff, but we often approach it in a very short-term way, and so you end up in situations where the way that you try to increase people's human capital is by getting as many people through college as possible which, as Sheila mentioned this morning, the risk of that is, of course, that you just sort of water it down and you're not necessarily doing anything that's really contributing to people's skills in the long-run. So the implementation tends to be different than the ideal might be. And finally, of course, not just a question about implementation but, again, about values, again focusing specifically on education as an investment with an economic return kind of leaves out of the conversation other sorts of values, and particularly some of the civic purposes that we might like to see result from higher education. So, if we say that universities are an economic engine, which, again, certainly not the only way that people talk about universities, but is a much more dominate thread in the conversation than it would have been, certainly, 30 years ago, and I would say even 10 years ago. I just like people to kind of think about the idea that this is a narrower mission than the Wisconsin Idea or in general, I think, the traditional mission of the land grant universities. And that necessarily if this is the one, the mission that we're going to choose and go with and that dominates, you should also be aware that that's necessarily going to mean there are other things we're choosing not to support, and there are tradeoffs there that aren't necessarily always explicitly articulated. So I will stop there. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Okay, I'm going to make some comments. This is an excellent paper. I really enjoyed it. There are many important points. Can you all hear me? Is the mic on? Many important points, especially, I think, the zero sum game where if you invest in some of these things the there's not money to invest in others. The lack of disinterested knowledge, which was, of course, one of the main things that universities supplied for the public good. That happens when everybody has an economic investment in the knowledge that is available. And the narrowing of the sorts of things that we consider appropriate to the mission. Some things to think about. I think it was not just the economists who are responsible for this, and not just the state. 

I really think that it was that economists said coincided with the power dynamics of the business class at an opportune moment. The turning point is the mid-'70s. Why then? Certainly because the economy is starting to get in the tank, but that's not the only thing. I think it was tied to the end Keynesian economics and the beginning of the neoliberal term. Keynesian economics in the US played out as guns and butter. Stimulation of the economy through the Cold War military spending in return for a somewhat welfare state. And a substantial segment of R&D was done by universities in that arrangement. Basic research with all the ironies that involves, and so it  was mainly Department of Defense funding. It was a lot of money. Steven Muller, then president of Johns Hopkins, said US universities enlisted in the Cold War and not just in the sciences. 

There were language programs, often replaced by area studies, an interesting shift from women to men, participation in the CIA and many other intelligence gathering ventures for which Yale was particularly known, and USAID programs and the list goes on. I lost my place here. Oops, I'm going the wrong direction. The mid-1970s was right after the end of the Vietnam War, and military funding was down, especially for research universities where the weapons sought by the Department of Defense had not been delivered in the way expected, and universities were penalized for that even before the end of the Vietnam War. And where campuses had become sites of protests against that war, including this one. At least one research university president testified, I think it was from the University of Rochester, before Congress calling for reinstatement of DOD funding along with the promise that protest would never happen again and the statement that students who had protested were class traitors. But even more importantly, defense funding was down not only for research universities, but for defense industries which had played an important part in keeping the American economy strong. And the US was losing ground in manufacturing compared to Germany and Japan. 1983 was the later, and the US had slipped on every indicator. The US business class, operationally defined as the leaders of large industries, was, as David Dixon so clearly wrote about, infuriated by the success of protest in initiating cross-industry regulation in areas that it had never been the case before, like environmental quality and worker safety and health, and there were two others but I can't remember them now. 

It's been a while since I looked at this stuff. I only remember that there's four. Politically, business leaders began to develop think-tank type organizations across a wide variety of areas that pushed for what we would now call a neoliberal approach to the economy. The one that was, I thought, always most salient for higher education was the business higher education forum was the principal's only organization of the leaders of corporations and the CEOs of corporations, and, as they then came to be called shortly after that, the CEOs of universities. I would argue that the legislation you talk about could be captured under the competitiveness legislation that happened in the '70s, '80s, '90s and continues in America COMPETES. It was talked about at that period as competitiveness legislation. I think you may say that elsewhere in the book. >> Yeah. I would say the competitiveness stuff came a little later. They weren't using the language yet until '81 or so. 

>> Close. >> Yeah. By the early '80s they were talking about it in those terms. >> And if you look at the AAU president's testimony before Congress 1980 and post-1980, you see that they then use what I call the, they switch from a narrative of basic science to a narrative of entrepreneurial science in their testimony before Congress. I love Wesley Posvar's most of all. He said, "We will contribute to innovation. We will change the economy by orders of magnitude with less inputs than we are called for now." So, I think we have, basically, corporate-led and corporate think-tank-led policy that drew on economist thought going back to Hayek and others about human capital technology and innovation, but unless you had the turn the end of the war, the whole thing, I'm not sure it would have happened. And that led, eventually, to a sort of federal policy that was industrial policy from the bottom up. No specific winners and losers but powerful industries were subsidized through a variety of competitiveness policies, most of which have implications for research universities. And I think we're still there. 

And I love your book, not your book but what I've read of it so far, but I do think that the turn had its roots in the sorts of things I'm talking about. >> Can I respond? All right. I think it's an interesting question of how much of this was about the organized business interest and how much of it wasn't because I think, for me, one of the things that I found surprising was the extent to which the intellectual stuff behind this actually, I think, did matter. And it wasn't coming from Chicago schools, like the people you would think of as neoliberal. The people who were making these growth arguments were center-left, Kennedy Administration economists. This is like the Robert Solows. >> I don't disagree with that, but I think stuff only gets picked up when you have business people and policy people who do it. >> It's true. I think, to me, the place that I think the business was successful in sort of an organized way was in pushing the idea, they were very good at pushing the idea that innovation is important and that we need to do something about innovation. And I think that was an organized success. 

And you can kind of see that. It's interesting, a lot of it emerged in the National Academy of Engineering. >> Sure. Yeah. >> So that's really where a lot of the conversation coalesced. >> They agree by the '90s. You can see that they've given up the idea of basic science in the national academies. >> Yeah, this is the early '70s even that I'm talking about. So I think that you do have organized large R&D intensive companies who are promoting the argument that we have to do something about innovation. And then, of course, those set of people have a very specific idea of what the solutions are to solve innovation that do line up with this sort of larger conservative business interest. 

But to me what's interesting was the extent to which this was picked up by both sides. And I don't see it as much being promoted by conservative think-tanks and those kinds of groups. >> Well, it depends on whether you consider the places like the Business Higher Education Forum conservative. Probably you wouldn't. >> No, no, I'm willing to say that they're conservative. >> They're not super conservative. So I just think that that's the new consensus. And I think it's not necessarily conservative. I do think it's a lot of liberals who go that way too. >> But I guess for me the thing is that I don't see it as just coming from them. 

The business class pushed it, but I really do see this as more of a bipartisan move. And I think that if you hadn't had a lot of, I think that you have lot of left-leaning technocratic economists who were also pushing this same idea. To me, some of that's what it is is that you have people who really believed, who saw a role for government in managing science, but they were rethinking of science in these economic terms. And then once you start to think about that that's how we measure the success of science is economic. Whether you're on the left or on the right is going to end up how you decide that that should be actually implemented in practice. But either way you're going to focus on one particular set of things that science can do and not be as interested in another. So I guess the place that I would disagree is not that business interest wasn't pushing this in conjunction with a particular set of policies, but I just think there was a lot more of this on the left than people sometimes acknowledge. >> That may very well be the case. 75% of both Houses vote for competitiveness legislation with the exception of NAFTA and maybe two other ones between 1980 and 2005. >> And I know it was almost unanimous. 

>> Yeah. I'm saying 75% is not lightly taken. That's a commitment on the side of both the left and the right, if we want to use that language, for all of the competitiveness legislation, to say nothing of the things that happen in administrative law. >> Should we take some questions? So we don't have fundamental disagreements. >> We won't be as lively as you and Richard Vedder. >> No. >> That was pretty lively.