Universities (should) produce intellectual public goods

What universities should aim for

Universities: what are they for? Despite (or because of) the fact that universities are hundreds of years old, a clear consensus on their fundamental purpose does not really exist. They are certainly not “for” educating clergy anymore. Often, it seems that universities are justified through a Busy Town view of the world—universities are institutions that existed when we were young, so they form part of our mental model of what a society should have, and thus universities should continue to exist.¹

Often, though, if you dig a bit, their value is framed in terms of long-term economic growth or intangible benefits like cultural enrichment. These justifications, while not without merit, hint at a deeper underlying notion: universities as producers of intellectual public goods. This is what I want to defend here: universities should aim to be producers of intellectual public goods.

Public good: what is that? A pure public good is something that is (1) a good (i.e., has some value) and is (2) both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Non-excludability means that it is difficult or impossible to prevent anyone from consuming the good once it is provided. Non-rivalrousness implies that one person's consumption of the good does not diminish its availability to others. Classic examples include clean air and national defense. A broader concept would include goods that are not strictly non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but who are just too complicated to make excludable. For example, a city street could—in principle—have tolls, but the overhead of tolls on every city street is so impractical that it is best to treat streets as public goods. So, let’s use public good as a good that is too onerous to make private.

In this context, an intellectual public good refers to knowledge, research, or information that benefits a large swath of the economy and that it would be completely impractical to have use restrictions on. Knowledge, by definition, does not exclude others. If you one of read my papers, that does not stop anyone else from reading them.

Importantly, the notion of a public good is associated with, but distinct from the concept of long-term benefits. Some types of research, may yield dividends over extended periods, others can have immediate (or at least, short-term) utility.

Some types of knowledge may stand as monuments. The discovery of the largest prime number a few months ago (by an amateur using their own funds) is probably not strictly speaking a good, except as a monument to human achievement: we taught sand to think and it told us of huge prime numbers.

However, universities face the peril of monasticism, where academics become engrossed solely in their personal quests for knowledge. In this scenario, academics produce work that, while intellectually stimulating to them, fails to translate into benefits for society at large. This inward focus can occur at both individual and subject levels, creating pockets within the academic universe that are disconnected from any public good mission. On the other side, you also have politicians of a certain sort who wants universities to take on shovel-ready projects with industry. These can be mutually profitable, but they are not public goods and are not part of the core mission of the university as a provider of public goods.

Biting some bullets. When I discuss this with people, one counterpoint is that there areas of that seem to fit what I would call intellectual public goods and are not part of academia: for example, open-source software or Wikipedia. Should universities play a more active role in such endeavors? I will swallow this bullet whole: it is a failure of the academic system that someone like Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) was not affiliated with MIT or Carnegie Mellon University.

1. Instead of calling it the Busy Town model of the world, we could be call it the guild view of the world. Universities are a kind of guild which has rights, even a quasi-personhood, independent of modern cost/benefits thinking.