Raymond D. Horton

There is a gap between those who produce research and those who use it. Most university research, whether theoretical or applied, is used by other academics, but for a university and its city to make the most of each other, the university must find ways of delivering what it produces -- knowledge -- to those outside its walls. Blockage in that flow of knowledge has adverse consequences for both its producers and its consumers.

The most prominent extra-academic users of research are business, government, and the non-profit sector. That usage is more advanced in the business and non-profit communities than in the public sector, where the fragmented decision-making process is less conducive to incorporating research into policy. In business, the users of information have a clear idea of what they want to do with it and thus have an easier time dealing with academics; in the non-profit sector, organizations usually don't have the kind of full-time staff that can gather and analyze information internally, so they contract out consultative services to university researchers.

Missing from this description, of course, is the general public. Research has important effects on the public's interests, but most of the populace receives little or no information about research. Academic papers, monographs, books, or journals have very small and highly specialized readership among members of the public. (Indeed, most members of academia don't read them either.) If the public is going to be informed about academia, it has to be through the mediation of journalists and popularizers -- and aside from a few exceptions like Stephen Jay Gould in biology and Seymour Melman in engineering, good popularizers among academics are a rare commodity.

The ethos and mores of a research university contribute to inefficiency in this flow of knowledge. The grounds on which Columbia and similar institutions provide tenure to scholars have little to do with the extent to which the city's business, government, and non-profit communities use their research. Not many people get tenure at Columbia for doing policy research, identifying options or making recommendations that interest consumers. Young scholars are going to do the kinds of work that they believe will give them a shot at tenure; for the most part, this is not applied research.

On the other hand, a university that turned out research primarily addressing the needs of specific organizations downtown wouldn't be a very exciting place intellectually. The tension between knowledge producers and consumers has a valid purpose. Columbia's literary scholar Edward Said, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), drew an important distinction between policy-oriented and value-oriented intellectuals, noting that the intellectual of conscience has an obligation to try to be the latter -- not to be an instrument of others' aims, but to exercise critical judgment, to transform information into wisdom. I believe Professor Said has it right. The other great function of a major university is teaching, and when we produce hundreds of bright, highly trained young people every year to go into New York City's professions, it's vital that we've helped them develop values as well as skills.

Ultimately, the intellectual flow from university to city may never overcome these structural and philosophical differences. The university's tangible contributions to the city -- as one of the city's largest employers and as an income source, an export industry attracting dollars from elsewhere in the form of tuition and grants -- are unmistakable and more directly visible.¹ Nonetheless, both the indirect and direct contributions deserve attention. If we were serious about improving the flow of knowledge, we could change the incentive structure for researchers, perhaps by expanding the cohort lists that are circulated for tenure evaluations. Instead of writing to 12 leading professors in a field, one could also allow evaluations by informed parties outside the university to carry some weight.

Publicizing the tenure process carries the obvious risk of politicizing it (though, in truth, it's already somewhat politicized). It's hard to imagine my colleagues, or myself for that matter, taking that risk and letting non-academics influence tenure decisions. But a less controversial way for the university to encourage more user-friendly research in the outside world would be to pursue more aggressively the idea of clinical professorships. We could give such positions to people who may not necessarily have a background in the classroom, or in generating the kind of basic research that the tenure process encourages, but who perform useful applied or utilitarian research.

Another channel that could be widened is consultancy. Many professors serve outside organizations as consultants. Nearly all research universities are also actively pursuing joint research programs with businesses, a win-win arrangement that brings dollars from the private sector into the university and allows faculty another outlet for their ideas. Universities have a justified concern, however, that the almighty dollar would begin to drive the research agenda.

If universities need to face the opportunities and responsibilities that attend change, so do the organizations that put our research to use. In the last decade, government at the state and local levels has been less interested in long-term issues than short-run performance; the business community, with its emphasis on returns by quarter (if not by month), is certainly at least as guilty. Every type of institution needs R&D units or their functional equivalent: divisions that address considerations beyond tomorrow's election or next quarter's cash flow.

This is the reason a university separates scholars from the avarice of day-to-day life: to foster the combined responsibility and luxury of being able to think about things that may not be on anyone's radar screen right now but are likely to be on everyone's screen in five years or more. The border between academe and polis has a function -- as does creative dialogue about how best to help knowledge move across that border.

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1. For details on the university's tangible and intangible contributions to its community, see Olinger, Chauncey G., Jr. (ed.), Columbia and the City: The University's Commitment to New York City (NY: University Seminars, 1993).

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RAYMOND D. HORTON, Ph.D., is professor and coordinator of the public and non-profit management program at Columbia's Graduate School of Business.

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