http://kropfpolisci.com/higher.education.washburn.pdf
> "The problem is not university-industry relationships per se; it is the elimination of any clear boundary lines separating academia from commerce. Today, market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education as never before, causing universities to engage in commercial activities unheard of in academia a mere generation ago. Universities now routinely operate complex patenting and licensing operations to market their faculty's inventions (extracting royalty income and other fees in return). They invest their endowment money in risky start-up firms founded by their professors. They run their own industrial parks, venture-capital funds, and for- profit companies, and they publish newsletters encouraging faculty members to commercialize their research by going into business. Often, when a professor becomes the CEO of a new start- up, there is considerable overlap between the research taking place on campus and at the firm, a situation ripe for confusion and conflicts of interest. The question of who owns academic research has grown increasingly contentious, as the openness and sharing that once characterized university life has given way to a new proprietary culture more akin to the business world."
These problems have only gotten worse in the past 15 years; a nice example is the remdesivir story (a Covid-19 treatment whose discovery was financed by taxpayers yet which ended up under the exclusive control of Gilead Inc.)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medic...