An Outspoken Critic Campaigns Against Campus Ties to Industry

By Debra E. Blum

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- "Every campus should tolerate at least one David Noble."

So wrote a professor in a letter to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in support of David F. Noble's bid for tenure there in 1984.

Mr. Noble, a history professor who left Drexel University last month to take a job at York University in Canada, was denied tenure by MIT, and in March settled a lawsuit against the institute.

In the past decade he has gained a reputation as a harsh critic of higher education's relationship with private industry. Even his supporters describe him as polemical in his writings and abrasive in his manner.

Soon after arriving at MIT in 1975 as a postdoctoral fellow, Mr. Noble, who specializes in the history of technology, began taking a hard look at university research. Since then he has written and spoken out about what he sees as the corruption of academic institutions by private enterprise and government-sponsored military research.

In Mr. Noble's opinion, the greatest threat to the public interest in higher education is the commercialization of science -- the control that corporations have increasingly gained over scientific research at universities. Universities have been transformed from "educational enterprises to money-making and big-business enterprises," he says.

In 1983 Mr. Noble helped to organize the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, a group that monitors industry's ties with academe. He has been one of the most vocal critics of MIT's relationship with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The institute is a private organization that, in return for paying for its own operating expenses and the salaries of research scientists who hold joint appointments on its own staff and the MIT faculty, has considerable access to MIT's biotechnology research.

In two popular books about technology (including one that was the focus of much of his unsuccessful tenure review at MIT), Mr. Noble has criticized MIT and some of its professors.

In 1989 Mr. Noble's opposition to MIT's Industrial Liaison Program caught the attention of Rep. Ted Weiss, a New York Democrat who had been leading Congressional hearings on conflicts of interest among universities and businesses. The liaison program is a technology-transfer enterprise that allows about 250 foreign and American companies to receive, for a fee, what the university calls "facilitated access" to MIT faculty members and their research. Among other services, member companies obtain copies of research published by MIT professors, plus "preprints" -- copies of papers that have not yet been published.

Testifying before Mr. Weiss's subcommittee at a 1989 hearing called "Is Science For Sale? Conflicts of Interest vs. the Public Interest," Mr. Noble pointed out that half of the member companies of the Industrial Liaison Program were foreign-owned. He said MIT and other research universities were betraying the public trust by "subsidizing foreign competition and productivity with taxpayer-supported research."

Paul E. Gray, president of MIT when Mr. Noble worked there and now chairman of the institution's governing board, said at the hearing that Mr. Noble's criticism was misleading, since many American companies collaborate with MIT outside the liaison program.

In a recent interview, Mr. Gray said a close relationship between academe and industry was "normal, appropriate, and, in the case of MIT, in line with our mission in society." He added that Mr. Noble's views on the partnerships between universities and private industry were "off the wall." (Mr. Gray had called Mr. Noble "off the wall" at a faculty meeting on the Whitehead Institute in 1981. In his lawsuit, Mr. Noble pointed to the comment as an example of what he described as the administration's hostility towards him.) Mr. Gray also said that Mr. Noble simply had been out to embarrass MIT since he was denied tenure there.

Mr. Noble shrugs at such suggestions. "People think I'm out to get MIT or the whole academy," says the professor, who appears at once pleased and exasperated by the notion. "I'm just doing my job as a professor. I'm looking at society and assessing what I see."

After joining MIT's faculty, Mr. Noble says, he came to believe that the institution was not the place for such activity. When he sued it in a Massachusetts court in 1986, he claimed he had been denied tenure because he had been critical of MIT in his scholarly work, and because he had openly criticized the university's corporate ties.

Robert Sullivan, a lawyer for MIT, says Mr. Noble was denied tenure because his scholarly work was not up to par, and because he was not considered trustworthy by some of his peers.

A state judge granted Mr. Noble a trial on one of nine counts in his lawsuit -- that claiming breach of contract. But Mr. Noble, who had been seeking reinstatement and $1.5-million from the institute, agreed in March to drop the suit. In return, MIT agreed to release previously confidential information on the case. MIT officials, who deny that Mr. Noble's tenure review was unfair, say they sought to keep the documents confidential to preserve the privacy of those who had evaluated the professor for tenure. The documents provide a rare glimpse into the confidential tenure-review proceedings typical at the nation's universities.

Depositions, notes from tenure-committee meetings, and other documents made public in the settlement present a mix of criticism and praise for Mr. Noble. Indeed, few evaluators were able to make unqualified comments about the professor. If he impressed, he also angered. If he was lively in debate, he was also abrasive. If his writing style was provocative, it was also hostile.

Reviews of his work frequently commended him for his creativity and his willingness to raise vital and controversial questions about the nature of technological innovation. At the same time, reviewers often expressed concern over what they called his lack of subtlety and fairness. His then-forthcoming book, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, was considered by many an important contribution to the literature on American technology, but was criticized by others as simplistic and unbalanced.

In 1984, five of nine tenured members of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, where Mr. Noble was an associate professor, voted against tenure for him. The decision came despite a recommendation in favor of tenure by a four-member faculty panel that had screened his candidacy.

In a letter informing the humanities and social-science dean of the negative vote, Carl Kaysen, then the program's director, wrote that the science faculty members' doubts about Mr. Noble "outweighed their appreciation of the importance and interest of the problems that David's research addresses and the value of his perspective on the historical study of technology." Mr. Kaysen said the professors' doubts about the fairness of Mr. Noble's intellectual judgments made them concerned that he couldn't be fair when it came to deciding such departmental business as promotions.

Mr. Kaysen declined to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Noble has argued that MIT officials put pressure on faculty members to deny him tenure. He says that the officials didn't appreciate the fact that Forces of Production, which figured heavily in his tenure review, painted such a terrible picture of the university.

Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, agrees that Mr. Noble's scholarly work may have been unfairly devalued because of his colleagues' opinions of his political views and personal style -- which Mr. Katz calls "passionate."

"There's a difference between controversial and not good or responsible scholarship," says Mr. Katz, who was prepared to testify on Mr. Noble's behalf if his case had gone to trial. "David was exploring legitimate issues in his scholarly field that deserved attention and respect. He should have been able to do that without fear of reprisal or threat to his academic freedom."

Thomas Ferguson, a former political-science professor at MIT, argues that Mr. Noble's case is part of a larger pattern in academe where the traditions of peer review and self-criticism break down in the face of big-time research dollars. He points, for example, to recent charges that some universities -- including Stanford and MIT -- have overcharged the government for the overhead costs of federally sponsored research.

"When you're talking about a lot of cash, self-regulation is just not a reality," he says.

Mr. Ferguson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, left MIT in 1984 -- two years before he would have been reviewed for tenure. He says he left in part because he felt his politics might stand in the way of a favorable decision. (He had written articles arguing that the influential role of money in American politics had deleterious effects on the public interest.)

"MIT has a weak record in protecting any kind of critical political inquiry," he says.

Mr. Noble obviously agrees. But his long battle with MIT has not dampened his feisty spirit. At Drexel University, where he was hired with tenure in 1987, he continued to ruffle some feathers. In an interview for a local newspaper article last year, he criticized Drexel's plans to streamline university operations by merging two of its colleges. Drexel, like many other universities, he said, is "beefing up research and gutting the quality of undergraduate education."

He also led a fund-raising effort to bring Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women, to speak on the campus. The university had withdrawn an offer of a teaching position to Ms. Yard, citing budgetary reasons. But some students and professors claimed the decision had been based on Ms. Yard's stand for abortion rights.

This summer Mr. Noble will join York's faculty as a tenured professor of social science. He says he is looking forward to the move because, he says, Canadian higher education has not yet become as tainted by corporate interests as American higher education has.

Meanwhile, he has moved on to other issues. He notes that the book on which he is currently working doesn't even have the word "university" in it. The book examines the parallels between society now and society 1,000 years ago.

Then again, in an article to be published in The Progressive, he didn't start out to condemn higher education's ties with the military, either. But after he examined the use of fuel-air explosives in the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Noble ended up calling the piece "Academic Atrocities." The article explores how 20th-century weapons of mass destruction have been researched and developed largely in university laboratories.

He smiles broadly at the idea that he can't stay away from the critical examination of university research. For the third time in the interview he says, "I just call them as I see them."