Machlup justified tenure as a market correction for academic-freedom externalities

Evidence

It is for clearing away as much as possible every motive of pecuniary interest that could prompt him to throw any kind of cloak or reserve upon any of his expedients for increasing his profits, that I would insure them to him for life. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 179 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Hayek cited Machlup on patents and copyrights until his final book published in 1988, and Machlup cited Hayek on knowledge in his three volumes of a planned ten-volume “Knowledge Project” cut short by his death in 1983. … Because of the importance of the latter, IP becomes relatively less important as the use of knowledge always relies on a certain locally embedded set of understandings and inherited practices to be made operational. The benefits of free knowledge-flow generally outweighed the supposedly incentivizing traits of IP rights. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 190 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The point is not to castigate a rising generation of scholars for participating in practices that index the degree to which all academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization. Rather, the point is that relentless configuration of liberal arts research by academic market norms paradoxically weakens the capacity of liberal arts scholars to defend the liberal arts at the moment of their endangerment. It renders what scholars do increasingly illegible and irrelevant to those outside the profession and even outside individual disciplines, making it difficult to establish the value of this work to students or a public. The move to judge every academic endeavor by its uptake in nonacademic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is equally damaging. Of course, these metrics abjure humanistic inquiry, but they also cannot capture the value of basic scientific research from which technical applications derive, thus threatening to shut off the spring waters whose exploitation the REF aims to affirm. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 392 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Student tuition fees were proposed as a pro-market formula for achieving intellectual diversity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 103; Granting lifetime tenure removes the financial incentive to conceal management details — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 179; Hayek and Machlup prioritized free knowledge flow over intellectual property incentives — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 190 (+3 more)

Related

• Machlup defended tenure as protecting academic freedom in 1964 (similarity 0.86)
• Machlup framed academic tenure as correcting a knowledge-market failure (similarity 0.86)
• Hayek and Machlup prioritized free knowledge flow over intellectual property incentives (similarity 0.81)
• Tenure protect scholars from markets yet breeds systematic accommodation of power (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Granting lifetime tenure removes the financial incentive to conceal management details #corroborates (0.82) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 179
• Hayek and Machlup prioritized free knowledge flow over intellectual property incentives #corroborates (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 190
• Market metrics weaken scholars’ capacity to defend the liberal arts #expands (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 392