 Since the late 19th century, universities, as distinguished from colleges, have had a major social responsibility in addition to the obvious one of teaching and a slightly less obvious one of civic engagement. And that major responsibility is research or, as the title of this session indicates, knowledge production or knowledge creation. So this session is about how information technology in general and cyberspace in particular is affecting or might affect, for better and ill, the role of the university as a generator of knowledge. There are at least two ways in which it seems information technology is affecting the role of universities as the creators of knowledge. The first one implicates commercialization, the second one specialization, commercialization. 2003, Derek Bach, recently retired as, not so recently retired as president of Harvard, wrote a very interesting book called Universities in the Marketplace, in which he described, and for the most part lamented, the increasing engagement of universities in profit making. So he pointed to the following trends. First, universities especially in the United States were increasingly seeking through participation in athletics to make money, to recruit athletes who couldn't participate as students on an equal level with their peers and to build large stadiums, enter into television contracts and so forth, all in order to earn money. Second trend is more relevant to our topic here. Universities were increasingly, circa 2000, doing and then exercising intellectual property rights over their, the fruits of their research. So this was facilitated in the United States by a statutory reform, this was called by Dull Act, but it wasn't just the statute, it was a shift in the way university administrators thought about their responsibility and mission, increasingly the direction of, let's leverage our creations into making some money. And they were becoming moderately successful in doing so. So in the year 2000, American universities earned in the aggregate a billion dollars in licensing fees. Not trivial, not gigantic compared to their overall budgets, but not trivial either. That's the second form of commercialization. The third one is they were selling education increasingly, selling courses. Intrigued by the possibility of distance learning, they were trying to create business models in this area, which you would charge for access information, continuing education, executive education, one of the main products of business schools. All of these were profit-making ventures. Why, Bach asked, were universities moving in these directions? Well, there were a bunch of reasons. Declining revenues from other sources, a vague sense of the purpose of the university which might resist these trends, a general mood of the wonders of capitalism. And last but not least, they began to make money because they could. Because increasingly, economic life was dependent upon the kind of information universities were generating, so they were in a position to charge. So the money was there and they might as well collect it. So as I say, Bach's book was a lament. He thought this was terrible. I didn't say it quite so bluntly, but that's the general mood of the book. Why was it terrible? Because it was undermined academic standards. Now, here's something that connects closely with Joe Ito's presentation earlier. Because it was erecting barriers to the flow of knowledge and information. It was accentuating trends towards secrecy and toward limiting the ability of the world at large to gain access to the fruits of the university's research. Because it was deflecting attention on the part of the universities and their faculties from the pursuit of truth toward the pursuit of money. Because it was generating biases and the recommendations that faculty were offering to the world and it was because it was making people angry at each other. So it was a lament. That was, say, year 2003. If anything, these trends have intensified since Bach wrote his book. And information technology, at least in the first instance, seems to be reinforcing these trends. Why? Well, because it increases both the pressure toward commercialization and the temptation. Okay, so that's our first subject. Our first hypothesis is there's a relationship between information technology and commercialization as it affects the role of the university in generating knowledge. And we should think hard about this. And if we agree with Bach, devise ways of resisting it. And if we don't agree with him, figure out why his argument fails. The second of the trends is vaguer, easier to capture, harder to figure out which way the arrow is pointing. On the one hand, it seems that the ease of research and communication, again referring to Joey's very provocative talk, that information technology and cyberspace facilitates, is corroding disciplinary boundaries in the university. It's easy to get access to, increasingly easy to get access to the fruits of all sorts of disciplines, and it makes consumers of information more Catholic in their tastes. It's like a smorgasbord. So information technology on the one hand seems to be fostering a trend toward interdisciplinary work. On the other hand, it's doing exactly the opposite. The knowledge in each field of academic life is getting deeper. The pace of advance in every academic field is accelerating. It's harder to keep up. And so people tend to specialize. It used to be the case in law schools, for example, where something would subscribe to flagship law journals, the Harvard Law Review. It'd show up once a month, roughly speaking, and you just read it cover to cover, or more or less, to see what was happening in law. Nobody does that anymore. Instead, you subscribe to SSRN and you get a specialized set of articles, and you feel at a loss in your inability to keep up with the pace of research. All provoked by information technology, in this case SSRN as a vehicle for spreading faculty products.