Producing Value in a Lab: Blurred Boundaries Between Higher Education and Industry

Most American universities founded in the mid to late nineteenth century were created in the spirit of entrepreneurialism. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles, Peter Drucker (who enshrined in mainstream consciousness ideas such as privatization and centralization, the centrality of marketing, the knowledge worker, and the emergence of the information society) points out that “No better text for a History of Entrepreneurship could be found than the creation and development of the modern university, especially the modern American university.”13 MIT’s 1861 founding charter states that the fledgling polytechnic institute is being created “for the purpose of instituting and maintaining a society of arts, a museum of arts, and a school of industrial science, and aiding generally in . . . the advancement, development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures and commerce” (“Act to Incorporate”).14 In a related document from the same year, the founders elaborate on how the necessity to keep pace with (if not outdo) the European economy hinges on a tight connection between “intelligent culture” and “industrial pursuits.”15 In today’s parlance, they were aiming for a more even balance between theory and practice. Three years later, a committee provided a more detailed account of the “Scope and Plan” of one MIT school in particular: the School of Industrial Science. Amid the 40 mentions of “practice” and “practical” peppered throughout this 28-page document are detailed instructions for the creation of four laboratories to bring together theory and practice via student training and “the prosecution of experiments and investigations . . . including the examination and testing of new machines and processes, and the conducting of original researches in the different departments of applied science”.16

The way these early MIT labs emphasized experimental mechanical research and strove to avoid the appearance of pure intellectuality anticipated the ethos of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, which opened in 1876. As we describe in chapter two, Menlo Park was based on the importance of research but only to the extent that it was “practical.” In contrast to “theoretical” science which Edison believed was “pointless and slow,” he was adamant about always producing working prototypes.17 Because the lab was funded almost entirely by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists eager to see a return on their dollar, one of Edison’s most famous aphorisms was “You got to make the damn thing work.”18

Peter Drucker argues that Edison was the first to understand “knowledge-based innovation” and the way in which it leads to control of the future. Crucially, innovation has little to do with novelty; instead, it capitalizes on ideas that are already in circulation, iterating and improving them: “Every other electrical inventor of the time began to work around 1860 or 1865 on what eventually became the light bulb. Edison waited ten years until the knowledge becomes available . . .”19 We know from numerous scholarly accounts that at Menlo Park Edison set the stage for the knowledge-based innovation that becomes a hallmark of the modern American university with a style of management that was, at the time, innovative in its strategic blending of craft-based and industrial-based management. According to Michael J. Gall:

Edison created a pre-industrial atmosphere at the lab facility, such as apprenticeships and education, irregular work hours and wages, breaks, bonds of mutuality, and limited autonomy, which was instrumental to an efficient process of invention. Invention entailed conception creation, planning and drafting, parts and tools fabrication, experimentation, development, testing, refinement, patent model manufacture, and patent application. Such a process required a malleable, skilled, and competent workforce capable of conducting a variety of tasks under Edison’s leadership and guidance. . .this. . .culture was an essential part of the fabric of Edison’s management strategy and the success of his invention operation.20

However, between 1878 and 1880, as the lab expanded its of workforce and number of ongoing projects, Edison began to rely more heavily on conventional industrial management tactics, including “the creation of a worker hierarchy as well as moderate task subdivision and specialization.”21

Menlo Park is the most influential early instance of modern lab management practice. As the twentieth century progressed, its pairing of seemingly contradictory techniques became enshrined as common practice for media labs. At the same time as they were part of a more horizontal structure consisting of semi-autonomous clusters (e.g. experimental assistants; machine workers, mechanics, and apprentices; office workers, accountants, and bookkeepers), workers were also part of a hierarchical reporting structure that led directly to Edison himself. Workers also had flexible and fluctuating work hours while still being accountable to Edison’s production schedule. Collaboration and camaraderie were encouraged, but the discourse of singular, individual achievement—usually, Edison’s achievement—usually dominated.

As David Noble notes in America By Design, once the industrial research laboratories based on Edison’s original design began to multiply and expand, “the role of the scientists within them came more and more to resemble that of the workmen on the production line and science became essentially a management problem.”22 Noble goes on to distinguish broadly between scientists in universities who were “relatively free to chart [their] own paths and define [their] own problems,” and industrial researchers who were “more commonly [soldiers] under management command, participating with others in a collective attack on scientific truth”.23 However, labs at MIT like the Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry (founded in 1908), the Servomechanisms Laboratory (founded in 1940), and the Radiation Lab (also founded in 1940) are either a mixture of both or aligned more with the latter than the former.

The Radiation Lab (Rad Lab), created during the late years of World War II to improve radar technology, was the first “largescale interdisciplinary and multifunction R&D organization set up at a university.”24 Given the way Edison managed Menlo Park, the Rad Lab was unusual but not unprecedented in the way it pulled together the research, development, and production of radar technologies into a single organization. Quoting an unpublished manuscript by Leroy Foster on “Sponsored Research at MIT,” Henry Etzkowitz paints a picture of a culture of rapid prototyping and production at the Rad Lab that later became a key hybrid lab technique: “‘Most of the knowledge was gained by building something as quickly as possible and trying it out. Theoretical knowledge generated pari passu to be plowed back into the work at a later date’ . . . Improvements were made, and the apparatus was tested again.”25 While Etzkowitz characterizes the organization of the Rad Lab as “highly decentralized and flexible,”26 Henry Guerlac points out that although the lab started out as loose and informal, the Pearl Harbour attack instigated a shift to a management structure that was both horizontal and vertical to ensure it would be suitable for many kinds of projects:27

The combination of both vertical and horizontal organization brought together the groups working on related components on in basic research into larger units called divisions and brought the related systems groups under a single divisional head. Above the divisions stood the Director’s Office and Steering Committee, comprised of the Director and the Associate Director and the heads of the technical divisions.28

Departing from Menlo Park’s singleminded focus on profit, the Rad Lab may have appeared as a business-like entity, but it operated without a budget, as most of its expenditures simply needed to be approved by the federal government, based on their perceived contribution to the war effort.29

The combination of flexible management structures and rapid prototyping and production techniques laid the groundwork for the MIT Media Lab, which opened in 1985. Without ever directly declaring itself the first of its kind, tech journalism quickly positioned the Media Lab as occupying a “new niche in technical research, somewhere between industrial R&D . . . and the academic engineering sciences.”30 Predictably, Wired’s hyperbole is thick here. The history of higher education laboratories in the U.S. is defined by this precise mix of the private and public sectors. Still, it is true that the Media Lab was and continues to be successful in terms of its astonishingly large $75 million annual operating budget.31

Nearly all of the Media Lab’s annual budget comes from corporate sponsorship. More than 80 companies are are either “consortium lab members” or “consortium research lab members”; the former provides “access to all of the research conducted at the Lab, Lab-wide visiting privileges, invitations to semi-annual member-only events, and full intellectual property rights,” while the latter provides “the added benefit of an employee-in-residence at the Lab.”32 The incentive the Media Lab offers to these member companies is that students and faculty in the lab can conduct research that is “too costly or too ‘far out’ to be accommodated within a corporate environment. It is also an opportunity for corporations to bring their business challenges and concerns to the Lab to see the solutions our researchers present.”33 In return, the Media Lab receives funding to pay for an astonishingly wide array of research projects, the ability to promote itself aggressively, and a clear pipeline for students that leads from the lab to industry.

But the question of financing has connections to how other levels of power structures are being reproduced in terms of work, diversity, and indeed, people.While the Media Lab will never be able to completely depart from its long history of being directed, populated, and dominated by certain racial and gender demographics, it will likewise never be able to remain unaffected by funding that comes from U.S. tech companies with the same deeply engrained racial and gender demographics which in turn affects which projects are supported and implicitly promoted. As Media Lab faculty member and Director of the Center for Civic Media Ethan Zuckerman stated to us in an interview:

I think [the Media Lab] can be alarmingly insular. I think we tend to feel like we look at the world in a way that’s unique, and I’m not sure that it’s as unique as we think . . . We have great international diversity . . . [but] when you look at underrepresented minorities, which is how MIT measures diversity, which is basically American populations that are usually underrepresented within universities—Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/Latinas, not Asian Americans—how are we doing? The answer is we’re doing dismally . . . [However,] we have made a lot of progress on gender. I think when I was here, we were at about 2:1 male to female, and I think we’re closer to 60–40.34

We conducted this interview in the spring of 2017. As of August 2019, Zuckerman declared his intentions to move his work out of the Media Lab by Spring 2020 in light of realizations that in 2014, ex-Director Joi Ito had accepted over $250,000 in funding for lab projects from known sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. These realizations were followed by a press release by MIT later in the month indicating that the university as a whole had accepted $800,000 in total from Epstein over a period of twenty years, all of which went either to the Media Lab or to professor of mechanical engineering and physics Seth Lloyd.35 By early September, journalist Ronan Farrow revealed in The New Yorker that the lab had in fact knowingly accepted as much as eight million dollars of funding from Epstein over the years, marking his donations as if they were given anonymously and going against MIT’s decision to disqualify Epstein as a donor after he pled guilty in 2008 to charges of solicitation of minors for prostitution.36

What has made these revelations about the lab’s indiscriminate fundraising practices even more disturbing is that even in the face of MIT President L. Rafael Reif’s apology for their lack of judgement about what funding to accept and what to refuse, and Ito’s apology and subsequent resignation, Negroponte continued to maintain his belief that taking funding from Epstein was justified and that he would still recommend to Ito (as he did in 2014) the lab accept Epstein’s funding. “‘If you wind back the clock . . . I would still say, ‘Take it,’” he reportedly stated at an all-hands meeting at the Media Lab in September 2019.37 Writers Angela Chen and Sarah Hao for MIT Technology Review describe what unfolded toward the end of this same meeting:

Negroponte stood up, unprompted, and began to speak. He discussed . . . how he had used [his] privilege to break into the social circles of billionaires. It was these connections, he said, that had allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay people full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intellectual property. Negroponte said that he prided himself on knowing over 80% of the billionaires in the US on a first-name basis, and that through these circles he had come to spend time with Epstein . . ..38

As a bastion of the new and supposedly profitable, it makes sense to see the Media Lab as an egregious example of contemporary universities’ neoliberal strategies since the 1980s. Indeed, the spirit of “demo or die” became one of the early mottos and techniques at the Media Lab with its spirit of progress and innovation, engineering and science, at the cost of “studies, surveys, or critiques.”39 Yet the lab is also a more extreme version of a long lineage of entities dedicated to innovation and invention, driven by internal management techniques whose workings depends on collaboration between higher education and industry.