Willinsky op-ed: "Access and Taxes"

Access and Taxes

February 13,2008
Social Science Research Council - Knowledge Rules Blog
By John Willinsky
Opinion

It may be because I have spent my entire educational life in public schools, public libraries, and public universities, prior that is to joining Stanford this year, that I am drawn to recent news stories on the endowments that help to finance this country's leading private universities. I have become all too aware that I’ve joined an institution with $17.2 billion tax-exempt endowment (exceeded in size only by Harvard and Yale), and I am keen to understand how this plays out in the critical balance between the private and public interests that sets these institutions apart.

Or as Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee with jurisdiction over tax policy, has pointedly asked, should not colleges and universities be required to spend a minimal proportion of their endowment on public purpose (typically used to justify tax-exempt status) just as foundations must. As if in response to such queries, Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth have recently announced increases in endowment earnings going into financial aid for students, enabling families, in the case of Harvard, with an income of up to $180,000 to qualify for aid.

What does this seeming scramble to prove tax-exempt worthiness have to do with knowledge rules? Well, the new rules are about access to knowledge. Increased financial aid is one way of increasing access to the extremely dynamic and generative body of knowledge which these institutions represent. And not just the cost of access is at stake. The number of students admitted has also become an issue, as New York Times reporter Joseph Berger noted last December, when he observed "at least four of the nation’s most exclusive institutions — Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Amherst — are either modestly expanding enrollments for the first time since the late 1960s (when some began admitting women) or have task forces studying the matter."

From where I stand, as someone concerned with both this public service question and current changes in scholarly communication, these universities have a wonderful opportunity to do more than modestly expand access to their degrees for the brightest and the best. In addressing broader public purposes, these institutions are also in position to direct endowment earnings toward greatly increasing access to the very body of knowledge to which they eagerly contribute on an almost daily basis.

Let me briefly introduce three ways that endowment earnings could further what might be loosely called the public purposes of knowledge, leading to increased access to research and scholarship. These approaches fall within existing publishing practices; they will neither undermine the critical role played by peer-review, faculty's academic freedom in publishing in the journal of one's choice, nor the career-reckoning reputation rankings that exist among journal titles.

The majority of scholarly publishers today, including its biggest names such as Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, offer their authors the right (in return for turning over the copyright to their work) to post their final post-peer-review draft in a library archive or on the faculty member’s website. Once posted there, this work is picked up by Google, and suddenly a 10-page article that appears to bear on your child's illness does not require a $40.00 credit card payment to view it, but is freely available. The university’s costs in maintaining an open access archive for its faculty members and helping them to stock it with published work, if not the equivalent cost of the articles that it makes freely available, could well be considered an extension of the research's already considerable "public purpose." The point has been clearly recognized by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as it now requires that articles reporting on research that it has supported be archived within 12 months of publication.

Universities can take their support for public access a step further by using the endowment to pay author or publication fees that ensure that their research is immediately open access for readers (with such fees running in the area of $3,000 per article). Having open access in this way to the publisher's copy is that much more effective when patients bring them into a doctor’s office or citizens throw them down on a city hall committee table, and this, too, could be taken to extend the public purpose of the university’s work, even as this work is already very rich in such public purpose.
A well, many universities also have faculty members involved and interested in running peer-reviewed journals, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, that are free to read online. This follows from their interest in seeing the journals circulate as widely as possible. University support for these open access journals would be an excellent way for universities to invest endowment revenues in extending public access to knowledge, all the more so if that support for the journals could be twinned with journals in developing countries.

Access to this body of knowledge could mean anyone could add high-quality, easily accessible references to such public services as Wikipedia and MIT’s highly celebrated Open Course Ware with its course syllabus and instructional materials. It would alter the balance between sound and questionable information online, and serve, in this way, the larger world of interested scholars and dedicated amateurs, concerned parents and social activists, high school teachers and other professionals, policy-makers and, yes, lobbyists. Does free access to research and scholarship sound too far-fetched, too markedly Canadian in its earnestness?

Well, the Harvard Faculty Council has passed a motion on February 12th to make the work of Arts and Science faculty members freely available. More to the point, and closer at hand in my case, Stanford University has been steering endowment funding to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a leading instance of the highest quality scholarship made publicly available. Both of these initatives speak bravely and boldly to the public purpose of these institutions, even as they challenge and change the rules of access to knowledge.

Senator Grassley has stated that, "since tax breaks for charitable donations are supposed to contribute to the public good, it's fair to ask whether the tax breaks that lead to big university endowments are serving the public." On a daily basis now, I see those endowments serving a public good in the students we teach and the research we do. But this may also be the time for universities to expand their vision of how this knowledge constitutes – and is calculated for tax exemption purposes as – public service. Their efforts to extend the reach and rule of knowledge on a global scale seems to me wonderfully consistent with the public good that I, at least, have come to associate with education and learning.