[Am-info] USA: Microsoft's Big Role on Campus [long]

[Erick Andrews]

This ain't spin, it's real, it's takeover.  It's neo-capitalism
without a heart.  Read it:

http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=8188

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Donations Fund Research, Build Long-Term Connections

By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post August 25, 2003

REDMOND, Wash.  -- Bearing gifts of cash, software and computers
worth $25 million, Microsoft Corp.  came to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1999, saying it wanted to jointly
develop educational technologies.  Some scholars expressed more
suspicion than gratitude.

At a celebration to kick off the collaboration, students and
faculty members heckled the speakers, insisting the computer
company's software wasn't worthy of use or study at MIT.  Some
took boxes of Microsoft's Office 2000 software and stomped on
them.  An editorial in the school newspaper wondered:  Had the
school sold itself out to become the "Microsoft Institute of
Technology?"

Today, four years into the five-year partnership, the protests
are over and Microsoft technology is firmly entrenched at MIT.

Aeronautical design classes now use Microsoft's Flight Simulator
computer program.  Electrical engineering and computer science
professors are putting their courses online using Microsoft's
PowerPoint presentation software.  The university's educational
computer network is being overhauled to use Microsoft's .Net
architecture.  Video games, hardly an MIT priority but a strong
commercial interest of Microsoft's, have suddenly become a
subject of scholarly inquiry.

Similar transformations are taking place at university campuses
across the nation, escalating the debate over corporate
influence on academia.  Such concerns about donations have been
raised in fields of study as diverse as auto engineering and
medicine, but Microsoft's donations are a special case.  Because
students are likely to keep using the technology after
graduation, they help to maintain Microsoft's software industry
dominance.

"Universities have become much more open to corporate donations
even when they have strings attached, and they are less likely
today to assess the long-term impact of these donations on
academic freedom," said Lawrence C. Soley, a professor at
Marquette University and author of "Leasing the Ivory Tower:
The Corporate Takeover of Academia."

Donations to 1,000 Schools

Microsoft has lavished $500 million over the past five years on
research and teaching projects at 1,000 schools, funding efforts
by 6,000 academics in computer science, electrical engineering,
linguistics, biology, mathematics, graphic arts, music and other
fields.  Microsoft partners are among computer science's biggest
luminaries:  A. Richard Newton, dean of the engineering school
at the University of California at Berkeley; Eugene H. Spafford,
who runs Purdue University's influential cybersecurity
institute; and Gail E. Kaiser, a Columbia University researcher
who is one of the nation's most prominent software engineering
experts and one of the few tenured female professors in the
field.

The software giant's donations have allowed universities to
follow through on projects they could not have otherwise dreamed
of, given their limited research budgets.  The collaborations
have not only led to new products on store shelves but work
dominating academic journals focused on high-tech innovation.

The corporation, however, has also directly or indirectly
influenced curriculums and research priorities, drawing an
outcry from critics who say the donations are turning computer
science departments into vocational schools where mastery of
proprietary computer programs are valued over the study of
theory.

Hal Abelson, a computer science professor who co-directs the
MIT-Microsoft partnership, said the donations have allowed MIT
to make class readings and other material freely available on
the Web, benefiting not only the school community but the world
at large.

"That is not distorting the research agenda, but doing things we
otherwise might not have," he said.

Microsoft, for its part, acknowledges that its donations are
about business development as well as philanthropy, but that it
is a win-win situation for everyone.

"The success of the field comes from innovations through
university environment," said Rick Rashid, Microsoft's senior
vice president for research.  "Microsoft prospers when
universities prosper."

Still, others lament that even if everyone has the best of
intentions, the end result portends a future when innovation in
the field of computers will be greatly influenced, if not
controlled, by a single company.

"[I worry] that in the face of budget shortfalls, universities
will sacrifice their research autonomy, offering up curriculum
and academic integrity to the highest bidder," said Mark Schaan,
a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who was part of a group of
students at the University of Waterloo, the Canadian equivalent
of MIT, who last year urged administrators to turn down
Microsoft's donations.

Project 42 Sets the Tone

Microsoft first began to reach out to universities in a serious
way in the mid-1990s with Project 42.

At the time, Microsoft software was dismissed as too clunky, too
slow, too unreliable and too uncool among many researchers on
the cutting edge of technology.  Microsoft was seen as an
imitator and not an innovator -- it created the Windows
operating system based on Apple Computer Inc.'s graphical
interface, the Internet Explorer browser for the Web based on
Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator.  The dot-com upstarts
fueling the boom, more than a few predicted, would soon be in a
position to out-innovate the aging software maker.

Microsoft's salvation:  Project 42, named after the mysterious
response the supercomputer in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy" gives when asked for the meaning of life.
Later unveiled as .Net, Project 42 was a set of software tools
that would allow disparate systems to communicate more
effectively across the Internet -- and to keep Microsoft
relevant in a world where PCs were no longer the center of the
computing universe.

The company concluded that to make .Net a success, it had to get
academics involved.  Not only would their imprimatur lend
credibility to the technology, Microsoft would benefit from
their technical expertise.  In 1998, the company began to
quietly fly academics to its headquarters for previews of the
technology.  Damien Watkins, then a lecturer at Monash
University in Australia, recalled that some of his peers wore
Linux T-shirts to show their skepticism.  In the end, though,
they were won over in part by the promise of the technology --
and by a $150,000 donation the company made to the university,
he said.

"I think Microsoft has changed a lot over the last five to 10
years.  Setting up Microsoft Research and working with
university faculty is a sign that they are looking a lot further
into the future than they had done previously," said Watkins,
who was so impressed with .Net technology that he began teaching
it to his students, then founded a private firm that uses .Net
technologies.  He is now applying for a job at Microsoft.

Today, more than 2,000 professors from top-tier schools are
considered close collaborators with Microsoft, accepting cash,
software, hardware or other in-kind donations from the company
for specific research projects or classes.  An additional 4,000
have less formal relationships with the company but still
receive free equipment and support.

Microsoft's total research and development budget -- $4.7
billion in 2003, $4.3 billion in 2002 and $4.4 billion in 2001
-- is estimated to be more than all the rest of the software
industry spends together.  Each year, Microsoft gives away about
$100 million of that to universities.

In comparison, according to the National Science Foundation,
computer science department expenditures at all universities and
colleges from all sources for 2001 was less than $1 billion.

The collaborations have resulted in refinements in handwriting
recognition, better ways to compress music and video files for
electronic transmission, and new theories about how to better
search the Web.  Microsoft researchers and their partners now
produce about 120 papers in 20 journals per year, a relatively
large number.  In 2001, for instance, 30 percent of the papers
presented at the influential Conference on Programming Language
Design and Implementation meeting were by Microsoft researchers.
At this year's SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference, some 14
percent were Microsoft works.

Among those who say they have benefited from Microsoft's
donations is Howard University associate professor Todd E.
Shurn.  Two years ago, he was struggling with how to best teach
a multimedia class that would combine computer science, art and
communications skills.

Two of Shurn's former students, who had gone on to work at
Microsoft and had come back to Washington on a recruiting visit,
had an idea:  Why not build the class around Windows Media
Player?  The class could create a new interface, or "skin," for
the program.  The professor was intrigued.  He fiddled around
with the technology for a few days and concluded it was worth
testing.  Microsoft provided $5,000, software and books and sent
one of its technicians to help set up the computers the students
would be using.  The experiment was a success, Shurn said, so
much so that he expanded the project the next year to include a
contest open to the entire school.  Microsoft, of course,
provided the money for the awards.

Shurn estimates that when he first started at Howard a decade
ago, nearly all computer-oriented projects involved machines
running Unix-based operating systems.  Now, he said, about 80
percent of assignments rely on Microsoft Windows.

"Our migration toward Microsoft began because of pricing and
then, as a result of Microsoft becoming very active on campus,
it accelerated," Shurn said.

Thanks, But No Thanks

Microsoft's efforts to reach out to some other universities,
however, have not gone as smoothly.

California State University students and faculty urged
administrators in 1997 to turn down a $300 million gift from
Microsoft and three other companies because it required an
exclusive contract for upgrading the computer and phone system
at the 22 campuses.  At the University of Michigan in 1999,
after administrators signed a deal with Microsoft, a major
donor, to sell technology at the Michigan Student Union,
students protested by handing out diskettes with the free
Windows alternative Linux.

And at the University of Waterloo last year, administrators
announced a $1.6 million donation from Microsoft.  At the same
time they announced they would change the curriculum to
introduce Microsoft's C# programming language into the
first-year programming course instead of the more popular and
long-established C++ they were currently using.  Students and
faculty rebelled.

The university ultimately backed down this spring, saying for
now the classes will be "multilingual."  A faculty senate is
evaluating the proposed curriculum changes.

Doug Leland, head of university relations for Microsoft, said
there is often some hostility when company representatives first
step on college campuses.  There is "a deep level of the
unknown," he said.  But, he said, the "attitude of campuses
towards Microsoft has changed dramatically in the past few
years."

"We've really broken through a lot of those trust and
credibility issues," he said.

One way Microsoft has done that is by offering some gifts with
no strings attached or by allowing academics to have a great
deal of freedom with the money they are given.

The MIT partnership, which runs from 1999 to 2004 and is
designed to develop educational technologies in an initiative
called "iCampus," is the company's showcase example.  Even
though the projects must be approved by a six-member committee,
half of whom are MIT employees and half of whom are Microsoft
employees, the academics own the intellectual property developed
and have the freedom to publish what they wish without a review
from Microsoft.  Professors also have the option not to
participate in the Microsoft collaboration.

An MIT contingent of professors, led by Abelson, were among 350
faculty members who attended a recent gathering of Microsoft
academic partners at the company's headquarters here in
Washington.  At the three-day, expenses-paid event, the
professors stayed at the Hyatt Regency, dined with Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates on tables decorated with fresh peach lilies,
and took boat cruise on Lake Washington.

It was part academic conference, part networking event.  It was
also a unique promotional opportunity for Microsoft.

At a question-and-answer session between the academics and
Gates, one professor asked the Microsoft founder about his views
about the study of information technology, a part of computer
science that emphasizes on how documents, spreadsheets and other
data should be handled.  What kinds of technologies should
students majoring in this subject be taught?

Gates replied quickly and with a smile:  "Microsoft Office."

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-- 
Erick Andrews