Similarly, a private benefactor or corporation's continued beneficence depends on his, her, or its satisfaction with your performance. Until the Vietnam War era, university people did not hesitate to conduct classified research, but during that war, campus after campus gradually adopted principles defining classified work as inappropriate. Similarly, although many individual professors consult for corporations under contracts stipulating that the resulting intellectual property belongs to the corporation, there is an emerging standard saying it is inappropriate for a university to make a contract that permanently suppresses knowledge. Universities are amenable to temporary suppression, agreeing to hold back from publishing certain kinds of work until the corporation has the opportunity to file patent claims, but permanent secrecy is antithetical to what we're all about. Like the shared understanding that private benefactors may endow a faculty chair but may not overrule the university in naming the recipient, the consensus against permanent suppression of the fruits of research is a fundamental safeguard against inappropriate compromises.
Students come first.
Student involvement in academic-corporate partnerships can lead to fruitful research, but confusion in roles and incentives can hamper a young person's career. Publication must not be delayed in a way that compromises the completion of theses or dissertations, and regularly constituted faculty must have primary responsibility for establishing the standards of student research. Well, it's not good enough for me. The final quality judgment about the student's research resides with university faculty. Universities must be prepared to make ethical judgments.