Book scrutinizes collegiate branding

Mary’s Cakes and Pastries of Tuscaloosa did a decent business selling cookies decorated with the crimson letter A. When the nearby University of Alabama in 2012 sent Mary’s a cease-and-desist letter, the collegiate obsession with branding may have reached high tide.

Higher education’s hunger for patents, trademarks and copyrights has been building for decades, and it hasn’t ebbed, according to Jacob H. Rooksby’s new book “The Branding of the American Mind: How Universities Capture, Manage, and Monetize Intellectual Property and Why it Matters.” Rooksby, a Duquesne University law professor, unites stories of collegiate covetousness of everything from sports slogans to scientific research into a thoughtful book that asks: Should every ivory tower thought really have a registered owner?

Whether you teach at, attend or pay for college, it’s likely that you see higher ed as more than a tuitionfor-diploma transaction. Universities have historically prided themselves on being incubators of scholars and knowledge, from which ideas flow freely into the world.

“The Branding of the American Mind” is sometimes painfully diligent in explaining the laws of copyrights, patents and trademarks. It gets its power from cataloging university excesses, such as Chatham University’s trademark of the motto “Ready to Be Heard,” and Penn State’s fight to strip the term “WhiteOut” from a Norwegian firm’s intellectual property portfolio.

But every dollar that universities spend accumulating such trophies, and defending them from others, is a dollar not spent on education.

The trend becomes most insidious in the area of medical patents according to Rooksby. The University of Utah’s discovery of breast and ovarian cancer genes and Harvard’s development of a mouse designed for oncology research were each licensed to companies, which turned huge profits. Even student homework isn’t safe. The University of Missouri at Columbia, for instance, encouraged students to enter a business plan competition — then demanded a 25 percent stake and 60 percent of the profits from the winning concept. The school eventually backed down.

Rooksby makes a series of suggestions — some that universities could pursue individually or through their associations, and others that might best be spurred by legislation. At stake is the most important piece of intellectual property of all.

“Higher education’s historic brand was a marketplace of ideas, a place intentionally removed from the sphere of commerce, so that the search for ideas and the pursuit of truth could be unfettered, and knowledge could flourish,” Rooksby writes. He adds that “resisting the pursuit of brand is itself a brand, and the one that higher education should work to reclaim.”