Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy.

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, the university was posed as an underutilized weapon in the battle for industrial competitive and regional economic growth ... At university after university, new research centers were designed to attract corporate funding, and technology transfer offices were started to commercialize academic breakthroughs. But we may well have gone too far. Academics and university officials are becoming increasingly concerned that greater involvement in university research is causing a shift from fundamental science to more applied work ... Universities have been naively viewed as engines of innovation that pump out new ideas that can be easily translated into commercial innovations and regional growth. This has led to overly mechanistic national and regional policies that seek to commercialize those ideas and transfer them to the private sector. (1) Richard Florida In a recent book, Richard Florida marked twenty years of transformation in the university's purpose. Following on from his analysis, the 2000s can best be represented through convoluted debates detailing how universities are implicated in diverse modes of economic and social engagement. The palette of achievement, assessment and validation has been brushed with words and phrases like innovation, creativity, lifelong learning and the knowledge economy. These imperatives probe the traditional structures and ideologies of higher education. Richard Florida found 'naivety' in tethering university research to commercialization. However, while tracking a movement from fundamental to applied science, the changes to the humanities generally and media, communication and cultural studies specifically were unmentioned in his comments. The role of the humanities and social sciences as content providers that feed screen and sonic media is increasingly significant via the transformation of delivery platforms through digital convergence. (2) In fact, when assessing Florida's full published research portfolio, the commodification of scholarly research in the humanities has been a minor part of his commentary on the creative industries, often slotted into discussions of his 'three T's'--technology, talent and tolerance. Florida's Cities and the creative class included only one chapter--'The university, talent, and quality of place'--that offered a presentation of the enmeshed relationship between the new economy and higher education. Perhaps recognizing this absence, he addressed this link a year later when, with Gary Gates, Brian Knudsen and Kevin Stolarick, he published a research project funded by the Heinz Endowments, titled The University and the Creative Economy. In response to this document, which was released in December 2006, our article for Nebula has a single objective. Our goal is to evaluate how the rise of the professional doctorate in universities aligns with--or disconnects from--'the creative economy.' Over the last decade, the institutional diversification of doctoral candidatures has operated in parallel with the burgeoning--in policy documents at least--creative industries. Our work takes the release of Florida's The University and the Creative Economy as an opportunity to re-evaluate and re-contextualize the two words 'professional' and 'doctorate.' (3) Florida wanted the purpose of a University to be more than 'pumping out new ideas.' While he is now considering the multiple roles of higher education in his more recent publications, the place of postgraduate education in facilitating technology, talent and tolerance is still unmentioned in the most recent report. Instead, he remains interested in the concentration of students and the number of academics in particular cities. (4) Subject or discipline specialities, the number of postgraduates or the type or mode of masters or doctorate were not deemed relevant to his research. While revealing the number of students, academics, universities, patent applications, license income and invention disclosures (5) that build into the Bohemian Index and the three Ts, greater precision is needed when aligning the postgraduate experience and the creative industries. …

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