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  3. The University Makes Use of Knowledge to Obtain Economic Interest Nobody ever went into academia to make a fast buck. Profes

The University Makes Use of Knowledge to Obtain Economic Interest Nobody ever went into academia to make a fast buck. Profes

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问题             The University Makes Use of Knowledge to Obtain Economic Interest
    Nobody ever went into academia to make a fast buck. Professors, especially those in medical-and technology-related fields, typically earn a fraction of what their colleagues in industry do. But suddenly, big money is starting to flow into the ivory tower, as university administrators wake up to the commercial potential of academic research. And the institutions are wrestling with a whole new set of issues.
    The profits are impressive: The Association of University Technology Managers surveyed 132 universities and found that they earned a combined $ 576 million from patent royalties in 1998, a number that promises to keep rising dramatically. Schools like Columbia University in New York have aggressively marketed their inventions to corporations, particularly pharmaceutical and high-tech companies.
    Now Columbia is going retail—on the Web. It plans to go beyond the typical "dot. edu" model, free sites listing courses and professors’research interests. Instead, it will offer the expertise of its faculty on a new for-profit site which will be spun off as an independent company. The site will provide free access to educational and research content, say administrators, as well as advanced features that are already available to Columbia students, such as a simulation of the construction and architecture of a French cathedral and interactive 3-D models of organic chemicals. Free pages will feed into profit-generating areas, such as online courses and seminars, and related books and tapes. Columbia executive vice provost Michael Crow imagines "millions of visitors" to the new site, including retirees and students willing to pay to tap into this educational resource. "We can offer the best of what’s thought and written and researched," says Ann Kirschner, who heads the project. Columbia also is anxious not be aced out by some of the other for-profit "knowledge sites", such as About, com and Hungry Minds. "If they capture this space," says Crow, "they’ll begin to cherry-pick our best faculty. "
    Profits from the sale of patents typically have been divided between the researcher, the department and the uniyersity, and Web profits would work the same way, so many faculty members are delighted. But others find the trend worrisome: is a professor who stands to profit from his or her research as credible as one who doesn’t? Will universities provide more support to researchers working in profitable fields than to scholars toiling in more musty areas?
    " If there’s the perception that we might be making money from our efforts, the authority of the university could be diminished," worries Herve Varenne, a cultural anthropology professor at Columbia’s education school. Says Kirschner: "We would never compromise the integrity of the university. " Whether the new site can add to the growing profits from patents remains to be seen, but one thing is clear. It’s going to take the best minds on campus to find a new balance between profit and purity.
According to the text, the traditional feature of the Web of Columbia is______.
选项 A、offering free access to the advanced features that are available to Columbia’s students
B、free page will feed into profit-producing page
C、providing the expertise of the teachers on the profit site
D、offering free sites listing courses and professors’ research interests
答案D
解析 事实细节题。文章第三段讲到，哥伦比亚大学正在通过互联网进行零售。它计划超越典型的网站免费列出课程和教授们研究兴趣的“．edu”模式，这说明传统的特征是[D]选项。其他都是网站的新计划。
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