ABSTRACT
The land grant university (LGU)/system has found itself cornered in the midst of contradictory social forces. And at the heart of each of these social forces lie rival judgments about the appropriate configuration of industry-university relationships. State agricultural experiment station (SAES) administrators have thus sought to replace anarchic industry-researcher relationships, which at times have led to abuses and public relations scandals, with more formal industry-university relationships focused on a biotechnology center. There has been a strong tendency in analyses of industry-LGU relationships to treat the LGU/SAES system as unique and a largely self-contained system. The strategy of seeking private funding of research became increasingly feasible as industry came to embrace new "high technologies" in which the proprietary goals of private firms involved the need to conduct relatively basic or fundamental research of the sort that would be of interest to intellectually ambitious scientists.
