University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2005 by Renate Bridenthal

UNIVERSITY, INC: THE CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

By Jennifer Washburn. Basic Books, 2005

This stunning account of how the commercial ethos in universities has subverted the values of humanism and the public good is a heads-up for anyone involved in higher education. Jennifer Washburn has accumulated an alarming amount of information about the intrusion of market forces into research universities. Not only are academic activities skewed in the interests of profit, but the public at large is also cheated and sometimes harmed.

Washburn's chief aim is to show how the corporate influence on academic science, particularly in medicine, pharmacology, and biotechnology, has sacrificed a commitment to basic research and even integrity to industry's short-term bottom line. Here are some of her examples:

   In the 1990s, the tobacco industry
   paid academic scientists up to
   $20,000 each to publicly downplay
   the risks of smoking.

   The Enron Corporation financed
   the Harvard Electricity Policy
   Group, which wrote thirty-one
   reports promoting deregulation of
   California's energy markets.

   At Brown University,
   Micro fibres, Inc. tried to
   prevent Dr.
   David Kern
   from publishing
   his
   findings on a
   potentially
   fatal new lung
   disease that affected
   workers at its factory. Microfibres
   was being asked to donate to a
   new project at Brown Medical
   School, and the Brown administration
   told Kern not to publish or
   present his work. After protest,
   Brown backed off and Kern presented
   his results at a conference--but
   a few days later, his teaching
   and research positions were eliminated.

   Also at Brown, it was revealed that
   the lead author of a study endorsing
   the safety and effectiveness of
   the antidepressant Paxil was paid
   over half a million dollars in a single
   year in consulting fees from
   drug companies. One of the companies
   was the maker of Paxil, later
   identified as potentially inducing
   suicide among teenagers.

Increasingly, corporate influence goes beyond exerting pressure from the outside. Novartis, the Swiss-based multinational pharmacological company and producer of genetically engineered crops, signed an agreement in 1998 with the University of California at Berkeley to fund research in its Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. In return, Novartis got the first right to negotiate licenses on one-third of the discoveries, whether funded by its donations or by taxpayers' money. Novartis also got two of five seats on the departmental committee that determined how the money would be spent; the three university appointees all received large research awards from the firm. An external review by a team from Michigan State University concluded that such agreements should not be repeated, because they created conflicts of interest for the university as an institution.

Such concerns were amplified when a leading opponent of the Novartis deal was denied tenure at Berkeley. He had published research indicating that genetically modified corn had contaminated native maize in Mexico; his department had recommended him for tenure by a vote of 32-1.

Despite this and other corporate bullying at UC campuses, Governor Gray Davis pushed for UC to increase its collaboration with industry, with the creation of the California Institutes for Science and Innovation. Davis offered $100 million a year in public funds to each of four new UC institutes, contingent on each raising twice that much from other sources. The goal of this mixed private/public project is commercialization of discoveries through the academic integration of venture-capital management and business incubators, with industrial parks intertwined with university research facilities. "When these expensive commercial-research centers were being launched," Washburn writes, "state spending on the UC system declined by 14 percent, even as enrollment climbed 18 percent."

Washburn knows that university-based research in the U.S. has often tended toward utility, originally through land grants for agricultural colleges and later for war-related research. However, she argues that 1980 legislation, the "University Small Business Patent Procedures Act," or Bayh-Dole Act, which permitted universities to patent and license federally sponsored (taxpayer-financed) research on a large scale, has led to a new paradigm, a "market-model university," that increasingly puts short-term profit ahead of humanistic education and basic research.

The more public universities are starved of public funds, the more they will find private resources tempting. But the intellectual and moral costs are high. Secrecy has enclosed the scientific commons. Intellectual property battles have led to charges of stealing research and the abuse of junior scientists and students. Distorted research results injure the general public and create distrust of university work.

Finally, curricula are distorted to favor science and business, while humanities and social sciences wither. In general, the latter fields have fewer "products" to market and therefore attract less funding in a "market-model university." This model has already affected the structure of the professoriate. Washburn gives New York University as an example, where "stars" are offered salaries in six figures, while the majority of classes are taught by adjuncts whose academic freedom is perennially at stake.