Anatomy of a corporate takeover - 1. The Money Game - universities, adademic freedom and sponsorship

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 2001 by James L. Turk

After scaling the ramparts of academic freedom through secretive funding deals, corporations are gaining a new foothold in the ivory towers by exporting a commercial culture of governance

The basic role of the university in democratic is at risk. Alone among social institution, the university's mission is the unqualified pursuit and public dissemination of truth and knowledge. The university serves the broad public interest to the extent it treasures informed analysis, critical inquiry and uncompromising standards of intellectual integrity.

When those who make up the university, through their teaching, research and community service, struggle to push beyond conventional wisdom, they often threaten those in power with a vested interest in the status quo. Throughout history, academic staff who take their mission seriously have sometimes found themselves at odds with dominant religious groups, with governments and the state, and with the corporate sector.

Recently, corporate involvement in the university has provoked the most concern. Strapped for funds because of public sector cutbacks, universities have turned increasingly to the private sector for support, often considering corporate proposals that would have been anathema previously. The very concept of philanthropy has changed. Gone are the times when donations were made without strings. Today, the donor expects something in return.

A good deal of discussion has focused on purely commercial deals which involve the adornment of universities with corporate logos and advertising, or provide suppliers, like soft drink companies, with exclusive rights on campus. While such deals raise legitimate concerns and have provoked student protest, the bigger danger lies in relationships that threaten university autonomy and academic freedom. For example, corporate donations to universities are often made in utmost secrecy. The details of the deal remain undisclosed to the university senate or the larger university community. Canada's largest and most richly endowed university, the University of Toronto, signed secret deals in 1997 with the Joseph Rotman Foundation ($15 million for the Faculty of Management Studies), CEO Peter Munk of Barrick Gold and Horsham corporations ($6.4 million for the Centre for International Studies) and Nortel ($8 million for the Nortel Institute for Telecommunications). The deals allow the corporations unprecedented influe nce over the academic direction of University of Toronto programmes.

Mounting unease

For example, the Rotman agreement initially called for "the unqualified support for and commitment to the principles and values underlying the [donors'] vision by members of the faculty of management." The Munk donation obligated the Center of International Studies to assure that this project would "rank with the University's highest priorities for the allocation of its other funding, including its own internal resources."

In the U.S., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gained considerable notoriety in the early 1990s, when for a fee of $10,000 to $50,000 per year, it provided corporations privileged access to its faculty and to their research reports. The institute advertised its readiness to place the expertise and resources of all its schools, departments and laboratories at the disposal of industry.

The trend has been gradual, but unease is mounting about overly close relations between corporations and university-based researchers. Several high-profile cases have fuelled the debate. In the UK, the editor of the British Medical Journal resigned as a professor at Nottingham University over its decision to accept more than five million dollars from British American Tobacco towards an international centre for corporate responsibility. In the U.S. and Canada, the cases of Drs. Nancy Olivieri (see next page) and David Kern, among others, stand as blatant illustrations of the corporate threat to academic freedom and integrity. While serving as a consultant to a company producing nylon flock, Kern, the director of occupational medicine at Brown University's Memorial Hospital (U.S.), found evidence of a serious new lung disease among the company's employees. Going against the will of his university and the company that threatened to sue, Kern published his findings. His position at the university was eliminated. In the same year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control officially recognized the new disease, flock worker's lung. (1)

The fact that university administrations did not side with their faculty in both these cases signals a profound change at work within academic institutions. Corporate-dominated university boards increasingly choose top administrators who support a corporate model of governance. And universities increasingly operate in market-oriented cultures, in which social value is measured by short-term market relevance. There is money for computer science and business administration, not for philosophy, history, theoretical physics or the arts.