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October 27, 2003
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Something in the water
A reader with a Ph.D. in history and a nonacademic career writes:
I found (and continue to find) myself considerably more afraid of the growing corporatism of academic life than I do the theoretical musings and obscure (ok, incomprehensible even to those with perfect SAT verbal scores) prose of a tiny subset of humanities scholars. Those very science and engineering departments that many of your correspondents suggest are untainted by politics are, I would suggest, the most overwhelmingly politicized departments at virtually every major research university. With literally tens of millions of dollars at stake in NIH, Defense, Energy, and Corporate Research grants, they abandoned any pretense of academic freedom decades ago. As "Deep Throat" advised Woodward and Bernstein, "follow the money." Were you to do so, you'd doubtless discover that the humanities - flawed though they may be - allow (at the least the possibility of) dissent from the prevailing norms (note, I did NOT say hegemony). Such heresy would be unthinkable at grant-craving engineering and scientific departments. When big bucks are stake, those who don't tow the line are shown the door. And unlike scholars in the humanities who need little more than a library and a modem, scientific renegades (who just might find the cure to cancer, AIDS, cold-fusion, you name it) end-up silenced altogether.
This week's Chronicle of Higher Educatiom has a long piece on corporate-funded academic research that speaks directly to this reader's concern. It's subscription-only, unfortunately, and it's too long to summarize. But the main plot points are these: a Berkeley researcher who contracted with Ecorisk, Inc.(acting on behalf of Syngenta) to study how the widely used herbicide atrazine (made by Syngenta) affects amphibians; a contract stipulating that Ecorisk and Syngenta would have the final say about whether the research results would be published; a professor who did not read his contract thoroughly enough to notice that stipulation before he signed it; research results showing that atrazine adversely affects the development of frogs even when exposure is a fraction of the current legal level (by inhibiting larynx growth and by stimulating so much estrogen production that testes effectively turn into eggs and ovaries); scary implications of that research, since what estrogen-inducing atrazine does to frogs is suggestive of what it may be doing to humans (breast cancer, for example, is associated with increased levels of estrogen); impending EPA reapproval of atrazine; billions of dollars hanging in the balance; and a nasty, prolonged subsequent fight about who own Hayes' data, whether he is a credible scientist who does credible work, and whether he has the right (not to mention responsibility) to make his findings publicly known. Read it and weep--and then think twice about what's in your water.
On the positive side of things, cases likes Hayes' are causing some schools to assess the extent to which their research departments are becoming corporatized, and to initiate discussions about how to identify conflicts of interest and prevent corruption. Former Harvard president Derek Bok's recent book, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education discusses these issues at length. I've reviewed Bok's book for Knowledge@Wharton, and will put up a link when the review is available on line.
UPDATE: John Rosenberg quotes one of his readers and adds a pointed point of his own:
"Erin O'Connor has a posting complaining about corporate influences in universities. ... Perhaps this is a good excuse for you to point out that the people who usually complain the most about this (not Erin) are the same people who offer as a reason for racial preferences: 'This is what the corporations want us to do.'"Consider it pointed out.
Perhaps it is worth adding that these are often the same folks who applauded the military brass as a progressive force in society for filing a brief in support of racial preferences in the Michigan cases but who now want to bar military recruiters from campus because of the militaryís policy regarding homosexuals.
UPDATE UPDATE: Mitch at Blogfonte has more links on the Berkeley case, and some sharp comments:
My feeling is that the Berkeley member of this particular research project decided to bail on the project when it became clear that the rest of the panel showed little inclination to run with the most alarming interpretation of their collective data. He apparently pulled out of the project in 2000. It's hard to tell who has their thumb on the scales in the scientific dispute - I've been involved in similar situations in which the activists were the malefactors. The contractual dispute, on the other hand, stinks. Hayes's publications seem to be several years after his 2000 resignation from the Ecorisk project. Exercising contractual restraint upon a research scientist who has resigned from your project is a damned ugly way to run a business. It's as bad as AccuWeather's noncompetition clauses, in its own way.
