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October 27, 2003
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Still more on political sciences
This from a reader who signs himself "An engineering professor who is not a pet researcher," in response to today's earlier posts on the political climate of the academic sciences:
In response to the poster who claims that science is highly politicized, I frankly don't see it. Any researcher in a disputed field knows, or should know, that there are multiple funding sources out there. No one forces anyone to take a contract, and moreover if a point of view is not being heard, a researcher can usually get enough funding to be heard. He just has to find the right source.As for corporate funding, I would say that most of the time, the researcher serves his corporate client best by being honest with him. Most corporate legal dept. do not want to be held liable for a dangerous product. Granted, they want to control the flow of information, but the fact that it was sent to the corporation means that a good plaintiffs attorney can use it against the corporation if it is suppressed. Of course, there are stupid managers, and of course telling the corporation things it doesn't want to hear can cost you next year's funding. That's life.
Yes, it can be messy. The Berkeley researcher has an ethical responsibility to step forward, and the university has a responsibility to protect him. That's what academic freedom and tenure are all about. He can expect people to dispute his findings and his techniques. That's also part of freedom of speech. The corporation has a right to defend itself. He could, after all, be wrong. BTW, the research contract is signed by the university, with the researcher as principal investigator (PI). Funds go to the university. Usually contracts are vetted by the legal dept., plus whatever department administers the contract. In this particular case, they were apparently sleeping when the contract went through.
It is certainly true that administrators want researchers to put in for research in areas where large expenditures are planned. These areas are usually best guesses about the most fruitful fields to explore. I've never quite figured out how they are chosen, but the results (in my experience) have usually been relatively untainted by bias. What is more annoying is that administrators also divert funds into those areas and into the research budgets of pet researchers. Often these funds come out of overhead, i.e. overhead from my research funds. This is really annoying and on a very local scale, political, but it has nothing to do with left/right, democrat/republican politics. A** kissers span the political spectrum.
Again, thanks. At the very least, what's emerging here is that it does not necessarily make sense to try to talk about the structural, procedural, and methodological issues facing the academic sciences in the same breath that one tries to talk about the structural, procedural, and methodological issues facing the academic humanities (the social sciences would also be its own analytical entity, albeit one whose features overlap with both the hard sciences and the humanities at different points). Even so, it's interesting to see how divided readers are on what it means for academic researchers to accept corporate funding for their work. The scientists themselves seem to be saying that this is simply how things are: it takes money to do science, and the money has to come from somewhere; corporate funding is not inherently unethical, though corrupt corporations and corruptible scientists can do a lot of damage when they find one another. Non-scientists seem, on the whole, to be quicker to point fingers, and to suggest that there is no such thing as a "pure" relationship between academic research and corporate interest--a point that may be both technically true and entirely not useful from either an analytical or a practical perspective. Derek Bok takes this stance in Universities in the Marketplace, arguing that there is no sense worrying about whether the university is becoming corporatized, because that has already happened. His book is devoted to working out ways that universities can handle their never-ending quest for ever more revenue in an ethical manner than enhances inquiry and education rather than undermining it.
More responses are welcome. I'd be particularly interested to hear about specific cases that illustrate either the ethical and political pitfalls of corporate funded academic science or the ways business and academic research can collaborate ethically and productively.
