From Inside Higher Ed:

A University of Maryland professor has pulled his institution into a heated labor debate in California, prompting a rebuke from administrators and inviting questions about his own conflicts of interest.

As a paid consultant for Service Employees International, the nation's fastest growing labor union, Fred Feinstein recently wrote a legal opinion suggesting that California health care workers could receive "less favorable" benefits if they left SEIU for another union. Feinstein penned his opinion on university letterhead, which was then photocopied and used by SEIU as campaign literature, urging workers to stay on as members.

Listing his credentials, Feinstein mentioned his status as a senior fellow and visiting professor in Maryland's School of Public Policy, along with detailing his prior service as general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board. What Feinstein did not mention, however, was that he's on the SEIU payroll and received about $240,000 from the union and one of its affiliates, Change to Win, in 2007 and 2008, according to federal filings.

Feinstein's letter prompted a harsh response from the National Union of Healthcare Workers, an independent union that has framed itself as the alternative to SEIU for workers in California. NUHW suggests that Feinstein exploited his position as a faculty member, portraying himself as a disinterested academician while taking a position favorable to an organization that compensates him.

"The University of Maryland is being thrust into the middle of this dispute in a way that not only compromises the University of Maryland, but calls into question the independence of academia in general," said John Borsos, vice president of NUHW. "Fred Feinstein, writing a letter on the University of Maryland's letterhead, certainly gave the impression of speaking with the authority of a university on the dispute."

William Powers, executive dean of Maryland's School of Public Policy, said Wednesday that Feinstein "violated university policy" with his actions.

"In writing and submitting the letter, Mr. Feinstein was not acting within his role as a university faculty member but in his personal capacity as an adviser to the union," Powers wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. "It was thus a mistake for him to use university letterhead or in any other way to imply that the university was engaged in this matter or stood behind his opinions."

Powers went on to say that the university would be "firmly informing" Feinstein that he’d violated university policy, adding that Feinstein will need to tell recipients of the letter that he wasn't acting as a faculty member when he rendered the opinion.

While Powers affirms that university policy was violated by use of the letterhead, he would not say whether Feinstein violated conflict of interest policies that govern consulting or other outside work. Concerns about the strength of such policies have been raised in recent years across academe, mostly in connection with biomedical researchers with ties to pharmaceutical companies. Issues of conflict of interest, however, have most typically been raised about researchers writing in academic journals -- not something like Feinstein wrote, which was essentially a one-page legal opinion, rendered in plain speak and distributed as campaign literature.

Still no word on whether MIT is taking Gruber's errors as seriously as Maryland appears to be taking Feinstein's.