University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.

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.

Jennifer Washburn has done us a splendid service by identifying the often corporate sources of abuses endemic now in the university, and the dangers inherent in the enclosing of the information commons. While other writers have warned about these trends, few have given us so much specific detail about how they work. I would like now to contextualize the issue of the market model of the university by looking at a bigger picture: the global economy.

David Harvey, in his book The New Imperialism (Oxford UP 2003), offers a useful approach by describing the current stage of advanced capitalism as one of over-accumulation, in which there is a lack of opportunities for profitable investment. As a result, investment opportunities are created through the privatization of formerly common property resources. "Enclosure of the commons" is the neo-liberal objective of state policies. Mainly, Harvey refers to practices of capital investment abroad, for example, the ways in which international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank force open markets. In an asymmetrical position of economic power, this means exacting tribute from poorer countries, hence the title of his book, The New Imperialism.

In a more experiential, dramatic page-turner of a book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins shows how this works on the ground. He was hired to lure underdeveloped countries into expensive infrastructure projects which put them into debt and ultimately into debt peonage to the global financial institutions, which sapped their autonomy. Global capital has dispossessed them and accumulated for itself new investment opportunities and the expansion of its own reproduction.

Harvey offers examples of domestic policies, too: for instance, Margaret Thatcher's privatization of social housing in England. This looked like ownership at low cost at first, but the process led to housing speculation, gentrification, loss of affordable housing, homelessness, and social anomie. Then followed privatization of utilities, with similar anti-social results.

Jennifer Washburn's book shows how this is happening to us here in academe. The City University of New York, where I taught, has like other public universities been steadily starved of public funding. For CUNY, this has meant rises in tuition, increased workloads for faculty, and growing adjunctivization of teaching. As the shortage of funds worsens, the public university is forced to look to the private sector. Hence the corporatization that Washburn describes so chillingly well. Corporations enter academe as the World Bank and the IMF enter poor countries: apparent saviors that devour university autonomy. We are dispossessed; corporations accumulate us for profitable investment.

Washburn also shows how the old division of scientific labor has broken down, between universities that conducted basic research, federal labs that conducted applied technical research, and private industry that developed new products and processes. Intensified international competition has forced a speed-up to put things on the market, thus breaking down those divisions which had delayed commercialization. Through legislation like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, resources are allocated into research areas that will assist business as directly as possible. Furthermore, new centers or institutes are created that evade university regulations, attract funding, and avoid contractual issues of tenure or disciplinary standing. Increasingly these are transnational in scope because many of the research projects transcend national boundaries.

Pressure to create a market model of the university also comes from trade agreements like the 1994 GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), which establishes guidelines governing international trade and investment in the service sector, including higher education. An ever-larger proportion of capital consists of intellectual property and intellectual skills. For regional trade agreements like NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) and possibly a future CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) or FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), this process would lead to restructuring of higher education for primarily economic purposes by standardizing degrees, curricula, testing, and the role of government subsidies (or privatization). Barrow, et al., fear that such a trade-directed focus of international higher education "may accelerate an already overwhelming colonization of higher education by narrowly defined corporate and political interests that erode its broader egalitarian, democratic and humanitarian goals." [emphases mine] (170)

Here in New York, our state university has already fallen prey to this trend. The New York Times reported on March 24, 2005, that Governor Pataki has tied State University of New York fortunes to alliances with the business sector. This year, according to the report, New York provided an extra $89 million for SUNY as a match for $918 million in sponsored research. So-called "Centers of Excellence" at the Albany, Buffalo, and Stony Brook campuses are intended to be hubs for new partnerships with industry; Albany's center aims to specialize in nanotechnology, Buffalo's in bioinformatics, and Stony Brook's in wireless information.

At CUNY, there is also reason for concern. Jennifer Washburn writes that New York has steered $250 million into six Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) centers, four of which have a strong bioscience focus. This may be what's behind the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center mentioned on page 33 of the CUNY Master Plan for 2004-2008. The Plan states that a new $198 million Center will be built on the City College campus, with a focus on biosensing, "a field that involves technologies that can be used for the identification, monitoring, and/or control of biologic phenomena." It has medical and defense applications. The Plan claims that the University has already attracted support from NASA ($3.6 million for design consultants) and the National Institutes of Health, and from private business and industry, including Raytheon, "an industry leader in defense, government and commercial electronics, space, information technology, technical services and business aviation and special mission aircraft." Raytheon has already committed funds to be used for research activities by faculty working in the field of remote sensing at City College. Other companies discussing collaborative efforts that will use the new facility are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, IBM, Xerox, JDS Uniphase [fiber optics], Newport Corporation [photonics], and Symbol Technologies [wireless].

Progressive faculty members everywhere need to guard against any slippery slide into corporate dominance and complicity with U.S. imperialism. We need to follow up with research on such trends in our own universities. If there is to be blood on our paychecks, we should at least know that.

REFERENCE

Clyde W. Barrow, Sylvie Didou-Aupetit, John Mallea, Globalisation, Trade Liberalisation, and Higher Education in North America. The Emergence of a New Market under NAFTA? Dordrecht/Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. (Higher Education Dynamics, vol. 4)