Who pays the piper calls the tune
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
The item appeared last week tucked in on page four of the local section of The Miami Herald. The article, written by King Hundley of the St. Petersburg Times, ran under the bland headline “FSU officers questioned donor deal.” In fact, what the story describes is a new and ominous twist on the reality that journalist and researcher Jennifer Washburn portrayed in her superb 2004 book, “University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education.”
While money is the main source of the corporate corruption of higher education – profits for the corporations that turn research findings into profitable products or services and funds for often cash-strapped universities – the FSU case, which features the billionaire Koch brothers, notorious funders of extreme right-wing causes, is about the use of money to influence ideas – the free generation and debate of which is at the very heart of the intellectual and academic mission.
The story of corporate corruption of higher education in the United States, ably dissected by Washburn, is mainly one involving the incestuous relations of academia with two of the main centers of power in American society: the military/intelligence complex and big business.
The affair between, on the one hand, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other three letter government agencies, and on the other universities, ranging from Harvard, Caltech, MIT, and Berkeley down to second-tier institutions in the heartland, peaked during the Cold War. To some extent, the events of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror,” had the effect of rekindling the liaison – as I write this, social scientists are “embedded” with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan attempting to teach the soldiers the cultural skills needed to “win the hearts and minds of the people,” while the involvement of psychologists and medical professionals as advisors in torture sessions carried out during the Bush administration is well documented and shameful.
But the story that Washburn relates is mostly about the meteoric increase since the 1970s of joint corporate/university research, which has polluted the very core of the academy and threatened its central values, including academic freedom, the openness of science, the free flow of ideas, and the boundaries between the impartiality and objectivity of research and the economic interests of professors and the institutions that employ them.
Washburn documents dozens of recent examples in which academic freedom and professional integrity have been sacrificed on the altar of good relations with corporate interests. The case of Dr. David Kern, a professor of medicine at Brown University (who also practiced at Brown-affiliated Memorial Hospital) – an elite Ivy League school – is just one of the many egregious examples detailed in Washburn’s admirably researched work (it includes 679 endnotes).
In the mid-1990s, Kern diagnosed a 36-year-old patient as suffering from interstitial lung disease (ILD), a life-threatening condition that impairs the ability to breathe and that is so rare that it afflicts only one in 40,000 people, most of them elderly. Kern was unable to pinpoint the cause of the man’s illness, but the following year another young patient presented with identical symptoms. The connection between the two patients: they both worked at Microfibers, Inc., a company that manufactures nylon-flocked fabrics.
Upon further investigation, Kern determined that a total of eight workers in a workforce of 150 had contracted ILD. That is roughly one out of every nineteen workers compared with an incidence of one out of 40,000 in the general population. The odds that the connection between working in the nylon flocking factory and coming down with ILD was coincidental were astronomical. Kern also discovered an article in a medical journal describing a similar outbreak in a nylon flocking manufacturer in Canada, further cementing the connection.
Kern had discovered a new disease – later officially designated by the Centers for Disease Control as “Flock Worker’s Lung” – and, following the norms of science, he was eager to present his findings to his peers at the annual meeting of the American Thoracic Association to be held in San Francisco in 1997. However, upon learning the news, Microfibers threatened a law suit, citing a confidentiality agreement Kern had signed promising not to disclose trade secrets. But Kern’s research had nothing to do with company trade secrets, unless one considers a trade secret the fact that the firm’s manufacturing process was slowly killing some of its workers.
To his astonishment, the university sided with Microfibers and instructed Kern to withdraw his paper, but Kern must have felt an ethical duty not to withhold scientific information with life or death implications because he presented his paper despite the pressures. Less than a week after returning from San Francisco, Kern received letters from Brown President Vartan Gregorian and Frank Dietz, president of Memorial Hospital, informing him that his teaching and research positions were being eliminated.
Kern’s case may seem extreme but it is hardly unique. In the vast majority of cases, companies hope to profit from the knowledge generated by university scholars and/or to capitalize on the prestige of a researcher or an institution. Findings such as Kern’s threaten profits and are anathema. Large individual donors are motivated by some combination of altruism, ego, and tax advantages. But the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which gave $3.6 million to the Florida State University (FSU) economics department as part of a deal sealed in 2008, isn’t looking for any of those things in return for its money. Its purpose is more insidious and represents an even greater level of corporate corruption of higher education than even the awful cases described by Washburn.
The Koch Foundation grant, specifically for the study of “political economy and free enterprise,” read the advocacy of the most rapacious form of capitalism, serves an ideological purpose. The Herald story actually understates the case when it describes the agreement as one “which gave unprecedented privileges to an outside party.”
The Koch money funds two tenure-track positions plus several graduate student fellowships in economics. But the money comes with a whole lot of strings attached and rare concessions few universities would give even in this age of wholesale corporate corruption of academia. Among other things, the foundation can stop funding the program “if the faculty hired with its money were not complying with its goals.” And those goals are well known: a plutocratic society in which business can run the show with absolutely no interference by other pesky actors, like government, unions, and advocacy groups.
In addition to the prerogative to defund the program if the professors hired prove not to be sufficiently right-wing for Koch, the foundation also gets to pick the graduate fellows funded through its grant. In addition, an earlier draft of the agreement, later eliminated after internal concerns were voiced, identified Bruce Benson, the current head of the FSU economics department, as “the continuing chair” in the context of a 10 year agreement between the university and the foundation.
The reason Koch wanted that stipulation in the contract is transparent. In a discipline which is overwhelmingly pro-business, and in which many professors serve as consultants to corporations, Benson seems even more enamored of business than most in his conservative profession. He was instrumental in negotiating the Koch deal and describes himself as “sympathetic to its [the Koch Foundation’s] goals of reducing government interference with business.”
With control of the money, the right to cut funds on ideological grounds, the power to handpick graduate fellows, and a chairman in its pocket for the duration of the agreement, Koch could be assured its dollars would go to finance an ideologically tight ship. All the elements were in place for Koch to impose a right-wing political straightjacket.
And so it happened. Despite the Koch Foundation’s brazen penetration of a state academic institution, and the concerns of top administrators as expressed in internal emails, the agreement sailed through with only minor changes. One top FSU administrator, in a pathetically naïve email, asked: “Does it compromise the academic freedom of individuals holding professorships under the agreement indirectly through the evaluation process and the prospective cessation of funds?” You think?
It is hard to imagine that FSU President Eric J. Barron could keep a straight face when he insisted last week that the institution’s academic freedom was not compromised by the Koch deal. In the last three decades, the ways and means of corporate corruption of the university have been multiple, from extremely subtle to scandalously obvious. But even by today’s low standards of academic autonomy, with the Koch deal FSU and its economics department is treading on new and treacherous ground.
