Disucussion for September 14 session - click "Edit" to add your notes/questions, then "Save":

Todd's questions

Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, "The Kept University"

• "..public support for education has been dropping" - Why?

• "Yes in none of the nearly 300 studies in which Krimsy found a conflict of interest were readers informed about it." - Why not? Are researchers just slimy people?

• What is the Bayh-Dole Act, and how has it affected university culture?

• What was the justification for the Bayh-Dole act?

• Have close university-industry ties happened before in history?

• In the last ten years, a great deal of academic discussion has focused on faulty assumptions in the system of intellectual property in the U.S. How does the university's interest in patents affect this discussion?

• Why are strong relationships between universities and corporations problematic, if in fact they are? Can't faculty who don't want corporate ties simply forego them?

Frank Koch, The New Corporate Philanthropy

• Koch quotes a speech by David Packard (of Hewlett and Packard fame) from 1973 in which Packard called for an end to a longstanding policy of unrestricted giving to universities. What was this a response to? How might it have affected the intellectual climate at universities like Stanford?

John Jost and Osolya Hunyady, "The Psychology of System Justification and the Palliative Function of Ideology"

• What is "system justification"? How does it relate to academic work and the recipients of funding that is constrained to "supporting the system"?

• How does system justification relate to those who fund universities?

• Is the system justification tendency restricted to people who benefit from a system? How does it affect disadvantaged groups?

• How might we think about universities differently, or try to change them explicitly, in light of an understanding of system justification effects?

Mildred Cho, Donald Dahlsten, and Chris Scott, "Corporate U: Corporate Funding of Academic Research"

• "Just let the market forces work. These things will sort themselves out." (quote from Peter Robinson) - Will this work?

Nathan Newman, "Big Pharma, Bad Science"

• "Universities once opposed patents for academic research." - Why? What changed?

• "Federal and state governments still supply the overwhelming percentage of university research funding. If all such funding was conditioned on ending non-disclosure agreements and on barring the licensing of government-funded results to private industry, the public would benefit both scientifically and financially. We've paid fo the knowledge once. We shouldn't have to do so again in increased costs of medicine and increased deaths due to suppressed knowledge." - Is this a viable suggestion? What are the barriers to enacting it?

Tom's Questions

• I would not give money to an institution whose ideology I strongly disagreed with (say, Oral Roberts University or Stanford's Hoover Institution). If that's a reasonable position for me as an individual, isn't it equally reasonable for corporations to restrict their giving to institutions based on what the institutions espouse? In other words, what's wrong with David Packard's rejection of the Committee for Corporate Support of American Universities's guideline that funds given to universities should be unrestricted in their use?

• "The Kept University" does a good job of explaining why universities have increasingly focused on research that would be profitable to corporations, at the expense of both other kinds of research (e.g. in the humanities) and of teaching. It also provides a number of examples where this focus has led to fairly clear ethical breaches. But is this tendency a bad one in and of itself, or are the examples simply evidence of the need to regulate commercial activity originating in universities? That is, is there a fundamental structural problem, or is the problem simply one of execution?

• "The Kept University" describes a problem and its causes, but it says little about solutions. What ought to be done to prevent the sorts of conflicts of interest described in the article? Whose responsibility is it to implement corrective policies (the universities, the corporations, the government,...)? What can realistically be expected in this domain?

• In "Big Pharma, Bad Science", Newman advocates 'barring the licensing of government-funded results to private industry.' How would the results of government-funded research get turned into drugs (or other useful products) if his proposal were adopted?

• In "Corporate U: Corporate Funding of Academic Research", the panelists discuss the pros and cons of three proposals to deal with the problems created by the corporate funding of academic research: (i) repealing Bayh-Dole, (ii) limiting corporate funding of universities to very indirect support of research, such as putting up buildings, or (iii) lifting all restrictions and letting market forces operate. Do any of these seem likely to solve the problems? Why or why not? If not, what other policies might be better?