When a pharmaceutical manufac-turer provides university professors with a research budget to do an efficiency evaluation on the company's products, should the company have a say on whether the results should be published in academic periodicals?
The above question was a hotly debated topic at health economics discussion groups on the Internet in January and February of this year.
Coincidentally, the Atlantic Monthly ran an article in its February issue, headlined "The Kept University." The article probed into how US universities are gradually being "kept" by the business sector. The authors of the article, Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn, provided several examples and statistics to support their observation.
The first example was that in November 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis provided US$25 million to UC-Berkeley's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, on condition that the university transfer patent rights on one third of the research results to company. The department was also required to set up a five-member research committee to review applications for research projects, two of whose members had to be Novartis employees.
The deal triggered fierce debates among professors from the College of Natural Resources, to which the department belongs. The focus of the debate was whether UC-Berkeley should have "sold out" its academic independence.
According to a study by Mildred Cho, a bioethics scholar from Stanford University (published in the 1996 Annals of Internal Medicine), 98 percent of drug evaluations done with corporate support reached conclusions favorable to the drugs. In contrast, only 79 percent of evaluations done with government or independent NGO funding reached favorable conclusions.
Another survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also reached a similar conclusion. The study found that the proportion of negative results found in evaluations funded by pharmaceutical manufacturers was only one-eighth of that in similar evaluations funded by non-manufacturers.
A separate study on research already published shows that about one-third of the authors have economic interests in the research projects they undertake.
A common phenomenon is that when corporations donate money to universities for courses by visiting professors, the donations are often attached to conditions lsuch as the professor's field of research and the number of hours he or she should spend on specific services or activities each week. For example, Kmart's donation to the University of West Virginia required the professor to spend 30 days each year training Kmart's branch managers.
In this way, corporations are able to use donations to manipulate research, courses and even other activities of the universities. Most US universities now see this as a matter of course. With state governments cutting financial support for state universities by the year, we find it difficult to blame state universities for "embracing" corporate sponsors and selling out their souls.
These figures and examples led the authors of the Atlantic article to an important question: will society begin to see universities as "corporate mercenaries" instead of academic institutions supposed to safeguard truth and objectivity?
On Feb. 23, the China Times reported that Taiwan's Ministry of Education has come up with the idea of a government-owned, privately-run university
This kind of "kept university" phenomenon is far more serious in the US than Europe. The reason is simple: government funding for universities is far lower in the US than in Europe. One advantage of universities uniting with business is that the universities can acquire more resources and their research can be more "practical" or "commercialized." These are also reasons for the US' speedy high-tech development, especially in biological and information technology. US universities have also contributed much to the country's economic development. According to estimates by the Association of University Technology Managers, US universities reaped US$34 billion and supported 280,000 jobs through technology transfers in 1998.
However, this kind of success comes with a price. As US universities increasingly embrace business, they also lose out in the pursuit of the objectivity and truth that they traditionally represent.
When professors evaluate products of a company that they or their universities have invested in, the objectivity of their research becomes suspect.
While Taiwan's universities are considering the "government-owned, privately-run" model and raising funds on their own, we first need to think seriously: what kind of universities do we need? What is a university's mission? If Taiwan society thinks the function of a university is job training and research and development, perhaps US universities will be good models. Also, "government-owned, privately-run" will be a very efficient strategy.
However, once our universities head in that direction, we should not harbor high expectations about research and development in the basic sciences, humanities, social sciences and the arts. Because these areas are often seen as "valueless," they stand a good chance of being downsized in a commercially oriented university. Very few businesses are willing to spend money to support research in these fields. Also, we will not have the luxury of expecting our universities to remain epitomes of independence, objectivity and truth.
This does not mean universities should not cooperate with business, nor does it mean national universities should not become "government-owned, privately-run" or raise funds on their own. But which universities need to be protected when both national and private universities are cooperating with business? When we spend less taxpayer money to fund universities, the price we pay is forcing the universities to seek support from the private sector and gradually become"commercialized" to the extent of changing their function, especially in their service to non-business sectors of society.
If we agree that the "soul" of a university lies in the pursuit and safeguarding of truth and in the dissemination of knowledge, then I hope our society and educators will ponder and discuss the issue together: What is a university's "soul"? How much is it worth? Which part of it can be sold out?
Chi Chun-huei (紀駿輝) is an associate professor in the department of public health, Oregon State University.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS