AMY GOODMAN: Well, on another issue, dealing with another topic, May is graduation month, and throughout the country, students are dusting off their shoes and putting on a cap and gown. But behind the graduation celebrations, American universities have been undergoing a dramatic change in recent years. Large corporations, conservative foundations and well-heeled executives have been busy buying the ivory tower and transforming it into an annex for industry.

Joining us to talk about this is Lawrence Soley, a professor of communications at Marquette University in Milwaukee. And he’s author of a book called Leasing the Ivory Tower, as well as an article in the latest issue of Covert Action magazine, Covert Action Quarterly.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Oh, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, tell us about your research into the takeover, the corporate takeover, of academia.

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Well, it’s been slow, and it’s been invisible, and it hasn’t been talked about. Instead, for the first few years of the 1990s, there was a lot of talk about political correctness, how African American nationalists, Marxists and feminist activists have taken over the ivory tower, when, in fact, control of the ivory tower has been in the hands of CEOs. They have dominated the board of trustees and the board of regents at universities across the country, and they select presidents and other executives that mirror their worldview, that see the world from the perspective of CEOs. And, in fact, as most people in New York know, the executives of universities in the New York City area see themselves as CEOs and oftentimes lavish themselves with huge salaries or, like Ann Reynolds at the City University of New York, also sits on the boards of directors of large corporations that, in turn, oftentimes oversee the direction of universities. And there has been an increasingly symbiotic relationship between the two. And, in fact, a study on university-corporate relationships reported that there has been a virtual explosion over the past several years in the number and variety of university-industry alliances.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Lawrence Soley, I guess many Americans are familiar with the universities’ increasing tendency to want to have contracts in there for their sports teams with various corporations. But you go much more into detail in some of the other manifestations. I was particularly fascinated by the point system that you described at MIT, in terms of how faculty can gain points for all kinds of freebies for providing services to corporations. Could you explain that a little bit?

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Well, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at MIT, there’s a program that’s called the Industrial Liaison Program, and it’s specifically designed to solicit memberships from corporations. And there are about 300 different corporations that belong to this program, each of which throws in between $10,000 and $50,000 a year to belong. And professors at the university get points for making contact with these corporations. And they get different types of points depending upon the level of the relationship. So, if they actually visit a corporate executive suite, they get more points than if they merely send a research report to an executive.

The point is, is that most of the research being done at MIT, along with most of the research being done at universities across the country, is funded by federal tax dollars. It’s federally funded, and it’s supported by us taxpayers. And yet, the primary beneficiaries of it, the ones who see the results of it, oftentimes before anyone else is allowed to see the results, are CEOs or researchers for corporations that didn’t fund the research.

One thing that took place in 1980 that really went unnoticed was the passage of an act commonly known as the Dole-Bayh Act, or the University Small Business Patents Procedure Act, that allowed universities for the first time to sell or license directly to corporations the rights to federally funded research. And they’re allowed to sell those rights, of course, for far less than the cost of the research, because the university isn’t funding the research anyway. So the taxpayers come in, they may spend multimillions of dollars for the research, and then corporations come in and, for a fraction of that, buy the results of the research. And so, that was a change in 1980 that really stimulated the increase in contacts between universities and corporations.

Corporations now see a direct benefit by coming in and signing research contracts or grants or setting up endowed chairs or funding programs to study or research centers and that type of thing, whereas in the past, prior to 1980, they didn’t see the direct benefits. And as a consequence, prior to 1980, there were far fewer, but still contacts between corporations and universities.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the greatest threats, it seems, of corporate takeover or corporate involvement with universities is the secrecy involved. We know it from Pentagon research at universities, where professors and even students are sworn to secrecy, which sort of defies the whole idea of open inquiry. You give the example of a British pharmaceutical corporation, the Boots Company, giving a quarter of a million dollars to the University of California, San Francisco for research looking at its drug Synthroid. This is something that came out a little bit in the news after your report came out, but tell us about
it.

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Well, that’s a fairly typical example of what happens when universities and corporations sign direct contracts for research. What happened was that Boots Pharmaceutical is a manufacturer of a drug called Synthroid that actually has a number of generic substitutes out there, or at least drugs that claim to be generic substitutes. And the research called for University of San Francisco researcher Betty Dong to actually investigate whether or not the generics were direct substitutes for Synthroid.

Well, what her results showed was that they were and that Boots Pharmaceutical should not be claiming that there were no substitutes. Of course, if there are substitutes, the price of their drug would drop. People could turn to the substitutes. And what happened after the research was done is they tried to block the publication of research, and they actually succeeded for quite a number of years. And what they claimed was that the research that they had funded and the research techniques that were utilized that they had approved previously were now somehow flawed. And that was the rationale that they used for prohibiting the university from publishing it, or, I should say, the research, the researcher from funding it.

But that type of contract exists in a lot of research contracts that exist between corporations and universities. As I point out in Covert Action Quarterly, there is a similar type of contract that existed between the geology department at the University of Texas and Freeport-McMoRan, that was contracting with university research to do — university researchers to do research for them in Indonesia.

And Juan mentioned a little while ago the types of relationships between sports teams at universities and clothing manufacturers and shoe manufacturers. And a good example of that type of contract existed at the University of Wisconsin, where they signed a contract with Reebok, and in that contract was a paragraph requiring the university to take action to remedy any statements made by their employees that put Reebok in a bad light. Now, there were a tremendous number of protests that arose from that, because that contract was very public. It was very visible. And as a result of that public relations disaster, of course, the university asked Reebok to remove that portion of the — that phrase from the contract, which Reebok, of course, facing a public relations disaster, agreed to do. But nevertheless, those types of provisions exist in a lot of contracts signed between universities and corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to professor Lawrence Soley, a professor of communications at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He’s author of the book Leasing the Ivory Tower and also a piece by the same title in the latest issue of Covert Action Quarterly. You’re listening to Democracy Now! And when we come back, we’re going to continue with this discussion, think about these, as Lawrence Soley puts it, “corporate easy chairs,” the Ronald Reagan chair of broadcasting in Alabama, the Lego professor of learning research at MIT, Dow Chemical Company research professor of chemistry at Northwestern, Sears Roebuck professor of economics at Chicago, Federal Express chair of excellence in information technology in Memphis, Bell South professor of education through telecommunication South Carolina, Coca-Cola professor of marketing in Georgia. You’re listening to Democracy Now! We’ll be back in 60 seconds.

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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, and, Amy, in your list of corporate university chairs, you forgot my favorite: the Elmer Andersen chair in corporate responsibility, named for the former Minnesota governor and the CEO of the Fuller Brush Company, which has a habit of exporting toxic glue and other substances to the Third World that are banned in the U.S. But I would like to ask, Professor Soley: What about those folks who say, “Look, costs of university education are rising. Government support to students’ tuition is decreasing. The university has to reach out for new sources of funding”?

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Well, my response to that is that the reason that tuition rates are going up is because of the relationship between corporations and universities. In fact, if you plot the rising costs of tuition and the increased costs of getting an education, you’ll see that those escalating costs actually began around the time that the University Small Business Patents Procedure Act was passed. And one of the reasons for that is that universities have discovered that in order to do this type of research, you need state-of-the-art technology, you need state-of-the-art laboratories. And so they have embarked on very ambitious programs to build high-tech Laboratories, high-tech research centers, and these have proven very, very costly. And yet, when corporations go to the university to get access to these technologies, they pay a relatively limited amount of money.

For example, here at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a paint company, Rust-Oleum, went to the university to try and find out what components in their paint were causing rust. And, of course, Rust-Oleum didn’t have a high-tech laboratory. The way that they used to do their research is they used to paint samples out, leave them out in the sun and rain and in salt, and see which corroded. Well, what they did is they went to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee here, and they asked to use high-tech equipment like electron spectroscopy, electron microscopy, to determine what the components were in their paint that was causing corrosion. And indeed, the university was able to discover that there was indeed a sulfide component in the paint that was causing some of their latex paints to corrode early. That’s the type of technology that’s necessary to do state-of-the-art research. That’s one thing.

Another thing is that with the increased emphasis on research at universities, we’ve seen a decline in the number of courses that professors teach. So, today, professors at most universities are now teaching far less than they did in the late 1970s, and they get reduced teaching loads whenever they receive a contract or a grant from a corporation or whenever they accept an endowed chair or whenever they’re overseeing a research center or a think tank and that sort of thing. In fact, I’m not the only one that has argued that. There was a study that was published last year in the Chicago Tribune where they got access to the financial records of the University of Rhode Island and systematically analyzed them and concluded that research actually causes universities to increase their tuition rather than decreasing it. So, the story that we’ve heard about corporate money actually lowering tuition rates is false. It’s actually the other way around.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, but, in essence, what we have is the continuing corruption of university life. Why have the student organizations, like the National Student Association, or the unions of professors not raised a stronger opposition to this, to this trend?

LAWRENCE SOLEY: Well, there are a number of student groups, like the Center for Campus Organizing based in Boston, that have raised the issue. It’s raised rather repeatedly at some campuses where corporate presence is quite visible. And usually it’s raised when it becomes visible. For example, at the University of Wisconsin, when the contract was signed with Reebok, there were large-scale protests against that.

The problem is, is that the direction of universities is set at the highest level by the boards of trustees and the boards of regents, and the boards of trustees are dominated by CEOs, so that if you were to look at, let’s say, New York University, you’d see on the board individuals like former CBS owner Laurence Tisch, Hartz Mountain chief Leonard Stern, Salomon Brothers founder William Salomon. And even at smaller universities, like the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, you’ll find on the board of trustees individuals from Montgomery Ward & Company, Graco Incorporated, 3M, Waldorf Corporation and even Honeywell, the corporations based in the Twin Cities. And so, students really aren’t in a position to effect change. Despite the large number of protests at the University of Wisconsin, the board of regents approved the contract between Reebok and the university. And this goes on in case after case after case.

The reality is that in most instances the relationships between universities and corporations are not as visible as in that case. For example, the Dong-University of San Francisco case that we talked about earlier, concerning Boots Pharmaceutical, became publicized only because Boots yanked the article away from a major medical journal, which was just on the verge of publishing it. And as a result of that, it got publicity, largely as a result of the journal raising the issue, that medical journal raising the issue, rather than being released to the public before then. In fact, most people at the University of San Francisco, or, for that matter, at the University of Michigan or the City University of New York, aren’t aware of the provisions of the contracts that are signed between universities and corporations, because these are proprietary contracts and they’re not public.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lawrence Soley, we want to thank you very much for joining us. Again, he is the author of Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia. It’s published by South End Press. You can ask your bookstore about it. Go to a independent bookstore if you can, or you can call South End Press in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s also author of the piece in the latest edition of Covert Action Quarterly called “Phi Beta Capitalism: Universities in Service to Business.”