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"In effect, all products and useful information resulting from the labour of university scientists is becoming private property owned by professors, funders, or the university. This fact transforms the university's role from that of ‘producing' for the general society to a function more akin to that of a leased research team."

-Janice Newson & Howard Buchbinder, University Means Business

Is your University selling out? Do you know where the money to do research at your school comes from? Do your work and ideas really belong to you at all? These questions are important to ask in this era of corporate driven agendas. But you're in Fine Arts or History, so this can't really affect you, right? Wrong. In Canada we are witnessing a dramatic shift away from government funding. Starting in the early 1970s, government began to cut funding to higher education. This forced universities to seek alternate sources of cash. Enter Big Business. Actually, the government is putting lots of money into universities these days, only most of it goes to "Centers of Excellence" and technology transfer institutions, both of which serve to promote industry-university ties. Think about it, in order to attract more industry funding into their institutions, the schools have to focus on marketable products, so there is an unavoidable concentration of funding to the technology (read product-development) sciences. Where do you think that money is now missing from? That's right, those economically stagnant areas such as the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Now you say, well that's fine, I'm a Chemistry Major, so that means I'll just be getting more funding for research - nothing wrong with that is there? Sorry to disappoint you, but how would you like to be told what area you can or cannot perform research in? Or not be able to share your ideas in an open exchange that scientists take pride in maintaining? Or maybe not being able to speak your mind freely about your friendly corporate research partner? Well, get used to it, because big business is your new roommate.

We at Concordia have already seen many signs of cost-cutting's creeping tendrils of influence. Ever-increasing user fees, the "internationalization" of the university by constantly courting students from outside Quebec because they pay almost twice in fees as Quebec residents. We are also losing invaluable programs such as Science and Human Affairs, a little known faculty but one which is specifically targeted at such things as scientific ethics, environmental studies, and especially, the links between industry and academia in scientific research. These losses are thanks to people such as Ontario premier Mike Harris suggesting universities should "curtail the number of degrees in areas of ‘non productive' education.".

The Funding and the Players

What gives? Why do the schools need to sell their autonomy now? The numbers tell a tale. McGill university's figures for 1996-1997 give a good example of just how important corporate research funding has become. Their total operating revenue was $482,866,000, of this, $196,390,000 comes from the Quebec government, tuition fees took care of $50,999,000, and research funding (not even including their hospital research funds) pulled in a whopping $115,146,000. As McGill's website proudly points out "In 1996-97, the total value of research grants awarded to staff, graduate students, and postdoctoral students at McGill and affiliated hospitals by the federal and provincial governments, Canadian foundations and industry, US and other foreign government foundations and industry, and the McGill endowment: $190.4 M..". So, in total, McGill took in more than $ 300,000,000 for investments in research.

McGill is first among Canadian universities in research funding per professor.

-McGill Website

Now, obviously the corporations that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific research wish to protect their investment through intellectual property strategies (patents, etc ...), and suddenly academic freedom and the open dissemination of knowledge is threatened.

However, it is not only our own government that is the root of this change. The supranational organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank endorse all these strategies for gaining research funds. Jan Currie, a sociologist and author of "University Means Business" is involved in the issue of academic capitalism. She notes that "The World Bank, in its 1994 report on higher education, urged countries to shift from dependence on just one source of funding - the state - toward multiple sources, with more money coming from student fees, consultancies and donations. In short, higher education should resemble the United States model more closely.". So, if the supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF are behind much of the drive to make universities function more like corporations, who's looking out for us as students and teachers? Well, not very many people actually. Luckily, there are some voices that are speaking up against this near-privatization. Our esteemed CSU president, Rob Green notes in this year's CSU handbook and agenda "The neoliberal agenda seeks to transform post secondary education (traditionally thought of as a social program for all) into an elitist institution where corporate dollars determine what type of research is done and which classes will be cut.".

What's the Damage?

So, what's the worst case scenario, will schools ever be the same again? Probably not. The era of universities being free to research whatever struck their fancy or having the ability to remain impartial to the business world is over. In fact, in the first report published by Canada's Corporate-Higher Education Forum (1983) titled Partnership for Growth, the think-tank argued that "universities need to abandon some of their treasured ‘cultural' ideals, such as the maintenance of autonomy and academic freedom.". It seems then that the most profound harm of university-industry ties will be the diminishing of university and professional independence. Universities are one of the last places where one may find a disinterested (without vested interests in the subject) opinion about and critiques of policies, technologies and products. When the autonomy of huge swaths of the university is compromised, and when open debate is displaced by corporate norms of proprietary secrecy, then society loses an important pool of potentially independent, trustworthy experts. An example of the potential danger of losing this more objective viewpoint is in the field of biotechnology. Most leading academic biologists have ties to biotechnology companies (Concordia recently received a funding grant of one million dollars from Bio Chem Pharma - one of Montreal's largest biotechnology companies). On critical biotech policy issues, such as the safety of releasing genetically altered organisms into the environment, there are few independent expert voices enlivening the public debate. Can we really afford to sell those voices to the companies that are trying to market such products?

Other consequences are also harmful to society. Corporate sponsorship arrangements and federal patent law enable private companies to skim the benefits of taxpayer investments in research - exclusively and without having to pay anything back to the taxpayers.

What Can We Do?

Admittedly, the average student has maddeningly little control over university policy in funding matters, but being aware of the problem is of great importance. Public disclosure of who is funding what is the first step in dealing with the issue of potentially conflicted professors and academic institutions, but it is not enough. We need to develop university norms that discourage both individual and institutional ties to business, so we can hopefully fulfil a more robust social role than that of corporate subsidiary. We should demand to know what corporations have ties with our school, and in what context. Back in 1993, Concordia had a gruesome warning about the direction the university was taking in research funding allocation. Doug Saunders, in an excerpt from QPIRG's activist handbook School Schmool, explains "Valery Fabrikant, frustrated by being denied tenure that he felt he deserved, was convinced that he was working in a corrupt environment where professors were more interested in money-making opportunities than any genuine research, where public funds were paying for private ventures, where scholarship was less important than entrepreneurship.". This is not to say that Fabrikant's actions were anything less than disgusting and inhuman. However, an independent inquiry performed by former York University President Harry Arthurs found some disturbing facts about Concordia's research methods and funding. The report concluded "We take no pleasure, in acknowledging that our report lends support to so malevolent a purpose and credibility to so unsavory an individual. Concordia is dominated by a production-driven research culture.". "Professors routinely do research not for the university itself, but for their own engineering and ‘consulting' companies." states Saunders. Further "Concordia, in short, has become a profit-taking center rather than a knowledge-generating center - a place where pay and promotions are derived ‘not from academic merit or seniority, but from successful entrepreneurship'.". We need to remember the causes and lessons of the Fabrikant murders and reflect at all times on the wisdom of our academic choices. It is up to each of us to become more aware of the issues, and to get involved in information gathering, dissemination and activism. It is our duty to keep the values of academic life in the forefront of university policy - before this slow and sneaky privatization has become irreversible.