The Marriage of Corporation and Academia, and How it Impacts a University's Operation

Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Ltd.

When doing work at the library, financial advisors from Coast Capital Savings typically don’t badger you about mutual funds with which to hedge your student debt, even if the Surrey campus library is blandly named after their credit union.

According to KPU’s Asset Naming Policy, the opportunity to have your name attached to something typically comes along as a means to encourage donors to give the university money. From the policy: “In order to qualify for a naming opportunity, donations must represent a significant amount of the asset being named.” Each naming opportunity comes with an agreement that is negotiated between the donor and the university, and each agreement is likely different.

In the case of the Coast Capital-KPU agreement, the main thing Coast Capital receives is their name plastered all over the library. There’s no CCS booth in the atrium prepositioning debt instruments. No naming rights over the business department wing. Just what seems to be a pretty innocuous friends-with-benefits situation between university and corporation.

But like many universities, KPU is connected to several corporations, typically as a means to supplement the less-than-adequate provincial funding. The way public university funding works these days, universities like KPU are forced to look at sources other than government for revenue just to operate frugally. They also have an increasing number of sessional instructors to pay, and everyone’s research to financially support. Someone’s got to pay, and if the public sector doesn’t want to foot the entire bill for an academic’s rare blood disorder research, well, the private pharmaceutical company downtown might prop them up. For a price.

When the price tag reads academic freedom with six zeros trailing behind, that’s when the critics become concerned about universities and corporations saying “I do.”

Universities and the private sector operate in very different ways and for very “legitimate reasons,” according to David Robinson, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. Universities have traditionally operated more collaboratively, he says, and academic researchers often share preliminary findings in order to let the broader community expand, criticize or disprove them.

“The private sector is mainly concerned about secrecy,” says Robinson. “You’re developing, through your research, new products, new processes that you want to keep to yourself because you don’t want your competition getting hold of them.”

Robinson provides an anecdote about Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who in the late 1990s was researching a new drug treatment for a rare blood disorder at the Hospital for Sick Children in conjunction with the University of Toronto. The pharmaceutical company Apotex sponsored her research at the time.

“As the trial progressed,” recounts Robinson. “She discovered, in her view, what she thought were very serious adverse side effects that some patients were exhibiting. She wanted to inform her patients and publish the results of her findings, and the company threatened to pull funding from her, started to sue her . . . the university didn’t protect her.”

Robinson thinks that, increasingly, universities are, “Becoming like the private sector.” He says that this trend of universities closely working with corporations leads to corporate thinking finding a nest in the senior administration and boards of governors of our post-secondary institutions—that they’re more in charge of a private or for-profit corporation rather than a public institution.

But with the state of public university funding, can such philosophies really be helped? The bigger issue beyond who the university’s in bed with is the current public commitment to public university funding, says Robinson. He notes there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with collaborations with the private sector. In fact, he suggests that in many cases the private sector can bring questions, issues and research problems that academics would not have thought about. Many corporations partner with nonprofits, even, and produce great things.

But when it comes to university partnerships, he stresses that there are rules to be followed that ensure every agreement is transparent and open. CAUT conducted a recent study that examined 12 of the biggest corporate-university collaborations. The report found that only seven of those collaborations had any protections for academic freedom and free publication of research.

It’s not really the perceived agency of corporate interests that shocks Robinson, but rather that, “Our so-called leaders of our universities are so quick to sell away fundamental academic values just for a little donation or the promise of more corporate funding.”

During the time a controversial agreement between KPU and Trans Mountain was signed, KPU’s vice-provost Salvador Ferreras told The Runner that KPU is, “An institution that is entrusted with by the board and by the University Act to conduct the business of a university, to raise money to have scholarships to support students and support the regional economy.”

KPU geography professor Bill Burgess, who is actively working against that agreement with other faculty members, sees problems with that philosophy. Burgess maintains that he’s “very enthusiastic” about the general idea of a polytechnic education, and, “Mixing the traditional liberal arts heart of the original university with more science-oriented and applied-oriented jobs.”

But he says, “The problem is that when we just turn into a job training institution for private business and government institutions.” His view is that employers are shedding their responsibility to train employees, and that these days the job market wants universities to gear their programs to, “Custom-fit their particular . . . short-term requirements.”

The B.C. government does have a program called the “Skills for Jobs Blueprint.” They project that up to 43 per cent of jobs in B.C. will require trades skills or technical training. This blueprint, which includes what the government calls “re-engineering education and training” seeks to strengthen trades sectors and especially LNG. Part of that blueprint will see about $270-million of post-secondary operating grants by 2017-18, “aligned to training that matches with high-demand jobs.”

Robinson believes that, “Fundamentally, what universities should do is conduct research that’s scientifically interesting—not something that’s being dictated by political interests of the day.” The research culture of a university, according to Robinson, fosters long-term research that goes for decades, not four- to five-year election cycles.

Perhaps 30, 40 years isn’t fast enough for policy-makers and the job market. Robinson is convinced that this research culture is necessary to future innovations, which he sees have been declining in Canada.

“The Irish physicist John Tyndall in the late 19th century asked a very basic question,” says Robinson. “He asked, ‘why is the sky blue?’”

Robinson says it led Tyndall to explore the properties of light. Which then led to understandings that helped humans create lasers, orthoscopic equipment and other things.

“Now, if you walked into a corporate boardroom today and said, ‘I want some research funding to investigate why the sky is blue,’ I don’t think you’d get much of a response except laughter,” says Robinson. “And similarly I think governments would be a little inclined to say, why would you want to investigate that? What practical use would that ever have?”