(1-7): Principles & Standards to Guide Academy-Industry Engagement
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Part I. ❖ General Principles (1-7): Principles & Standards To Guide Academy-Industry Engagement University-Wide The AAUP recommendations offered here include: GENERAL PRINCIPLES (these are principles that may be applied university-wide; they cover core academic norms and standards, such as authenticity of authorship, publication rights, and academic autonomy; they also address broad areas of academy-industry engagement, such as Student Education & Training, Financial Conflicts of Interest, and Intellectual Property Management), and TARGETED PRINCIPLES (these Principles address specific types of academy-industry engagement, including Strategic Corporate Alliances, Industry-Sponsored Clinical Trials, and Academy-Industry Interactions at Academic Medical Centers). Some repetition has been necessary to preserve in what follows, so the principles appropriate to each category remain comprehensive. ❖ Principle 1: Faculty Governance The university must preserve the primacy of shared academic governance in the planning, development, implementation, monitoring, and post-hoc assessment of all donor agreements and collaborations, including those with private industry, government, and nonprofit groups. Threats to shared governance and violations of good shared-governance practices run throughout many of the case studies and risk categories associated with academy-industry engagement that we reviewed in the Introduction. The key threats to shared governance may be summarized as follows: Approval of sponsored research contracts without review and consent by faculty governing bodies; 105 Involvement of senior administrators who hold approval or supervisory authority and who are compromised by financial COI; Faculty grant awarding processes dominated by, or influenced by, representatives of funding sources and or by faculty who are already recipients of corporate sponsor funding; Involvement of faculty, administrators, or governing board members with financial COI at any level; Analysis and review of completed projects compromised by involvement of faculty or administrators with financial COI; Non-disclosure of university foundation engagement with industry, including negotiations over gifts, contracts, or program initiatives; Loss of faculty control over key areas of authority and professional expertise—including curriculum planning and faculty hiring; Faculty selection of students for admission to graduate programs overly influenced by the goals of corporate contracts; Diminished faculty influence over departmental and institutional priorities; Diminished faculty influence over institutional mission. The AAUP recommends the following corrective and preventative measures: No external relationships, donor agreements, or university-industry collaborations should be allowed to intrude on academic governance, or contravene existing academic policies or collective bargaining agreements. The faculty senate or other equivalent faculty governing bodies should be explicitly involved in the overall development and final approval of any new, large-scale, multi-year Strategic Corporate Alliances (SCAs) on campus (See Part VI, below, for a more complete discussion of the AAUP’s recommended principles relating to SCAs). University faculty through their academic senates, or other governing bodies on campus, also should be actively involved in drawing up baseline principles and standards to guide all 106 forms of university engagement with outside sponsors, including corporate sponsors, the central focus of this AAUP report. Establishing these baseline standards will strengthen, and make more coherent, university policymaking in this area; safeguard academic professionalism; and engender greater campus- wide support and public trust. These guiding policies should draw on the AAUP’s recommendations offered here, and build upon them. To ensure that all forms of academy-industry engagement are addressed in an effective and comprehensive manner across the whole campus, these policies should cover the university as well as any affiliated medical schools, hospitals, institutes, and centers. Discussion: Too often, today, faculty governing bodies are shut out of policy-making and other negotiations surrounding the formation of academy-industry partnerships, even when these partnerships have a direct bearing on research and other institution-wide academic matters that have traditionally fallen under the purview of the faculty. Often these university-industry alliances emerge from one particular department or institute, but are not subject to any supervision, oversight, input, or evaluation by collective faculty governing bodies.276 This is the case with multi-year, multi-million-dollar partnerships—known as Strategic Corporate Alliances (discussed in detail under Part VI of this report)—which, due to complex negotiations and confidentiality concerns, are frequently presented to faculty senates or other faculty governance bodies as largely “fait accompli” deals, thus permitting minimal faculty input or consultation.277 The faculty should regard such end runs around shared governance as unacceptable. Simply keeping track of academy-industry engagements on campus can be tricky, since these activities usually take place under the auspices of a variety of different offices (the Office of Sponsored Programs, the Office of Research Administration, the Office of Technology Transfer, etc.) and may be negotiated primarily by a relatively small handful of university and company representatives. At many state-funded universities, meanwhile, a sizable portion of this private-sector and 107 corporate- gift and grant administration has been transferred over to legally separate, university- affiliated, non-profit foundations, which are highly opaque because they often claim exemptions from normal academic governance procedures and from state open record laws.278 Not surprisingly, as the private assets of these less transparent university-affiliated foundations have grown, so too has their influence and the potential for abuse. Allegations of misuse of university foundation assets have already led to civil suits, as well as state and federal criminal investigations at numerous universities. Here is a brief summary of just a few of these cases prepared by the Student Press Law Center, which tracks these university-affiliated foundations and their handling of donor funds:279 Misuse of University-Affiliated, Non-Profit Foundation Funding At the University of Idaho a former university vice president pleaded guilty to misuse of state funds and was sentenced to probation for his role in secretly diverting foundation money to prop up the financially troubled $136 million project.280 In 2005, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that University System of Georgia Foundation donor lists—which were disclosed only after a legal battle –revealed that colleges within the system awarded companies lucrative contracts after they had made large donations to a special fund that supplemented the university chancellor’s salary.281 At Iowa State University, an independent audit in 1999-2000 revealed that the ISU Foundation was still paying a former football coach, who resigned in 1994, over half-a-million dollars a year as part of a deferred compensation contract payable over 20 years. (While actually employed by the university, the coach’s annual salary was $111,197.)282 At Florida Atlantic University, a 2003 investigation revealed that its foundation had set aside $42,000 to purchase a red Corvette for the school’s outgoing president.283 Given these trends, it is imperative for faculty to protect shared academic governance by drawing up stronger consensus documents—containing baseline principles and standards to guide academy-industry relationships on campus—so all forms of academy-industry engagement 108 (whether advanced by the Vice President for Research, a small handful of faculty investigators, the Office of Sponsored Research, or a university-affiliated foundation) will be governed by a common set of clear academic standards. This principle on Faculty Governance helps to clarify and strengthen AAUP recommendations already issued in the “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” and the “Statement on Corporate Funding of Academic Research.”284 Academy-industry partnerships play a vital role in funding research, and bring many additional benefits. However, in the face of mounting financial conflicts of interest, and other commercial threats to academic freedom, research integrity, and public trust, the time has come for stronger faculty input and guidance in this broad area. ❖ Principle 2: Academic Freedom, Autonomy, and Control The university must preserve its academic autonomy—including the academic freedom rights of faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and academic professionals—in all its relationships with industry and other funding sources by maintaining majority academic control over joint academy-industry committees and exclusive academic control over core academic functions (such as faculty research evaluations, faculty hiring and promotion decisions, classroom teaching, curriculum development, and course content). No academic institution should accept any financial support that is either explicitly or implicitly conditioned on the donor’s ability to influence or control such core academic functions. This statement builds on the AAUP’s 1990 “Statement on Conflicts of Interest,” which reads in part as follows: Because the central business