Funding and Ethics in the Academy

Over the last ten weeks, we've primarily talked about funding with regards to how the state and the university allocate their budget – how the state cutting the education budget affects us as students. However, we've also touched upon funding on a more personal level: a few of the authors in both “Auto-Ethnographies” and “From Oppression To Grace” talked about their experiences involving funding – most involving either discrimination against race/gender or bias against the topic being researched. For academics, funding can be incredibly important – it determines both the types of projects they can work on and their prestige amongst peers. As such, as members of the Academy it's important for us to remain aware of the questionable ethical practices surrounding funding on both a personal and institutional level.

The ethical issues surrounding funding become increasingly complicated when personal privacy comes into play. For many projects, especially those involving human subjects, funding requires approval from an ethics board. Their primary purpose was to ensure the safety and projection of participants in academic studies. However, that purpose has changed with time. In the afterword to “Auto-Ethnographies”, Michael Lambeck describes a system which works to shift legal and financial responsibility onto these same participants. “In the ethics review process the university or granting agency passes on liability to the researchers and the researchers pass it on to their subjects. In my view, this is not merely non-ethical, but unethical.” (233) While there have certainly been budget issues in recent years, the Academy has a moral obligation to help the community – not exploit it. As institutions and researchers become increasingly focused on preserving their own legal and financial protection, tensions between the Academy and the surrounding community will only worsen.

Very few institutions are funded solely from their own members. Outside parties such as donors and other institutions often fund both academic and community outreach projects. However, this funding can come with strings attached – not all of them immediately apparent. For many groups, a large portion of outside funding depends solely on recent reported successes. In our quartet, Nesley (who works with the Dream Project) mentioned that they have to turn in surveys reporting success rates in order to continue to receive funding and Izumi (who works at the Pacific Science Center) pointed out that employees and volunteers need to write reports about current demonstrations in order to receive funding.

While it makes sense to both fund more successful projects and use the promise of additional funding as a motivational tool, this process has several problems. While thus far there have not been many serious reported cases of this kind of fraud in academic institutions, it does not mean this problem is insignificant. As a result of smaller operating budgets due to decreased third-party funding, there's additional pressure to engage in practices such as misreporting results in order to seem more successful. These can range from institutional standards to personal decisions, regardless of the motivation. Not only are these behaviors unethical (and carry heavy penalties if discovered), but they also undermine the legitimacy of other academic endeavors.

Another serious concern comes from the *other* kind of third party which funds academic endeavors. Corporations with overflowing coffers often have a vested interest in funding groups within the Academy. In 2007, BP gave UC Berkeley a $500 million grant to create an Energy Biosciences Institute, which would primarily work on new biofuels. While universities are certainly feeling the effects of state budget cuts, there are immense ethical problems associated with allowing corporate funding. There is a major conflict of interest when companies fund studies from an academic institution where the results could impact their business. Personally, though I don't think there's too much to worry about when it comes to entirely fraudulent results, I am worried about tampering with the scientific process – the same question phrased in two different ways can produce differing results. Increased corporate influence on the scientific process is not a good thing, especially when corporations aren't known for putting the public good before shareholder profits. When large sums of money are involved, it's often difficult to discern the objectivity and of whatever results are being reported.

Thus far I've been talking about ethics and funding on an institutional level. However, murky ethics come into play on a personal level as well, especially when it comes to discrimination. Many faculty at academic institutions derive their prestige from their publications – both in terms of quantity produced and quality of the publishing journal. These publications not only grant prestige to their authors, but also to the institution which they are affiliated with. As such, academics who publish more frequently in respected journals receive additional money in terms of both salaries and funding. In a morally ideal world, this would be a relatively functional meritocracy where the most qualified researchers receive the most funding. However, as usual, reality is far from ideal – beyond the essays we've read in “From Oppression to Grace”, there are several studies showing gender and race discrimination regarding both academic publications and faculty/tenure appointments. Given how both of these are instrumental to one's professional standing, this kind of institutional bigotry is especially abhorrent.

In direct contrast with the discrimination I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Academy is often referred to as an “Ivory Tower” due to its collective knowledge and perceived intellectual superiority (both internally and externally) of its constituents. It's common for an institution with a solid external reputation to avoid discussing matters which could potentially disrupt that reputation. The Academy is no different. Statistically, most faculty members are white males and the effects of this reach beyond the bigotry involved in hiring and publishing. In both “Auto-Ethnographies” and “From Oppression to Grace” this quarter, we've read how “controversial” projects (ranging from studies on institutional discrimination to critiques on clearly political biases) which place a critical lens on the Academy often find themselves unfunded, despite academic merit. Personally, I can understand the desire to maintain a certain reputation and stymie internal criticism – it is often the most damning. However, internal critique often provides a viewpoint lacking from external analyses: organizations which seek to limit it often suffer as a direct result.

This post has been rather critical for that very reason – personally, after I finished my first draft I was understandably disheartened. I remember in our last official class together several people mentioned feeling like they didn't have the tools to tackle the problems we've discussed over the last ten weeks. In our first lecture, Dr. Taranath asked how many of us had taken a class from a female professor before – I never realized how rare it was. It was the kind of statement which stuck with me weeks later as I was registering for classes and looked through the list of (predominately male) professors. As I was trying to figure out how to actually *end* a blog post it led to a sort-of realization– though as members of the Academy we have a responsibility to think about these sorts of problems (and as undergraduates we often have neither the free time or political clout to try and tackle them directly), by simply remaining aware and sharing these thoughts with others we can do our part to improve this community.