UC Academic Senate Smokes RE-89

UC and Tobacco

Wednesday was perhaps a typical University of California (UC) day. En route to their commencement celebrations, UC Berkeley students passed custodians who were picketing for raises. In support of the protesters, their scheduled speaker, Danny Glover, canceled his talk. A few dozen UC students on several campuses started a solid food hunger strike to protest nuclear research, in what U.S. News and World Report suggested might be "a boon for the pudding industry". Meanwhile, the UC Academic Senate, defeated RE-89, a measure aimed at barring tobacco industry funding of academic research.

The senate voted 43-4 against RE-89, with 3 abstentions. RE-89 represents the most recent push by some UC faculty to ban tobacco industry sponsorship. It follows last year's D.C. District Court decision, which confirmed in 1,742-pages that, among other transgressions, five tobacco companies lied about the hazards of tobacco and smoking for 50 years, enticed children to smoke, and used university researchers to help undermine anti-tobacco litigation efforts.

In trying to ban tobacco funding across the UC system, faculty were responding to a recent UC policy limiting individual schools from setting policies to ban tobacco money. That measure, enacted in 2005, overturned the tobacco funding policies set by the nursing, medical, public and family health schools, on the Berkeley, UCSF, UCLA, and San Diego campuses. By setting policy, University leadership forbid those schools, with their public health missions and first hand experience with the devastating tobacco related morbidity and mortality, from declining tobacco money. Other universities, such as Ohio State University, Harvard, and John Hopkins, have no such limits on individual schools whose academic missions clash with the goals of tobacco companies.

Why Tobacco?

Stanford University is also considering a campus-wide ban on tobacco funding, and professors there argue divisively along the same lines as the UC faculty. Some contend that professors should be free to pursue whatever research they choose, including tobacco. Others say that if any business ever earned the label "evil", it's the tobacco industry, and that continuing to welcome tobacco's dollars on campuses undermines university goals.

Faculty who disapprove of tobacco funding are often associated with public health or medical schools, in some cases they've devoted their scholarship to studying the tobacco industry. The UCSF contingent of the Academic Senate voted for the UC ban, and the UCSF campus is dedicated solely to medicine and graduate science research. Stanford tobacco industry historian Robert Proctor noted, "We really don't want to be collaborating with an industry that is producing the world's largest preventable cause of death."

University presidents, on the other hand, generally argue for what they call academic freedom. They maintain that academic integrity and conflict of interest guidelines for research cover any touchy issues that might arise in sponsored research. Evidence doesn't always support this claim. A 2003 study by a UCLA professor was one of four examples of academic research tainted by tobacco funding cited by Judge Kessler in her court decision. (In response to various ethical breaches, all UC staff and faculty are required to take a 30 on-line minute ethics class this year.)

Stanford President John Hennessy said "This is a political message, and I am very concerned that we are changing our academic policy to send a political message." His statement no doubt meant that the university doesn't need to send a political message to tobacco companies, condemning their toxic products. But it could be taken another way too. Since the primary charge of University presidents is to raise money for campus, they wouldn't necessarily be too eager to muddy the waters of fund raising goals by implying that their university might be choosy about where it gets its money. That would be the wrong political message to send to tobacco companies.

University administrations across the United States are sensitive to the issue of tobacco funding. Although universities often post conflict of interest policies and publicly list their funding sources, when we called universities with questions about their tobacco research funding policies, we received a wide variety of interesting responses from administrators. Some talked very openly about their decision making processes, but others were especially guarded. Coincidentally, those who were guarded were generally the same universities who posted affiliations with the tobacco industry.

It's a tricky balancing act for universities. Although many have divested their tobacco interests, these universities often continue to accept tobacco money for research. Since university communities are increasingly hostile to the tobacco industry and its smoke, these universities seem reluctant to discuss their nuanced policies. Tobacco industry money doesn't generally amount to a large percentage of research money but universities are quietly vigilant about protecting their rights to it.

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Acronym Required wrote more about the UC tobacco policy decision process a few months ago in "My Lab Thanks You For Smoking".

A number of books have been written on the relationships between corporations and universities.