=============================================================================== The Peak Simon Fraser University's Student Newspaper since 1965 =============================================================================== Simon Fraser University | Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada V5A 1S6 e-mail: peak@sfu.ca | phone: (604) 291-3597 fax: (604) 291-3786 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 3 -- September 19th, 1994 -- -- Features -- ******************************************************************************* Murder and money at the end of the university By Doug Saunders ******************************************************************************* MONTREAL (CUP) -- It must have been hard to admit that somewhere beyond his taunting, vengeance-plagued mind, Valery Fabrikant was right. Hard to look past that August afternoon in 1993 when the wiry engineering professor turned his threats into deeds, strolling though the ninth floor of Concordia University's main building, pistol in hand, killing four of his colleagues and gravely injuring a fifth. In an attempt to make sense of this tragic, inexplicable event, Concordia officials struck an independent inquiry to examine the lengthy paper trail of accusations, insinuations and threats left by Fabrikant. The inquiry, chaired by former York University President Harry Arthurs, was startled by what it saw at Concordia. "We take no pleasure," their 71- page report concluded, "in acknowledging that our report lends support to so malevolent a purpose and credibility to so unsavoury an individual." Fabrikant, long denied the tenure 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. According to Arthurs and his colleagues, Fabrikant's beliefs were correct. Concordia is dominated, in the words of the report, by a "production-driven research culture." Professors routinely do their research not for the university itself, but for their own engineering and 'consulting' companies. Instead of using taxpayer money to conduct experiments with their colleagues for the public good, these professors take huge government grants, generous university salaries, equipment and offices and use them to develop profitable products and techniques for their own companies and those of their clients. The fruits of this research are owned by the companies, to be hidden from the academic community and the body of public knowledge. Concordia, in short, has become a profit-taking centre rather than a knowledge-generating centre -- a place where pay and promotions are derived "not from academic merit or seniority, but from successful entrepreneurship." And worse: it's not just Concordia. Professors at Calgary, at Toronto, Dalhousie and Victoria -- at almost every university -- are under the same pressures. They are no longer in the business of teaching, of exploring, of professing. Rather, they are forced to become industrial profiteers, managers, and as Arthurs observes, "The better the managers they become, the more they are likely to adopt managerial -- rather than academic -- values and attitudes." What has happened to our universities? Have their academic principles become so diluted that scholars are driven to murder one another -- or have these principles, in any practical sense, ever existed? To understand what's going on, we need to step back from the flood of events and pose a more fundamental question: what, exactly, is a Canadian university? Arthurs wasn't the first Canadian to observe that universities have a tendency to serve big-business interests at the expense of the public good. "The two distinct objects of university education," wrote the members of the Royal Commission on the University of Toronto back in 1906, "are mental culture and practical utility. In recent years that latter has steadily gained upon the former, owing to the utilitarian character of the age." This was a new development. Universities, which had only existed in Canada since the mid-nineteenth century, had until then been places where Important People sent their sons to become well-formed members of the ruling elite -- to get some "mental culture." This included a heavy dose of Bible-reading, since the universities in those days were controlled by one or another of the churches. Then along came the Edwardian age, a prosperous time on these shores, when North America's newly- minted millionaires considered their ideas to be at least as important as those of the churches. They wanted a bigger cut of the action, since it had always been their money paying for the schools. So they struck a Royal Commission, which recommended that universities be reorganized around a new model: a Board of Governors, consisting mainly of wealthy businessmen, which would have complete financial control over the university. The idea was a hit, and today virtually every Canadian university is controlled by such a board. Business has always had a hand in universities (and, it should be noted, Canada's "public" universities are all private corporations). There have been many individual hucksters who have used universities as platforms to earn great personal wealth, especially during the world wars. But for the most part, the relationship between industry and academy was an arms-length one. Business leaders frequently described the university as a "valuable social investment," with an emphasis on social, since their ambition was to create more business leaders, more entrepreneurs, more people who spoke their language. But university was university, and business was business, and for the most part the two institutions were independent from one another. So it was that in 1956 another Royal Commission (this one on Canada's Economic Prospects) wrote that universities "are the sources of the most highly skilled workers" and called for a vast increase in the number of university spaces. Within a decade the student population had increased more than tenfold, giving rise to a new vision of the university: no longer a private club for the wealthy and powerful but a merit-based education open to everybody. Politicians boasted that Canada's intelligent, inventive population would be the envy of the world. Also during the fifties, Canada's universities became publicly-funded institutions, receiving most of their dollars through federal government transfer payments (a typical university gets two-thirds of its funds from the government, and the remaining third from tuition and other sources). These payments are delivered by provincial education ministries, which also have the power to regulate universities. In practice, though, most provinces have let universities stay relatively autonomous, at least until recently. This brief period -- from the late fifties until the mid seventies -- is remembered as the golden age for universities. Governments, scholars, businesses, the vast majority of individuals -- everyone agreed that our schools should take as many Canadians as possible and transform them into creative, critical, flexible and inventive individuals. And, for a while, it looked like it was working. Then things fell apart. With the seventies came government deficits, and politicians, quickly forgetting the idea of an educated populace, slashed handouts to post-secondary institutions so often that student leaders invented the unfortunate verb "to underfund." At the same time, large companies were in trouble, with profit margins slipping and threatening competition from abroad. Some business leaders cast hungry glances at university research labs, full of taxpayer-funded toys. If only those labs could be used for product development! What happened next has been carefully chronicled by two scholars, Janice Newson and Howard Buchbinder. "Business is in a technology squeeze," they write. "Universities are in a financial squeeze and what seems to be a marriage of convenience is consummated." In the early eighties, the old arms-length relationship between business and academia exploded in a flurry of activity. The campus was suddenly filled with partnerships, collaborations, technology-transfer offices, privately- funded institutions, innovation centres, spinoff companies, linkages, centres of excellence. These arrangements not only gave businesses free access to university professors, facilities and labs, they allowed companies to patent the results, keeping them out of the public realm. "In effect," another historian writes, "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." And governments are more than glad to play along. During the eighties, Canada's grant-giving organizations for science, medicine, and engineering all redesigned their rules around a "partnership" model: if you're a professor you have a much better chance of getting research funding if you're doing it for a company. If your research doesn't have any immediate profit-making potential, too bad. Also, we have seen an enormous shift in government funding away from "pure" research (finding a better way to convert matter to energy, tracing the origins of life) and into applied research (building a better mousetrap, designing cheaper car parts). Universities, desperate for dollars, have responded by redesigning their campuses around the flow of money: if governments and companies want profit-making research, then we'll all become applied-science schools. Never mind if our students all want to be philosophers, astrophysicists and musicians. Many of these changes were made very deliberately and publicly. And most were orchestrated by the Corporate-Higher Education Forum, a Montreal-based organization which brings together the presidents of Canada's largest universities and the C.E.O.'s of Canada's largest companies. In the Forum's manifesto, Partnership for Growth, the "cherished traditions" of higher education are described as "cultural obstacles" to be overcome. The Science Council of Canada -- our main public science agency -- jumped on the bandwagon with its book The Service University, which calls for the commercialization of all post-secondary research. "In this context," Newson and Buchbinder write, "`service' means a narrow, unidirectional focus on satisfying the needs of the corporate sector, rather than a broad focus on the diverse needs of Canadian society as a whole. Service to society is equated with service to industry." Into this environment stepped Valery Fabrikant, a short- tempered man with a special gift for theoretical research. Since 1985 he had worked at a Concordia "partnership" lab called the Computer-Aided Vehicle Engineering Research Centre, funded by the Quebec government. The lab conducted private research for Bombardier, Northern Telecom, Hydro Quebec, Via Rail, the military and at least a dozen other companies, all at taxpayer expense. In spite of the Fabrikant slaughter, there has been no Canadian outcry over the privatization of university research. Meanwhile, in the United States it has become something of a national crisis -- even without a mass murder. The Wall Street Journal recently described university technology-transfer offices as "technological bake sales." When the University of California tried to set up such an office, a group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists wrote a letter to the university president asking him to abandon the idea, arguing that "the plan would compromise science by pressuring academics to pursue profit-making." The president complied. And in April 1994, the U.S. Senate began hearings on university technology-transfer issues. Most Canadians haven't even heard of technology-transfer. Yet it has become commonplace for our universities to welcome corporations, inviting them to profit from the free pool of taxpayer-funded research -- in spite of the fact that Canadian businesses contribute almost no money to universities. In some cases, Canadian universities have truly outdone their American counterparts. McGill University, for example, recently became the first respectable school in North America to give a corporation control over what gets taught in an undergraduate program. In exchange for $200,000 worth of high-end recording equipment, McGill's music department gave Sony Corporation a seat on its curriculum committee. A Sony executive flies in from New York to attend the meetings. At the University of Toronto, a special program in "Nutritional Science" is about to be established by a consortium of companies which includes McDonald's and Nestle. When American pharmaceutical manufacturers lobbied the federal government for a patent-protected monopoly on prescription drugs (over their lower-cost Canadian competitors), they offered to spend millions of dollars investing in research laboratories at Canadian universities. It's turned out to be a win-win situation for the U.S. firms: they got their monopoly, and they'll get exclusive patents (at taxpayer expense) from the research labs. At almost every major university in Canada, there are similar stories. Some schools have established conflict-of- interest codes -- but these usually apply to individual professors, rather than the entire university. At many schools, the best minds, most expensive resources, and most valuable findings are efficiently being siphoned into the private sector, without any benefit to students or taxpayers. Most universities are too cash-strapped and desperate to complain about any "partnership," no matter how dubious. Trapped between their own shortcomings and the acquiescence of government and public, they are silently transforming themselves into publicly-funded private schools. How many more Fabrikants will it take before people start to notice?