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VCU
and the Evil Weed
VCU President Eugene Trani
blew Richmond’s reputation by going
along with a noxious Philip
Morris research contract.
Virginia
Commonwealth University
has been taking its lumps nationally after the New
York Times wrote a news
story and an editorial critical of a research
contract the university had agreed to with Philip
Morris USA, one of the biggest and most powerful
companies in Virginia.
VCU
and its President Eugene Trani are coming off very
badly in this public relations disaster, which is
largely of their own making. The Times
asked reasonable questions about taking money from
Big Tobacco under provisions that appear to
violate even VCU’s rules in terms of research
disclosure and academic freedom.
Tobacco
is still poison. Philip Morris makes products that
addict and kill. Period. End of story. Please
don’t bore me with tales of Virginia’s history and the golden leaf. Two good friends
of mine, both heavy smokers, died painful deaths
from tobacco-related cancer over the past three
years. I still grieve for them.
What’s
more, I have covered Philip Morris as a journalist
off and on for years. I don’t think I have ever
dealt with less forthcoming organization, and that
includes the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The last time I talked to a PM flak was last
December and I was treated like a mindless idiot
for asking questions based on public information
openly reported in the company's filings with the
U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. The
apparatchik insulted my intelligence by telling me
over and over what "confidential
information" was. Maybe I would do the same
if I had been sued as often as Philip Morris has.
There is a reason why BusinessWeek, my
former employer, wrote, “The Most Reviled
Corporation in America” as its cover language in a 1999 takeout on PM.
So,
academics across the country do have cause to
wonder why VCU and Trani have crawled into bed
with Philip Morris. The tobacco maker entered into
a research agreement totaling less than $300,000
-- pin money in college R&D -- to research
early detection for pulmonary disease and the
nature of water pollution from a PM research
facility in Richmond.
No
worries there, it would seem. In this type of
“research service agreement,” which Trani says
is the basis of VCU’s ”misunderstanding”
with the Times, an outside company or
government agency approaches a university and
works out a deal to have the school researchers do
work. There is proprietary material involved, and
researchers agree to keep it confidential. The
researchers will be allowed to publish a paper
based on their research, but the company or agency
has the right to review a draft report within a
deadline of 30 to 60 days to tag any proprietary
info so it can be extracted. The company keeps the
patent, not the university, although there is some
national academic debate about the ethics of doing
so.
VCU has been using research service agreements
since 2001.
Yet
when the New York Times went through the
state Freedom of Information Act to get a copy of
the research service agreement, it found
disturbing language. VCU professors were
restricted from even talking about the agreements.
If a news organization started asking questions
about the agreement, the school was required to
contact Philip Morris and provide details. Dr.
Francis L. Macrina, a microbiologist who is
VCU’s vice president for research, confirmed to
me that such wording was in the contracts.
“This
(the wording) was unique,” Macrina said, noting
that other research service agreements that VCU
has with other corporate sponsors do not contain
such stringent wording. The reason, he says, was
that there were third parties besides Philip
Morris who were supplying proprietary data for the
project. “It was very complex,” he says. I
asked if he could name the third parties and he
declined, saying I would have to file an FOIA
request.
I
asked him if there was a sense of fear and
retribution among the VCU faculty about discussing
the Philip Morris contract. In my opinion the bit
about having to inform Philip Morris about any
press inquiry has a creepy, Stalinist flavor to
it, but I do believe it, given my experiences with
Philip Morris.
Macrina
said there was no overriding sense of fear on
campus. But he added that not that many knew about
it. Only about 150, security-minded faculty and
administrators have access to a special contract
data base that contains confidential information
about the nine or so other research service
agreements that VCU has.
It’s
true that universities do all types of
confidential research. Consider the bastion of
liberal free speech, the
University
of California at Berkeley, which my sister, who teaches there, calls “Bezerkeley.”
This leftie outpost just happens to be the leading
research agency for most of this country’s
nuclear weapons – some 65 designated types –
and has been for the past six decades. When I was
visiting out West a couple of years ago, I was
amazed that
Berkeley
was very afraid it would lose the federal weapons
research to the University
of Texas. As it turns out, the fears were groundless.
So
what’s the big deal at VCU? For one thing, after
the Times published its story on May 22,
Trani, VCU, the Richmond elite and the local press
assumed an us-against-them, circle-the-wagons
wagons approach that made them all look like a
bunch of yahoos who just tumbled off a turnip
truck. Even our esteemed Jim Bacon, who otherwise
has done a fine job in reviving the business
channel of Richmond.com, fell victim to knee-jerk
parochialism by opining against the big bad New
York Times instead of praising it for doing
work that Richmond’s disgraceful and insular hometown rag should
be doing.
Trani
botched the job by not talking to the Times
reporter, and then coming out with nonsense that
these contracts are somehow significantly
different than “standard” research. As far as
I can tell, both types of research can have
contract agreements calling for the proprietor to
review any research papers the academics might
prepare by a specific deadline. In both types, the
researchers get to publish papers about the
research.
I
spoke with Jonathan Knight, director of academic
freedom and tenure, at the American Association of
University Professors, one of the most influential
faculty lobbies in Washington. Despite Trani’s assertion, Knight says that
there really aren’t any differences regarding
academic freedom between the two types of
contracts. In either type, “the company has the
right to first review from 30 to 60 days before it
is published,” he says. In the Philip Morris
case, that deadline has been extended to 120 days
because there are several of these so-far unnamed
third parties and they need to check the paper
over for confidential data.
What
Knight finds woefully wrong is VCU agreeing to
contract language that forbids any discussion of
the contracts. Knight says that “VCU went in
quite a different direction by preventing the
faculty or administrators from saying anything
about the contract without prior permission from
Philip Morris.”
So,
rather than having a massive erosion of academic
freedom -- the research will be published anyway
-- it seems we have a situation where a less
prestigious state school anxious for corporate
funding agreed to contract language that a more
prestigious institution might have refused on
principle.
Speaking
of principle, some 15 notable universities have
sworn off tobacco money of any kind. VCU is not
one of them. But dealing with the likes of Philip
Morris is always going to cause problems for VCU
because the school is stuck with its bedfellow.
Philip Morris’s $350 million research center is
the centerpiece of the highly-touted Virginia
Biotechnology Research
Park in which VCU badly wants to be a participant. I
have always been puzzled over what making
cigarettes has to do with improving health through
biotechnology, but hey, I wasn’t born and bred
in Richmond.
Curiously,
Philip Morris has given
Duke
University
, the nations’ 12th largest research
institution, a grant of $30 million to research
ways to get people to stop smoking. A Philip
Morris press release says under terms of the
agreement with Duke that Philip Morris has no
right to direct or influence how the research is
conducted nor can the company limit Duke’s
freedom to publish research in any way. Now how
come Trani can’t get a deal like that? So much
for the hometown advantage.
Indeed,
the Philip Morris affair underscores what VCU is
and what it isn’t, no matter how much its local
boosters try to pump it up. Despite some standout
departments, it is still largely a
commuter school with a 66 percent acceptance rate.
Its students significantly trail more prestigious
public schools such the University of Virginia,
Virginia Tech and William & Mary in SAT scores
and high school GPAs. VCU’s R&D is a tiny
$277 million although the total in the state is
really nothing to brag about.
Trani
has been allowed to elevate himself to a position
of influence that goes far beyond the intrinsic
worth of his university. And he seems to have a
thin skin when it comes to the national media. Let’s not
forget that he changed the name of the Medical
College of Virginia to "VCU
Medical School" because USA Today got MCV mixed up with U.Va.’s medical school.
How come Trani gets away with such
nonsense?
The
reason is that he’s allowed to and it is costing
all of us who live in the Richmond
area. Whether Trani and his backers want to admit
it or not, the Philip Morris incident has moved Richmond’s national image several points down the scale.
Chalk it up to the locals’ eternal and stubborn
obsequiousness to the evil weed. Add to it the
snooty, chip-on-your-shoulder parochialism that is
just so, well, “Richmond.”
--
June 2, 2008
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