Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8780

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Publication type: news

Schmidt S.
Moonlighting puts professors in 'conflict of commitment'
The Ottawa Citizen 2007 Mar 5
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=73addbd5-d2bb-4c95-bb24-688f9ebfcbaf&k=59347

Full text:

Paid consulting is no longer just-tolerated work academics do on the side, scholar argues

Forget the image of the scatterbrained professor with outdated eye wear and messy hair. Today’s academic looks more like a slick entrepreneur than a nutty professor.

The image overhaul, a by-product of a big push for professors to forge partnerships with industry, is bringing a whole new set of challenges for institutions. The new catchphrase is “conflict of commitment” as universities update the ground rules for enterprising professors who moonlight as consultants and corporate directors.

The University of Ottawa is in the midst of reviewing its policy to make sure core institutional values — namely the education of students, academic freedom and the integrity and objectivity of research — are protected as more professors assume multiple roles and engage in external collaborative activities.

The ongoing review comes just as the University of Toronto’s governing body approved a new Statement on Conflict of Interest and Conflict of Commitment, making clear involvement in external activities or organizations shouldn’t interfere with the traditional professorial duties of teaching and research.

These schools are following the lead of the University of British Columbia, which updated its conflict rules in 2005.

The new rules come with a centralized system for reporting disclosures of conflicts of commitments; this year, 1,956 professors at UBC have submitted disclosure reports, of which 1,827 were approved and the remaining 129 are still under review.

Glen Jones tracks this new reality in a forthcoming article to be published in the Canadian journal Academic Matters.

“Paid consulting activities, once viewed as tolerated moonlighting, are now increasingly legitimized as contributions to industry relationships and technology transfer,” the associate dean of academic affairs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto writes in the April edition.

“Some academic workers will increasingly have multiple employment relationships involving both universities and industry as a function of their research and consulting activities.”

Mr. Jones, a specialist in higher education politics, said in an interview that much has changed in a generation.

“Thirty years ago, it used to be a simple relationship. We simply regarded it as moonlighting — on the seventh day, people do this on the side. It was a bit of professional development. It got them a little more money. It was out there, but marginalized. It’s been repositioned as something that’s directly related to industry relationships.”

Granted, institutions are doing a reasonable job at keeping their policies current to the new expectation that puts partnerships with industry at the centre of modern academia, said Mr. Jones. But the new reality merits much more reflection, he added.

“The challenge to me isn’t so much policy, but ethics of practice — whether or not faculty have had the opportunity to reflect on the complex issues around these increasingly complex relationships and financial arrangements.

“I don’t know if people are doing anything unethical, but the challenge is for the opportunity to think this through.”

Mr. Jones singled out the new norm of hybrid research projects funded partially from the private sector, partly with public funds. Professors use some of the money to pay graduate students for their work one day, and supervise their unpaid academic work the next day.

At the institutional level, universities have built up large offices of technology transfer to help professors in the areas of patents, copyright and trademarks, and assist in the creation of start-up companies.

Universities then track the number of patents held and spinoff companies created by their professors, and hold them up as signs of a dynamic institution. The bulk of these are usually in the fields of engineering and biomedical sciences.

Susan Phillips, director of Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration, says the business opportunities related to corporate-funded research are less a concern in her field.

“People in the school have a pretty strong incentive to self-police because you need to maintain the autonomy to criticize public policy in government. You need to be independent, and be able to have access at the same time.

“We need our faculty to understand how government works inside government, so they need to get their feet wet, as it were. Doing contracts is something most of our faculty do at some point. I don’t really do it for the money, but it’s the experience that’s really important.

But there is a hitch, said Ms. Phillips.

“The downside is time management. Everybody is so busy these days. I don’t remember a weekend that I’ve taken off in a really long time. The first thing you put in is teaching, then academic research, then the time you might spend as leisure pursuits is going into this work,” said Ms. Phillips.

Unlike many universities, Carleton does not require professors to submit a yearly disclosure form listing all external activities, but they are requested to disclose potential conflicts.