ACADEMICS IN GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY
-- A Study of the Outside Consulting Activities of University Faculty --
by
Charles Schwartz
Department of Physics
University of California
Berkeley, California 94720
September 1975
[original 25 page pamphlet transcribed by the author, April 2008,
improved December 2011]
Summary
While it is widely known that university faculty sometimes hire out
their special expertise as private consultants, the full nature and
scope of this activity has generally been kept hidden from public
view. This report, in an attempt to pierce this shroud of
ignorance, presents a collection of data, some insiders' views on
consulting, several examples of abuse, and a critical discussion.
Some rather startling information, presented here in detailed tables,
shows that a large number of academics serve not just as ordinary paid
consultants to private industry, but actually sit as members of the
boards of directors of major business corporations. Finally,
there is a proposal that all consulting faculty - and especially those
at publicly supported universities - should be required to make regular
public disclosures of their
outside professional activities as a first step toward dealing with the
inherent problems of conflict-of-interest between their public duties
and their private services.
INTRODUCTION
It is told that 800 years ago, at the
University of Bologna in Italy, professors had to obtain permission
from their students and had to post bond in order to leave town on
private business [1]. No such requirements impede the travels of the
entrepreneurial professor in modern America.
As the acknowledged custodians of expert
knowledge in our complex society, professors at elite universities are
often called upon to serve as consultants to organizations, both public
and private, outside of the campus. This activity, which takes
the professor's time and interest away from strictly academic pursuits,
is not looked upon as "moonlighting" by college officials, even though
the consulting fees earned by the professor require no surrender of
academic salary for the time spent working elsewhere. There are,
to be sure, general university rules that attempt to put some upper
limit to the extent of such outside consulting: "one day per week" is
the most common limit, explicit on some campuses, only implicit on
others. But aside from espousing the vague tenet that a
professor's outside consulting should not interfere with the basic
teaching commitments, universities generally take a completely laissez faire attitude toward this
activity.
This is not an easy subject to learn
about. I once wrote to Dr. George Maslach, Provost of the
Professional Schools and Colleges at the Berkeley campus, trying to
learn about the scope and nature of consulting activity. He
replied, in part, [2]
I have no knowledge of the extent of
outside consulting by faculty and others; I have no knowledge of how
many people consult, nor do I know how they have spent their
time. There is no indication of how I can obtain this information
in any easy way.
Over the past few years I have been collecting
what information I could find about faculty consulting and, with the
helpful advice of a number of friends, I have now assembled it into
this
report.
CONTENTS
Some Data on Consulting ............
page 2
Examples of Abuse ......................
page 8
Conflict of Interest ........................
page 12
A Modest Proposal .......................
page 16
References ....................................
page
19
Tables ...........................................
page
20
SOME DATA ON CONSULTING
[
page 2]
A survey conducted by the Carnegie Commission
on Higher Education in 1969 shows how widespread is the practice of
faculty outside consulting. The results gathered from faculty at
elite universities are shown in Table 1 at the end of this
report. Forty-one percent of the faculty devote between 1 and 10
% of their work time to consulting, with or without pay; fourteen
percent devote between 11 and 20 % of their time; and five percent
devote more than 20 % of their time. The recipients if paid
consulting services were diverse:
federal or foreign government (20%); local business, government,
schools (18%); national corporations (17%); non-profit foundations
(11%); research projects (10%). Only 42 % of the faculty had done
no paid consulting during a two year period. Of all sources of
supplemental earnings reported by faculty, consulting was the leading
type but other types - such as summer teaching and research, private
practice and royalties and lecture fees - were also significant.
An earlier survey, covering the academic year
1961-62, gave data on the outside earnings of faculty broken down
according to their academic discipline [3]. The overall fraction of
faculty having outside earnings was 74%, the highest being Psychology
(85%) and the lowest in Home Economics (44%). The average amount
of outside earnings was highest for Law ($5,297), next highest for
Engineering ($3,197) and the average for all areas was $2,165.
A reported survey of the Harvard faculty
indicated that nearly half of the senior professors had outside incomes
that exceeded one-third of their college salaries; and a leading
economist at a major Ivy League school was quoted as saying that he
charged about $200 a day and added as much as $12,000 a year to his
regular income: "I simply need the money," he explained, "Our
nine-month salary is not adequate for the standard of living we like."
[4]
Information on individual professors'
consulting connections is not publicly available in any systematic
form. The standard biographical reference books (Who's Who for the very
elite, or such professional listings as American Men & Women of Science)
sometimes
list business firms or government agencies for which the
individual biographee is a consultant; but these sources, relying
as they do on the voluntary contributions of the persons listed, are
unreliable regarding the completeness of the data. I have found
numerous cases of academics' consulting relationships, verified through
other sources, which are not mentioned in these published biographies.
There are, however, two special kinds of
consulting relationships for which one can find published listings of
the individuals involved. The first kind covers people who serve
on advisory committees to the federal government. According to a
law passed by Congress in 1972 (PL 92-463) the President must give an
annual report of the activities and membership of the more than 1400
advisory committees that serve the various departments and agencies of
the Executive Branch. The first such report was issued in 1973
and it included an index of committee members, arranged by
institutional affiliation as well as by name. [5] Quoting from the
Senate Subcommittee press release that accompanied the publication of
this index,
Approximately 24,500 individual
positions on advisory committees are identified in the index. The
Department of Defense had more representatives on advisory committees
-- 713 -- than any other agency. The university with the most
representatives on advisory committees was the University of California
(374), followed by Harvard (130) and Columbia (108). Companies
with large numbers of representatives on advisory committees include
the following: RCA --93; ITT (and affiliates)--92; ...
The index includes 78 names of U.C. Berkeley faculty and staff
(reproduced in Table 2) serving on a wide variety of government
committees, from agriculture and military affairs to science and
poetry. (One notes that Provost George Maslach, who had "no knowledge"
of faculty consulting activities, is himself listed as a member of two
advisory committees in the Department of Defense.) Rich as this
index is in information, it should be noted that there are other types
of government consultantships which are not covered by the public
disclosure requirements of this law. Also, it appears that this
index has not been prepared for years later than 1972.
The second kind of consultantship for which
one can find thorough tabulations involves a very special relationship
to private industry: being on the board of directors of a sizeable
business concern. Dun
& Bradstreet's Million Dollar Directory, published annually
and available in many libraries, contains an alphabetized index of
directors and top officials in U.S. companies worth over $1 million.
The data in this volume is generally one or two years old; and one must
take care to verify the identity of persons who are named as directors.
To do this verification I have used several published sources:
corporation annual reports and stock prospectuses, the biographical
books mentioned above, and newspaper items. (The Wall Street Journal has
a very useful index for this purpose.) This searching can be a very
tedious task; however, it has yielded some surprising results.
In Table 3 is presented some data on my own
university, showing a number of U. C. faculty and administrators who
sit on the boards of directors of sizeable corporations, including some
of the country's largest industries. (This is not an exhaustive
list since I was unable to carry out this search for the entire
faculty, numbering several thousand persons.)
I have also surveyed the boards of directors
of the 130 largest corporations in the U. S. as ranked by Fortune in 1974, and I have
identified academics serving as directors in fully one-half of these giant
companies. These findings are presented in Table 4. This
listing could readily be extended by further research in this area.
While the job of an ordinary consultant to
private business is to help that business solve some particular
technical problems, the job of the board of directors is to set and
supervise overall company policy, with the express objective of
maximizing profit for the company's shareholders. Thus, this new
data which is presented in Tables 3 and 4 raises some most provocative
questions about the ways in which the academic world is integrated into
the dominant structure of corporate power in America.
Not only do some academics consult for private
industry and some others serve as advisors to government, but some
academics do both types of service. Here the possibilities for
conflict-of-interest are much stronger because the academic is usually
promoted in government advising circles as an expert who is supposedly independent of any special
interests. On the other hand, this intimacy with government
policymaking makes such an advisor even more valuable in service to
private business. I recently made a study of the membership of
the two highest science advisory bodies in the federal government and
found, not surprisingly, that the great majority of the people
appointed to these bodies were academics, as opposed to people from
industry or government agencies. However, what was surprising was
that I was able to identify more than one-half of these academics as
having significant personal ties to big business, mostly in the form of
directorships in large corporations. [6]
The data given so far whets the appetite and
makes one eager to find out more about this vast unexplored territory
of faculty consulting activities. It is difficult to believe the
earlier quoted comment by Provost Maslach (who was formerly Dean of the
School of Engineering) that he has "no knowledge of the extent of
outside consulting by faculty." It is clear that this subject has
a certain taboo associated with it. When I once asked my
department chairman about looking into this subject of faculty
consulting he declined, referring to it as "a whole can of
worms." When I once suggested that a faculty Senate committee be
given the task of reviewing campus policies and practices regarding
outside consulting I was rebuffed as follows. [7]
The Policy Committee has thoroughly
discussed the arguments in your letter of April 13, 1973, and finds
itself unpersuaded that a useful purpose would be served by Senate
surveillance of faculty consulting.
When we considered examples of specific proposals that might emanate
from a committee charged with such responsibility, we were unable to
imagine situations where positive consequences were plausible.
Questions of conflict with University duties are already covered both
by Administrative regulations and the Faculty Code of Conduct.
The only effective safeguard we can see against the more subtle dangers
in consulting is the conscience of the individual faculty member.
Nevertheless, a few people in positions to
know what is going on have been willing to discuss the subject of
faculty consulting, at least in some detail. During 1974, a few
students interested in faculty consulting activity undertook to
interview some campus administrators. They spoke with the deans
of three of the professional schools and they wrote up notes on the
interviews. I selected their notes of the interview with
Professor Richard H. Holton, Dean of the School of Business
Administration, as being the most interesting and I sent a copy of
those notes to Dean Holton (early in 1975) inviting him to comment on
their accuracy prior to my using them in this report. In
response, Dean Holton suggested numerous modifications of the notes;
and the following text includes all of his corrections. (These
corrections are, for the most part, simply clarifications of what he
intended to express in the interview and I am very grateful to Dean
Holton for his cooperation. There is only one place where I
considered that a substantial change was being suggested, and that is
marked by a footnote.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean Holton
First
I should tell you that I have only a vague notion of how much
consulting is done in our school; no records are kept. Right now
we're reevaluating our promotion and consulting policies.
Questioner
Maybe
we should start with that. We've heard that the University
has four criteria for promotion: research, teaching, public and private
service, and professional competence. How much weight is
consulting, as a private service, given?
H
We're
looking at the whole reward system that the faculty works
under. There is an argument now that faculty in the College of
Letters and Sciences have an easier time with promotions than faculty
in the professional schools. The greatest emphasis for promotion
is on research, with teaching closing fast. Neither University
and public service nor professional competence is assigned as much
importance. Many business administration professors feel more
weight should be given to professional competence.
Not much is done with consulting in the area of professional
competence, and faculty don't keep their files up to date on their
consulting activities. The view is that the campus budget
committee might give consulting work negative weight, since they may
wish to favor faculty members who do not earn any income beyond their
University salary. The consulting matter must be kept in check in
any business school, since too much consulting causes faculty to be
absent excessively from the campus, and the teaching and research
processes
can both suffer. At some business schools, at least some faculty
members do engage in too much consulting.
Our rule of thumb is that 1 day a week of consulting can be carried
without problem. The desirable kind of consulting is the sort
that reinforces research and teaching, not competes with it.
Consulting can strengthen teaching by providing real case studies and a
close look at live management problems.
An example of a desirable consulting project occurred when some of our
faculty members arranged for a survey of neighborhood shopping patterns
for a chain which was considering opening a new store in a particular
location. *
____________________________________________[FOOTNOTE]
________________________
* In the original notes, this sentence read as follows:
"An example of a desirable consulting
project occurred when some of our faculty members took a survey of
North
Berkeley neighborhoods on shopping patterns to see if it was feasible
for Safeway to build a store on Shattuck Avenue to compete with the
Co-op."
In suggesting the changed version, given above, Dean Holton commented
that "it is probably best not to identify the stores in question." I
disagree with Dean Holton's opinion on this because I see this concrete
example as illustrative of the important question about whose interests
are served by the existing faculty consulting practices. Safeway
is the nation's largest supermarket chain (with annual sales of over $8
billion) while the Co-ops are local consumer-owned stores.
_________________________________________________________________________________
The faculty could also use the information they gathered for their own
research. Repetitious consulting on one subject, where nothing
new is learned, is an example of undesirable consulting.
Q Is
the policy that consulting should reinforce instead of compete with
teaching an understanding, or is it a written policy?
H
I'll
give you a copy of our guidelines for the evaluation of faculty
members for advancement and promotion, which supplement the official
guidelines provided by the University. They emphasize that
consulting work should be supportive of the teaching and research
process and not for the sake of public relations.
Q
How
many faculty in this school do outside consulting? How much
is done for government and private business, in comparison?
H
That's
where I'm in trouble, since I have only the vaguest idea about
how much consulting the faculty does and for whom. I would guess
that perhaps 50%, plus or minus 10%, do some consulting. Most of
this would be for business, but many faculty do unpaid work for
government and for not-for-profit organizations.
Q
How
much time is spent in outside consulting?
H
Again,
I'm guessing. The maximum would be one day per week.
The average for the faculty members who are consulting might be a
couple of hours per week over the year, but that is only a
'guesstimate.'
Q
What
kind of consulting is done for the government?
H
For
example, some faculty members are on National Science Foundation
committees; I am a member of the Assembly Science and Technology
Advisory Committee, which looks into the general area of science and
technology aspects of proposed legislation. I'm also chairman of
the Public Advisory Committee on Truth-in-Lending, appointed by the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. For this I
receive transportation expenses plus $100 per day, out of which one's
meals and hotel bills must be paid.
Q
How
much money do consulting faculty make this way?
H
I
haven't the faintest idea.
Q
Is
this school working towards solidifying its policy on consulting so
that you will know?
H
I'm
not interested in the money the faculty makes in consulting or in
the number of hours they consult, as long as the consulting work does
not interfere with their teaching and research but rather serves to
reinforce these two activities.
Q
Do
you feel that we as students have a right to know about all
consulting relationships, so we can be aware of a professor's
biases? My own opinion is that since they are supported by state
taxes, and since state legislators are required to file complete
financial disclosures, maybe faculty should be required to also.
H
That's
a good question. But a professor's biases are probably apparent
in his classroom teaching. Biases come from a multitude of
sources in addition to one's consulting work. A teacher's
relationships with his family, with his colleagues, with his political
party, with the volunteer work he does can lead to biases of different
kinds. If you are interested in knowing a professor's biases, you
need to know the totality of his associations and beliefs, not just his
consulting relationships. Should one teacher be required to
report that he is consulting for Company X and Company Y, while another
is not required to report that he is an active member of a political
organization or the Ku Klux Klan? And if the first faculty member
also does a great deal of free advisory work to state and local
government agencies and for the local; hospital or the YMCA, don't we
get an incomplete picture of his "biases" by having him report only his
paid consulting work?
Q
We
understand the problem of privacy, but disclosing consulting
activities doesn't seem unreasonable.
H
Biases
are the product of all the past experiences of an
individual. Maybe you need to know if your political science
teacher hates his mother.
Q
You
seem to have been very open with us. Are you doing any
consulting for private business now?
H
I'm
working as an expert witness in an anti-trust case for the
defendants, some oil companies. The case involves the prices of
asphalt. In working on such a case, the expert witness from a
university faculty must guard his personal integrity and be able to
defend his position before his professional colleagues. He cannot
be a handmaiden to his client without losing his effectiveness as an
objective expert.
Many faculty members would agree that it would be okay for students to
know who they're working for, but that the questioning of how much time
is spent and how much money is earned is stretching things too
far. What's been the reaction to your suggestion by faculty so
far?
Q
It's
been strongly adverse.
H
It
would weaken our chance for competition with private schools.
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
The reader may notice that when Dean Holton
was asked about his own consultantships for private business he did not
mention being on the board of directors of any of the large
corporations that are listed opposite his name in Table 3.
______________________________________________________________________
ADDENDUM
October
3, 1975
Dean Holton has now informed me that he was mistaken in his description
of the Safeway marketing survey project, which appears on page 5 of
this report. What actually happened was that Safeway gave some
professors a grant, administered through the university, for the
purpose of gathering the data; there was no income to the faculty
members, although there was income to the students who did the survey
work; and the information gathered was made publicly available.
Therefore, in Dean Holton's view, this was not really an example of
"consulting" but rather of a "research grant."
________________________________________________________________________
EXAMPLES OF ABUSE
[
page 8]
I. This first
story illustrates how university faculty are cultivated and purchased
for use in the promotion of special interests. In 1971 the
airline industry was doing poorly and was seeking ways to get some
economic assistance from the federal government. An associate of
Ralph Nader, testifying before a Congressional committee, revealed
that, [8]
At this very time the airline industry,
through ATA (Air Transport Association), is gearing up a massive
million dollar "economic education" program to influence CAB (Civil
Aeronautics Board) and congressional decisionmaking, spearheaded by the
public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton. ...
The strategy of the ATA program is to build a "pyramid of support
reaching upward from a large base throughout the country to a pinnacle
at Washington." The proposal identifies some of the more important
segments of its planned audience:
"At a third level are groups whose
ideas and opinions often spawn public opinion. Among them are:
The media of ideas -- academic publications, and popular journals of
opinion.
The college milieu-elite faculties of economics and their graduate
students.
The air and press media influential at Washington.
...."
Now, what we are seeing here is the
unfolding of a strategy for the future of this industry in terms of
influencing the course of the Government and the policies that will
affect the industry's regulation in the public interest.
The full text of the Hill & Knowlton public relations plan for the
airline industry is contained in the appendix to these hearings (at
page 133) and it contains the following specific plan for the "college
milieu-elite faculties."
INTELLECTUALS
In the academic world, we
should do some research to single out the leading economic professors
with a particular interest in the field of transportation. We
would expect this to be an elite group of 100 or so, who should be
systematically called on so that their views can be classified and some
participation in the program planned for them.
Closely allied to them are the few score academicians and
others who are the most perspicacious minds behind the consumerist and
environmentalist movements -- the men who lead movements, write the
rationales that others follow, testify before government committees and
serve on commissions. It is essential that the industry know who
they are, enter into personal dialogues with them, and include them in
all pertinent written communications.
These are people of intellect. Many of them have
taken positions from which they are not likely to move sharply.
What they do have in common is a respect for ideas and regard for
facts. The industry has a good case for its economic theses and
its public aims. It follows that this case should be put
persuasively before those whose ideas are enormously influenced with
the government and the public.
These men should be cultivated by airline executives
individually, and should certainly receive the industry's position
papers and newsletters. We should also establish forums in which there
is time and the opportunity for the exchange of ideas, for discussion
and even argument. An annual two-day seminar should be scheduled
for each of these groups to bring them into working sessions with their
peers in the airlines.
The companies themselves should give careful thought to
means of bringing individuals from these groups into close
association, perhaps through summer employment fellowships, or
making contributions to college meeting-expense funds -- which are
often insufficient to permit as much travel as academicians would like
-- or by retaining selected individuals as consultants.
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II. This second story, told by Jack Anderson [9], shows
how this procurement works out in practice.
For instance, when the
Federal Trade Commission was trying to get ITT-Continental to clean up
its fraudulent advertising, the government's position was attacked in a
series of learned speeches by Professor Yale Brozen, a University of
Chicago economist; then the Brozen speeches were reprinted in full by Barron's, the financial
weekly. Then full-page ads, containing the text of the speeches,
appeared in the New York
Times and other newspapers. Then, just in case someone had
missed it, hordes of ITT PR men called on financial editors all across
the country to acquaint them with Professor Brozen's views.
Finally, of course, it turned out that Brozen was on the payroll of the
PR firm handling ITT-Continental's account and that he had been paid
for making the pro-ITT speeches which got such miraculous attention.
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III. Just to
show that there is nothing new in this type of behavior by academics,
here is a story told by Upton Sinclair, writing over 50 years ago. [10]
The people of New York are
struggling in the grip of rapacious landlords, and here comes Samuel
McCune Lindsay, Professor of Social Legislation at Columbia University,
with a pamphlet to demonstrate that there is really no shortage of
apartments, but on the contrary a surplus of thirty thousand. The
Lockwood Commission puts the professor on the stand and draws out the
fact that he was paid five hundred dollars by the Real Estate Board for
the writing of this pamphlet. Samuel Untermyer, counsel of the
commission, characterizes Prof. Lindsay's figures as "absurd," and
forces the professor to admit that he made no actual investigation, and
has "no practical knowledge."
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IV. In January
1975, a group of 32 eminent American scientists, 11 of them Nobel Prize
winners, issued a public call for a national energy policy which
strongly emphasized the need for and the virtues of nuclear power.
Their statement was widely reported in the press, it appeared as a 3/4
page ad in the Wall Street
Journal (paid for by Middle South Utilities System, a company
deeply involved with nuclear reactors), and it was displayed in full on
the editorial page of the San
Francisco
Chronicle, a large part of that space being used to
list the prestigious signers and give their institutional
affiliations. Twenty-six out of the thirty-two were identified
with universities and only two of them were identified with private
industry. However, I was able to establish that 14 out of the 26
academic scientists listed have been on the boards of directors of
major corporations and 4 others were shown to have served as
consultants. Significantly, among the companies to which these
academics had (hidden) personal connections were several having large
investments in the energy business. [11]
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V. An
episode of some notoriety in California concerns the famous oil leaks
from commercial drilling operations in the Santa Barbara Channel in
1969. The state's chief deputy attorney general publicly
complained that university experts on this problem had refused to
testify for the state in its multi-million dollar damage suit against
the oil companies. He stated that petroleum engineers at U.C.
campuses indicated that they did not wish to risk losing industry
grants and consulting arrangements. One Berkeley professor of
petroleum engineering, Dr. Wilbur H. Somerton, was quoted in the press
as saying he had declined to appear as a witness and that he viewed his
obligation to the community as that of supplying it with well-trained
petroleum engineers: "We train the industry's engineers and they help
us," he explained. [12]
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VI. A
recent newspaper story revealed that [13], "Equipment and personnel
from the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are
now being used in exploratory tests for geothermal steam on a ranch
near Calistoga -- providing valuable services at no charge to the
private interests involved." "An official with another company that
specializes in geothermal exploration estimated the work would cost as
much as $100,000 if it were undertaken by his or other private
firms." The American Metal Climax Co. had made this advantageous
arrangement "through a faculty contact" who was identified as "Frank
Morrison, a professor of geophysics at UC Berkeley who also works at
the Laboratory." "For the past three years," according to a company
official, "Morrison had been working under a contract 'well in excess
of $150,000' from American Metal," and furthermore, "his company gave a
$5000 grant to the university to 'defray the costs' of a full-time
laboratory employee and several UC Berkeley graduate students who have
been running the tests at the ranch." According to the article, the
Dean of Engineering on the campus "declined to comment on the propriety
of the arrangement."
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VII. This
account is taken from a recent book on the National Academy of
Sciences. [14]
In addition to such direct industry
representation, many academic scientists serving on Academy committees
have ties to industry that are difficult for an outsider to
detect. Thus a committee that issued a report in 1971 on the
biological effects of airborne fluorides was composed entirely of
scientists from universities and research laboratories that were
seemingly independent of industry influence. But it was later
revealed that four of these scientists, who had written most of the
report, had close ties to the aluminum industry, which is a major
emitter of fluorides. Some had written publications for the
Aluminum Association, received research support from the industry, or
testified for the industry in hearings on fluoride standards. The
report which they helped prepare under the Academy imprimatur proposed
tolerance thresholds which were somewhat more lenient than standards
proposed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a
Washington-based study group.
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VIII. This story
relates to one of the few faculty consulting scandals that has involved
students in active protest. [15]
Dr. Robert H. Ebert was appointed dean of the
Harvard Medical School in 1965. In 1969 he became a member of the board
of directors of Squibb-Beech Nut Corp., owners of the large
pharmaceutical manufacturing firm of E.R. Squibb & Sons.
However, some months later he resigned his corporate directorship
following a protest by a group of medical students who thought that
there was a serious conflict of interest between his loyalty to Squibb
and his loyalty to the best principles of medical practice and
teaching. Mindful of the loss of so prestigious a figure from its
board of directors, Squibb turned around and gave the vacant seat to
Dr. Lewis Thomas, dean of Yale's Medical School.
Three years later, Dean Ebert and Dean Thomas
appeared together as expert witnesses in a hearing before the Food and
Drug Administration, arguing in favor of one of Squibb's lucrative drug
products that the FDA had been trying to ban. When questioned by
the press, a Squibb official stated that neither dean had been paid a
special fee for this appearance, since both of them had been retained
on the company's payroll for a number of years.
This revelation raised another brief flurry on
the Harvard campus, but the university was mainly successful in turning
a deaf ear to the complaints. When one student was bold enough to
propose a university-wide "audit" of faculty consulting work this idea
was branded as "McCarthyite" by a prominent administrative official.
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IX. Finally, we
may note the sensitivity which many academics have about revealing
their consulting connections.
The Jason group is an elite gathering of
scientists (mostly academic physicists) who provide top level
consulting services for the department of Defense. Little is
known publicly about Jason because most of its work is highly
classified; but with the publication of the Pentagon Papers the
group gained considerable notoriety when it was revealed that they had
been instrumental in the creation and promotion of the "electronic
battlefield" techniques used in Vietnam. [16]
Several of these Jason members ran for
elective offices in the American Physical Society, and along with the
ballots there came long lists of the professional achievements and
honors which these distinguished physics professors had to their
credit. However, it was later pointed out that none of them had
acknowledged their connection with Jason -- although several of them
did take care to list their consultantships with the more dovish Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency. [17]
#
# #
# #
# #
# #
# #
# #
# #
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
[
page 12]
The basic purpose of the modern university is
usually proclaimed in high and noble terms: to search for truth,
to transmit knowledge and critical skills to students, and to do all
this for the betterment of society as a whole. Research and
Teaching, the twin primary jobs of the professor, are expected to
advance civilized society with both short term and long term
benefits. We now want to ask how outside consulting fits into
this framework.
Existing University of California rules
covering this activity provide a fascinating study in
self-contradiction. The following statement of U.C. regulations
was provided by Provost Maslach, replying to my inquiry. [2]
1. Standing Order of The Regents
103.1(b) states: "No one in the service of the University shall devote
to private purposes any portion of the time due by him to the
University nor shall any outside employment interfere with the
performance of his University duties. Arrangements for private
employment by Officers, faculty members or other employees of the
University shall be subject to such regulations as the President may
establish."
2. The most recent Handbook for Faculty Members of the University
of California (March, 1970, page 36) states: "Certain commitments
directly affecting other persons - for example, classroom teaching and
administrative engagements - naturally will involve specific schedules,
but the University, in general, leaves to the discretion of the
individual the allocation of his remaining time for such activities as
study, writing, research, committee service and public service.
It is assumed, however, that full-time members of the faculty are
devoting their hours and energies (full "working time") to the service
of the University.
All faculty members are free to engage in scholarly pursuits for
compensation if and when these activities can be conducted without
prejudice to University duties. ... When consultations or outside
services are such as to interfere with recognized University duties,
they may be undertaken only on the basis of a leave of absence, without
University salary, for the period involved."
Notice that outside employments of faculty are
referred to as "scholarly pursuits". In the basic U.C. policy
statement on outside services [18] it is spelled out that this activity
by faculty may be justified provided that
1) it gives the individual experience
and knowledge of value to his teaching or research;
2) it is suitable research through which the individual may make worthy
contributions to knowledge; or
3) it is appropriate public service.
Thus, as Dean Holton indicated in his
interview, outside consulting is supposed to be an adjunct to the
professor's primary tasks of teaching, research and public
service. Certainly there are examples of faculty consulting work
that meet this estimable standard and just as surely there are cases
that would fail this test. As far as I can tell, the university,
as a matter of general practice, ignores these criteria. The
Provost and the Senate Policy Committee, in their correspondence with
me, did not even pay lip service to these notions; and certainly those
of us in the general community who might wish to form our own
evaluations of the worthiness of these outside "scholarly pursuits for
compensation" are unable to do so because the information is kept
secret.
The apparent conflicts-of-interest involved in
the practice of outside consulting by faculty can be seen from various
viewpoints:
1) Regarding teaching, students may be concerned over their
professor being distracted from the commitment to good teaching because
of his or her involvement in some outside enterprise; it may even be
that a professor's personal commitment to some outside business or
political agency may warp the presentation of course material.
Thus, one student told me, "I remember taking a Forestry course which
repeatedly emphasized how the public should leave the big forestry
companies alone and trust them to harvest safely; afterwards I found
out that the professor was consulting regularly for the big timber
companies."
2) Regarding research -- "the unfettered search for truth" -- the
outside connections a professor has may readily influence the choice of
research topics, especially if the availability of research funding is
important, and may also have the effect of slanting the research
analysis or limiting the types of solutions that may be considered for
acknowledged problems. For example, the well documented history
of scientific studies on the health hazards faced by asbestos workers
shows how an industry can essentially purchase the kind of research it
needs for its own uses. [19]
3) Students, parents, taxpayers and legislators may be upset about
paying the professor's salary for the same time that outside income is
being earned from some private clients. As an illustration, the
University of California pays its Vice President, Dr. Chester O.
McCorkle, Jr., an annual salary of $53,500, which is more than the
State pays its Governor; but at the same time Dr. McCorkle is working
for two large agribusinesses -- Del Monte Corp. and Universal Foods
Corp. -- as a member of the board of directors of each. (I was
unsuccessful in trying to ascertain how much Del Monte pays its outside
directors in fees, but $10,000 a year is a typical figure for a
corporation of this size. [20])
4) Any citizen may complain about the contradiction that emerges when
the University presents itself as an institution dedicated to serving
the broad public
interest while, at the same time, much of its faculty is engaged in
consulting to serve the private
interests of outside employers.
It is this last category in which, for me, the
issue of conflict-of-interest is most interesting, because it allows us
to look beyond the narrow question of "the conscience of the individual
faculty member" so that we can focus our inquiry on the roles of social
institutions. The data showing academics sitting on the
boards of directors of large corporations certainly raises these larger
questions very sharply; and the examples of abuse cited illustrate some
of the more blatant concrete forms that this conflict-of-interest can
take. It is also worthwhile to discuss some alternative
viewpoints, from which this apparent conflict is made to disappear.
First, there is the elitist ("pragmatic")
view, held by many academics, that the ideal of service to the whole of
society is merely propaganda, designed to placate the masses but never
taken seriously in practice. The consulting privileges of faculty
were obtained during past years when money was plentiful and top rank
experts were rare; the universities had no choice but to allow these
"big-time-operators" a free reign.
Apologists, on the other hand, will claim that
the participation by academics in the powerful institutions of our
society will provide an enlightening
influence, and is thus to be praised. (This is parallel to one of the
main arguments in favor of ROTC programs on campus; it also echoes the
justification given by the many liberal professors who got involved in
such reactionary programs as counterinsurgency research for the
Pentagon.) The problem is that the academic in this position can
only work to assist the powerful institution to achieve its own goals,
whatever those goals may be; he or she can try to modify the means (as by suggesting the
electronic battlefield as an alternative strategy to massive U.S.
bombing in Vietnam) but must support the ends (e.g., military
victory) as given.
Consider, for another example of the liberal view, the case of Dr.
Clifton R. Wharton, Jr., president of Michigan State University, who
recently accepted positions on the boards of directors of Ford Motor
Co. and Burroughs Corp. He announced that he would consider
himself to be a "public director" and turned over all his directorship
fees to the university. Interviewed about this in Business Week, he said, "I
view my role as a person who can exercise the responsibility of the
directorship to make a profit, and bring to it a broad social and
public concern." [21] Left unsaid is what he will (or can) do when
these two stated objectives, corporate profits and social good, come
into collision with each other -- as they surely do.
Finally, we should consider how a Marxist
would view the question of conflict-of-interest in faculty consulting
practices. Since the modern American university is here seen as
an institution that has been largely fashioned for the primary purpose
of serving the needs of capitalism [22], it is then no contradiction at
all that certain professors should be directly tied to private
businesses.
While much of the data on faculty consulting
presented in this report is new, the broad issues raised are embedded
in a rich history of criticism. [23] During the 1960's the campuses of
America were hotbeds of protest, against racism, against imperialism,
often against the universities themselves, seen as instruments serving
those evils. Radicals analyzed the relationship of the university
to the larger powers of in the society and saw the flow of Pentagon
dollars into campus research for weapons of war and subtler means of
social control, saw the predominance of big business leaders on the
boards of trustees or regents that ruled the campuses, saw the calling
in of police power to to repress student movements that seemed to
present any palpable threat to the existing order of things, and saw
themselves, students, being educated not for the glory of knowledge but
rather to meet the call for highly trained workers that the corporate
system required.
This present study, concentrating on the area
of faculty consulting, is intended to illuminate one more aspect of the
integrated relationship that exists between the university and the
mainstream of American power, showing the outflow of the special
expertise of the professors into the private service of the large
corporations and their allied institutions. As much new
information has been presented here, it is certain that there is a
still greater wealth of data on this subject waiting to be uncovered.
In closing this section, I should say that it
is not my idea that all consulting by faculty should be
abolished. I do not imagine the university as an ivory tower; it
should be interactive, it should serve society. The question
raised is whether the current practices serve the whole of society in
some democratically balanced way or serve, instead, selected special
interests in a highly unbalanced way. I strongly suspect that the
latter is actually the case; but in order to allow others to make a
full evaluation of this question and to reach their own conclusions
there is first a need to collect more information. The whole
panoply of consulting activities should be laid out plainly for all to
see; within a university there should be no excuse for hiding the truth.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
[
page 16]
Putting all broader social theorizing aside,
there is one concrete suggestion that this study leads to. I
propose that all universities should adopt a disclosure policy, whereby
every faculty or other staff member who engages in outside consulting
should make an annual report of this activity, available for public
inspection. Such a report should include the name and location of
each person or organization served, the amount of time spent and the
compensation received for each consulting job, a brief description of
the work done, along with copies of any written reports produced.
While this proposal may be novel, there are
relevant precedents. Rigorous public disclosure of all possible
conflicts-of-interest is now commonplace for public officials.
University professors are not elected to their office but they do
generally claim to serve the public interest; and especially for those
academics who are supported by public funds it may be claimed that
these professors hold their expert talents as a sort of "public
trust". (Note that this disclosure requirement is much less
stringent than that applicable to elected officials: no inquiry is made
into the financial holdings of the professors, only into their outside
employments.) Furthermore, it is long established that the other
areas of faculty's professional work -- teaching assignments and
research achievements -- are open to public scrutiny.
Even without digressing from the standard
ideology of our present system the positive virtues of disclosure are
clear: it will discourage individual abuses. indicate where further
reforms may be needed, build and maintain public confidence.
Nevertheless, there are bound to be objections from some quarters.
Objection #1
"This
is an invasion of the faculty member's privacy."
This objection can be refuted on several counts. First of all,
by awarding the title of "professor", the university has bestowed upon
the individual a very special credential which elevates his or her
value as an expert consultant; and in this way the professor is already
tied to the university in carrying out any "private" practice.
Second, by permitting the professor to take time off without loss of
salary to engage in consulting, the university becomes a partner,
albeit a silent one, to the activity. And third, whatever
ambiguities were seen in the existing university regulations, this much
is inescapable: that the university sees consulting activity as an
integral part of the total service which the faculty member does as an
employee of the university. Thus, there is little which deserves
to be called "private" about faculty outside consulting, aside from the
fact that most of it is performed in secret. (There may be
instances where some privacy is properly claimed -- for example, the
names of patients of a practicing M.D. -- but such exceptions to the
general disclosure rule must be carefully delimited.)
Objection #2
"Where
do you draw the line in requiring disclosures?"
This argument may be used in attempt to throw up a smokescreen, as with
Dean Holton's remark, "Maybe you need to know if your political science
teacher hates his mother." For another illustration, several
years ago it was proposed that officers of the American Physical
Society (APS) should regularly disclose to the membership of this
organization all their professional consultantships, etc. .
Professor Luis W. Alvarez, then president of the APS, explained as
follows why the proposal was rejected by the APS' governing body.
I do not see how one can find a proper
cutoff point for information if one does not restrict it to information
concerning one's ability to serve the Physical Society. I think
that if I happen to be a member of the Board of Deacons of the local
Presbyterian Church, it would be none of the Physical Society's
business. I feel the same way about my directorship on the board
of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which is known to most of my friends
and associates. [17]
It should not require a PhD in anything to understand the difference,
in relation to the profession of physics, between a local church and a
500-million dollar electronics manufacturing corporation.
Similarly, in regard to our general disclosure rule for consulting
faculty, it should not be beyond the ability of reasonable persons to
draw up a reasonable set of guidelines. The primary requirement
is a good faith commitment to the principle of the public's right to
know about affairs that influence the public condition.
Objection #3
"This
requirement will create a great bureaucratic burden."
Many, if not most, universities are already in the habit of collecting
annual reports from each faculty member, listing teaching, research and
other varied activities of the past year. Only one more category
need be added -- covering consulting activity -- and these reports
should then be available for public inspection, if that is not already
the custom. Also, from the position of the professor who must
fill out this report there is no extra burden since the information
required will already have been recorded for income tax purposes.
Objection #4
"Making
this information public will expose some professors to
embarrassment, criticism or harassment."
Basically, this comes down to whether one is really dedicated to the
idea of the university as an open
institution in society and whether one has faith in the working of
democratic processes. This objection is implied in the closing
comment by Dean Holton in his interview: if one, or only a few
schools adopt this disclosure policy, they might lose some of their
faculty members to other schools that guarantee them continued secrecy
in their consulting activities. Hopefully, this disclosure policy will
be adopted before long at most reputable universities and so this
will be at worst a transient problem for whoever takes the lead.
Speaking more positively, I would say that a university is improved by
the departure of any faculty members who rate their private business
connections over their commitments to the university.
It may be only a slight oversimplification
to say that the problem of secret consulting is like the problem of
secret research. After much agitation, during the heat of the
Vietnam war, many faculties declared secret research to be
inappropriate on their campuses. What is being asked here is not
that the practice of consulting stop, but only that we be allowed to
know fully about it.
It is not difficult to predict that certain
groups will, for their own interests, be opposed to this proposal for
disclosure of consulting activities. The faculty establishment,
the university administration, the business and government bureaucratic
organizations that have all benefited from the traditional arrangements
will not want to see this change. However, on the other side
there are students, taxpayers, workers and consumers (to name some
groups that are well organized politically) in whose interest it would
be to support the proposal; these people do not usually benefit from
being able to hire university experts to advance their causes, and in
fact they often end up being in opposition to the moves of the big
businesses and big government agencies that do make great use of the
professors' talents.
This leads to a consideration of strategy for
getting this proposal adopted. The state legislature should be a
focal point since the many groups mentioned above have some clout
there. Also, those legislators have already adjusted to the ideas
of public disclosure of their own activities and may rightly wonder why
the state university faculty should be holier than they. At some
point the Congress should also be approached since federal funding is
important to many private colleges that are not directly responsive to
state legislatures.
Ultimately, it may turn out that the
university faculties and administrators will decide that it is best for
them to institute this disclosure program themselves, rather than risk
having legislatures look too closely at the cozy arrangements that now
exist.
By whatever route, however, these changes can
come about only if there is strong and determined pressure from
students. Student government can play a leading role in
educating, organizing and agitating -- this can go forward in open
campus debate, inside faculty committees where students have a voice,
and in the considerable lobbying talent that students have built.
There is also a very big opportunity for grass roots student organizing
around the issue of consulting: groups can form to work on individual
departments, to investigate the local consulting situation, to generate
discussion, to pool their findings and to build and maintain the
pressure for change as they see the need.
##############################
The author, a professor of physics, has been
on the Berkeley faculty since 1960, and has been involved in a number
of controversial issues on campus. For some years he has been
interested in studying the connections between science and social
problems, writing, teaching and speaking to the public from a critical
perspective; and he has been an active member of Scientists and
Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA).
1. Robert Reinhold, The New
York Times, June 18, 1969.
2. Letter from George J. Maslach to the author, March 20, 1974.
3. See Seymour E. Harris, "A Statistical Portrait of Higher Education,"
The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1972; McGraw-Hill; page
532.
4. Robert Reinhold, op.cit.
5. Federal Advisory Committees; First Annual Report of the President to
the Congress, Including Data on Individual Committees; March 1973;
printed for the Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on
Budgeting, Management, and Expenditures, United States Senate, 93rd
Congress, 1st Session. Parts 1-4, May 2, 1973; Part 5, Index,
January 7, 1974.
6. Charles Schwartz, Bulletin
of
the Atomic Scientists, October 1975.
7. Letter from Professor Geoffrey F. Chew to the author, April 24, 1973.
8. Testimony of Reuben Robertson III in "Advisory Committees", Hearings
before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations of the Committee
on Government Operations, United States Senate, 92nd Congress, 1st
Session; June 10 and 11, 1971; U.S. GPO, Washington; page 48.
9. Jack Anderson, with George Clifford, "The Anderson Papers," Random
House, New York, 1973; page 20.
10. Upton Sinclair, "The Goose-Step; A Study of American Education,"
published by the author, Pasadena, 1923; page 59.
11. For details, see Charles Schwartz, Science for the People, May
1975; page 30.
12. John Walsh, Science,
Vol.
164, April 25, 1969; page 411.
13. William Moore, San
Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 1974; page 5.
14. Phillip M. Boffey, "The Brain Bank of America," McGraw-Hill, 1975;
page 77.
15. David Ignatius, The
Washington Monthly, October 1973; page 21,
San Francisco Chronicle,
November
23, 1972.
16. See "Science Against the People: The Story of Jason", Berkeley
SESPA, 1972.
17. Charles Schwartz, Physics
Today, January 1975; page 13.
18. "Principles Underlying Regulation No. 4", University of California,
Office of the President, June 23, 1958.
19. David Kotelchuck, Science
for
the People, September 1975; page 8.
20. According to surveys conducted by the American Society of Corporate
Secretaries and published by The Conference Board, New York.
21. Business Week,
February 17, 1973; page 69.
22. For further reading I recommend, David N. Smith, "Who Rules the
Universities?", Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974; and Bettina
Aptheker, "The Academic Rebellion in the United States", The Citadel
Press, New Jersey, 1972.
23. Upton Sinclair's book, cited above, is remarkably fresh and
relevant despite its age. From recent years there is James Ridgeway's
"The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis" (Random
House, New York, 1968) which contains much information pertinent to
this present study; and there have been a number of local campus
pamphlets: "Who Rules Columbia?", etc.
Table 1 [
page
20]
RECENT DATA ON FACULTY
CONSULTING
Results compiled from the National Surveys of American Higher
Education, sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education,
1969. This information, obtained from the Data Librarian at the Survey
Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, does not appear
to have been published elsewhere. The following summaries,
selected for the set of "high quality" universities, are based upon
13,924 responses.
Question 45b: "In a normal week, what proportion of your work
time is devoted to consulting with or without pay?"
None
33.7%
1-10% 40.8%
11-20% 13.9%
21-40% 3.8%
41-60% 1.1%
61-80% 0.3%
81-100% 0.2%
Not answered 6.1%
Question 55: "During the past two years, have you served as a
paid consultant to: "
Local business, government,
schools 17.9%
A national corporation
16.9%
A non-profit foundation
10.7%
Federal or foreign government
20.2%
A research project
10.2%
Other
12.8%
No paid consulting
42.0%
Question 84: "What are the two largest sources of your
supplemental earnings?"
Largest
Second
largest
Summer teaching
13.3%
5.1%
Teaching elsewhere (extn, etc.)
3.9%
3.9%
Consulting
17.3%
14.6%
Private practice
7.5% 1.7%
Royalties (publ., patents)
7.1% 7.8%
Fees from speeches or lectures
5.2%
12.8%
Research salaries and payments
15.7%
5.0%
Other
10.1%
7.1%
None
15.7%
22.4%
Not answered/Does not apply
4.2%
19.6%
Table 2 [page 21]
MEMBERSHIP ON FEDERAL
ADVISORY COMMITTEES IN 1972. U.C. BERKELEY LIST
From the Index, released January 7, 1974, by the Committee on
Government Operations of the United States Senate
[78 names, not reproduced in this transcription, serving on
advisory committees to agencies: AGRI, DOD, HEW, INT, LABOR, STATE,
DOT, AEC, EPA, FCC, NASA, NEARTS, NEH, NSF, ARDC]
Table 3 [page 22]
SOME UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ADMINISTRATORS AND FACULTY
ON THE BOARDS OF DIRECTORS OF
SIZEABLE CORPORATIONS
Vice Presidents
Chester O. McCorkle, Jr.
- Del Monte Corp. **
- Universal Foods Corp. *
James B. Kendrick, Jr.
- Tejon Agricultural Corp.
Chancellors
Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr (Irvine)
- Buffums, Inc.
- Stanford Research Inst.
William D. McElroy (San Diego)
- Southern California First National Bank *
Charles E. Young (Los Angeles)
- Intel Corp. *
Faculty, Berkeley
Luis W. Alvarez (Physics)
-
Hewlett-Packard Co. *
Melvin Calvin (Chemistry)
- Dow
Chemical Co. **
Richard H. Holton (Business Admin.)
- Rucker Co. *
- Dymo Industries, Inc. *
- Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance
Co. **
Kenneth S. Pitzer (Chemistry)
- Owens-Illinois, Inc. **
Glenn T. Seaborg (Chemistry)
- Dreyfus Third
Century Fund
Edward Teller (Physics)
- Thermo Electron Corp.
Charles H. Townes (Physics)
-
Perkin-Elmer Corp. *
- General Motors Corp. **
Theodore Vermeulen (Chem. Eng.)
- Memorex Corp. *
John R. Whinnery (Elec. Eng.)
- Granger Associates
Faculty, Los Angeles
Neil H. Jacoby (Management)
- Occidental
Petroleum Corp. **
Willard F. Libby (Chemistry)
- Nuclear
Systems, Inc.
- Research-Cottrell, Inc. *
Harold M. Williams (Management)
- Signal Companies, Inc. **
- Norton Simon, Inc. **
- ARA Services, Inc. **
- CNA Financial Corp. **
* Corporations having over $100,000,000. in annual sales or
total assets.
** Corporations having over $1,000,000,000. in annual sales or total
assets.
Table 4 [pages 23-25]
ACADEMICS ON THE BOARDS OF
DIRECTORS OF THE 130 LARGEST U. S. CORPORATIONS
From a search of the annual reports of the companies listed by Fortune
in 1974: the top 100 industrials and the 5 top companies from each of
the other 6 categories. Many of the individuals listed below also
sit on the boards of other, lesser, corps.
University of California
Melvin Calvin (Prof. Chemistry, Berkeley) - Dow Chemical
Neil H. Jacoby (Prof. Management, Los Angeles) - Occidental Petroleum
Kenneth S. Pitzer (Prof. Chemistry, Berkley) - Owens-Illinois
Charles H. Townes (Prof. Physics, Berkeley) - General Motors
Harold M. Williams (Dean, Management, Los Angeles) - Signal Companies
University of Michigan
W. J. Cohen (Dean, Education) - Bendix
Morgan Collins (Prof. Emer. Business) - S.S. Kresge
Robben W. Fleming (Pres.) - Chrysler
Paul W. McCracken (Prof. Business) - S.S. Kresge
William E. Stirton (Vice Pres. Emer.) - American Motors
Harvard University
Donald K. David (Prof. Business) - Xerox; Great A&P Tea Co.
Lawrence E. Fouraker (Dean, Business) - RCA; First National City Bank,
NY
Jean Mayer (Prof. Nutrition) - Monsanto Chemical
Frederick J. Stare (Prof. Nutrition) - Continental Can
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Howard W. Johnson (Chm.) - DuPont; J.P. Morgan; John Hancock Life;
Champion Int'l.
James R. Killian, Jr. (Hon. Chm.) - General Motors; AT&T
William F. Pounds (Dean, Management) - Sun Oil
Jerome B. Wiesner (Pres.) - Celanese
Columbia University
Courtney C. Brown (Dean Emer. Business) - Borden; American Electric
Power
Grayson Kirk (Pres. Emer.) - IBM; Consolidated Edison
William J. McGill (Pres.) - Texaco; AT&T
California Institute of
Technology
Robert F. Bacher (Prof. Physics) - TRW
Harold Brown (Pres.) - IBM
Cornell University
John E. Deitrick (Dean Emer. Medicine) - Prudential Life
Franklin A. Long (Prof. Chemistry) - Exxon
Duke University
Juanita M. Kreps (Vice Pres.) - J.C. Penney
Terry Sanford (Pres.) - Cities Service
Northwestern University
John A. Barr (Dean, Management) - Esmark
Donald P. Jacobs (Prof. Finance) - Union Oil
Princeton University
Burton G. Malkiel (Prof. Economics) - Prudential Life
Courtland D. Perkins (Prof. Engineering) - American Airlines
Purdue University
Frederick L. Hovde (Pres. Emer.) - General Electric; Inland Steel
Mary Ella Robertson (Prof.) - John Hancock Life
University of Rochester
Robert L. Sproull (Pres.) - United Aircraft
W. Allen Wallis (Chancellor) - Eastman Kodak; Esmark; Metropolitan Life
Stanford University
Arjay Miller (Dean, Business) - Ford
J.E. Wallace Sterling (Chancellor) - Shell Oil
Barnard College
Martha E. Peterson (Pres.) - Metropolitan Life
Brown University
Donald F. Hornig (Pres.) - Westinghouse
Bryn Mawr College
Katherine E. McBride (Pres.) - New York Life
California State University
Brage Golding (Pres., San Diego) - Armco Steel
Carnegie Institution of
Washington
Caryl P. Haskins (Pres.) - DuPont
Case Institute of Technology
T. Keith Glennan (Pres. Emer.) - Republic Steel
Emory University
E. Garland Herndon, Jr. (Vice Pres.) - Coca-Cola
Hunter College
Robert C. Weaver (Prof. Urban Affairs) - Metropolitan Life
University of Illinois
John Bardeen (Prof. Physics) - Xerox
Illinois Institute of
Technology
John T. Rettaliata (Pres. Emer.) - Western Electric; International
Harvester
University of Leiden
Ernst H. van der Beugel (Prof. Int'l. Relations) - Xerox
Marquette University
Charles W. Miller (Prof. Business) - W.R. Grace
Meharry Medical College
Lloyd C. Elam (Pres.) - Kraftco
Michigan State University
Clifton R. Wharton, Jr. (Pres.) - Ford; Equitable Life
University of Nebraska
Durward B. Varner (Pres.) - Beatrice Foods
New York University
James M. Hester (Pres.) - Union Carbide
Notre Dame University
Theodore M. Hesburgh (Pres.) - Chase Manhattan Bank
Pepperdine University
M. Norvell Young (Chancellor) - Lockheed
University of Pittsburgh
Marina vN. Whitman (Prof. Economics) - Westinghouse; Manufacturers
Hanover Trust
Pomona College
David Alexander (Pres.) - Great Western Financial
Rensselaer Polytechnic
University
Richard G. Folsom (Pres. Emer.) - American Electric Power; Bendix
Rutgers University
Margery Somers Foster (Dean, Douglass College) - Prudential Life
University of Southern
California
Norman H. Topping (Chancellor) - Litton
Syracuse University
William P. Tolley (Chancellor Emer.) - Colgate Palmolive
Tulane University
Hebert E. Longenecker (Pres.) - CPC International; Equitable Life
Tuskegee Institution
Luthe H. Foster (Pres.) - Sears, Roebuck
Virginia Polytechnic
Institution
T. Marshall Hahn (Pres.) - Georgia-Pacific
Washington University
William H. Danforth (Chancellor) - Ralston Purina
Wayne State University
Edward L. Cushman (Vice Pres.) - American Motors
Wesleyan University
Edwin D. Etherington (Pres. Emer.) -- American Express
Yale University
John Perry Miller (Prof. Economics) - Aetna Life & Casualty
Statistical Summary
68 academic people, from 44 universities, holding 85 directorships, on
the boards of 66 corporations.
When these findings are compared with the tabulation given by Ridgeway
[23] we find that the presence of academics on the boards of these
largest corporations has increased by 65% in the seven year interval
between these two studies.