Washington Watch: Pressures on Research and Academic Freedom
By Mark F. Smith
Since its foundation in 1915, the AAUP has seen its main work as defending the principles of academic freedom. In the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the founders identified three elements of academic freedom: "freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching with-in the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action." The drafters concluded that "the first of these is almost everywhere so safeguarded that the dangers of its infringement are slight," and they proceeded to concentrate on the other two elements.
That decision has guided much of the Association’s work. Yet many subtle, but real, pressures on the academic freedom of researchers still exist. The articles in the September–October issue of Academe illustrate some of the ways in which the adoption of corporate decision making in higher education has affected academic research. Responding specifically to the influence of corporate sponsors on clinical research, several leading medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, developed guidelines in September to ensure the scientific independence of studies funded by pharmaceutical companies. Another leading periodical, Nature, has decided to ask authors for voluntary disclosure of financial information that could bias their work. Previously, Nature had rejected such a course.
The 1915 Declaration of Principles addressed these very issues when it called on the university faculty member to "be exempt from any pecuniary motive or inducement to hold, or to express, any conclusion which is not the genuine and uncolored product of his own study or that of fellow-specialists." In fact, the AAUP called on universities to avoid "even a suspicion" that research decisions are shaped by "inexpert and possibly not wholly disinterested persons outside of their ranks."
One of the main reasons colleges and universities have increased their reliance on private, often commercial, financing is that support from the state and federal government has declined. As government money goes down relative to the costs of higher education, institutions are faced with choices ranging from increased tuition to increased fundraising from private sources. Over the years, the AAUP has consistently identified federal funding of research as a top legislative priority in order to ensure that publicly sup-ported basic research is accountable to the public, not to private interests.
But government support often creates its own set of problems, including the introduction of political factors into the decision-making process. Congressional committees hold the programs they finance accountable, and the government has to deal with competing interests in determining levels of support.
The public controversy over President Bush’s decision on federal funding of stem-cell research revealed the problems raised by government financing, as well as the necessity for it. As the president prepared for the decision, he faced strong pressure from competing interests—those advocating the need for discovering cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and those who objected to the creation of stem-cell lines on religious and philosophical grounds. The continuing debate over the actual number of lines that exist suggests that the issue is not going to go away.
Congress and the federal government exert their greatest influence on research through the budget and appropriations process, but they can affect research in other ways as well. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act updated federal copyright law to reflect the emergence of digital technology. Yet some of the provisions of the act have a direct impact on encryption research, and legislative controversy and litigation have resulted.
Congress is now considering another intellectual property issue that threatens to disproportionately affect academic research. In 1991 the Supreme Court invalidated the copyright protection databases received under a standard based on the compiler’s effort, investment, or creativity and judgment in selecting and arranging materials. Since that time, a legislative solution that addresses the legitimate concerns of producers, without overly restricting the rights of researchers, has not been found. The AAUP opposes the attempt to extend copyright protection to databases based on concerns that doing so would limit or deny future access to information currently available to researchers.
There is always a tension between the pursuit of pure academic research and the demands of society at large. Both government and private support bring outside considerations to the reality faculty researchers have to face.
Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.
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