Constructive Engagement With the Corporation

Here’s a way of working with business interests without selling your soul.

By David J. Siegel

Can academic values and traditions survive contact with the powerful forces of corporatization and commercialization? Do our alliances with industry accelerate an imminent takeover of higher education by the private sector, essentially offering distribution channels for business practices and culture? Are collaborative arrangements— whatever else they may promise— the thin edge of a wedge that will ultimately level the educational enterprise as we know it? These are among the questions confronting us as ties with industry proliferate and take on new forms. Indeed, the specter of corporate influence over higher education appears to loom larger than ever, inspiring a brisk trade in critiques of the arrangement. The impression left by many observers is that higher education is close to becoming a permanent subsidiary of Big Business, Inc.

Many of the gravest concerns that critics of corporate culture have about the consequences of academic-corporate relationships, however, are built on little more than ill-informed speculation, fueled by a lack of direct engagement with the objects of our criticism, namely, corporations. The solution to our knowledge gap—and the key to our liberation from fears of “creeping corporatization”—may actually involve more connections with industry, not fewer. At the very least, closer connections might modernize our thinking about a sector of society that will undoubtedly figure more prominently in the future of postsecondary education.

The possibility of using partnerships to develop a more nuanced understanding of our corporate counterparts led me to spend over a year studying the dynamics of the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) Program in Business, a cross-sector collaboration involving universities, companies, a federal government agency, and a nonprofit organization that coordinates the initiative. LEAD was established in 1980 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School by executives from McNeil Pharmaceutical to introduce talented underrepresented students (rising high school seniors) to business education and careers in business. Today, LEAD’s partners include twelve prominent universities, nearly forty multinational corporations, and the U.S. State Department.

Each year, the university partners host 370 students (selected from an applicant pool of more than 1,200) at three- to four-week residential Summer Business Institutes, arranging corporate site visits so that students can get an inside look at the operations of Fortune 500 firms and explore career opportunities. Afterward, the program continues to track the students’ progress. LEAD reports that 65 percent of the program’s alumni are currently pursuing careers in business, and 50 percent of them have received or are pursuing a business degree from a “top-twenty-five” business school.

One of my objectives in undertaking a study of LEAD was to explore the extent to which corporate objectives dictate matters of academic policy and whether, in fact, universities are bending their activities to suit corporate preferences. What I discovered through extensive interviews and observations led me to reassess the threat that corporations supposedly pose for institutions of higher education. These findings may help others to reevaluate the claim that our connections to the private sector can have only ruinous consequences for academe.

Disequilibrium

Universities are often portrayed as occupying the weak side of a power imbalance in interactions with business partners, as if corporate priorities will always trump academic ones. In his 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the voice of the businessman “dominates the rooms in which the real decisions are made.” There is an abiding fear that universities will become the silent partners in alliances with business elites, because corporate patrons inevitably control the purse strings.

In LEAD, however, parties to the collaboration are professional coequals in virtually all aspects of program design, development, and delivery. All of them have a defined role to play, respect the expertise of the other parties, and work to benefit the students rather than to maximize organizational selfinterest. The university participants in my study—faculty and deans and other administrators—report that corporations are enhancing the learning experience, not diluting it. When different visions of the initiative arise on campuses, these disagreements tend to be settled with the students’ interests in mind. For example, new curricular ideas and innovations presented by business partners, far from being foisted upon reluctant university officials, are regularly discussed among the parties and judged according to their relevance, their fit within the instructional framework, and similar educational considerations.

More to the point, the university participants have no compunction about rejecting ideas that threaten to interfere with their autonomy. For example, after being offered a generous gift by a major institutional donor, LEAD ultimately declined on the grounds that the terms of the gift dictated decisions about curricular content and pedagogy better left to the faculty at each of LEAD’s member universities.

In any joint project, different motivations for involvement are likely to produce episodes of tension as partners pursue certain independent objectives on top of the official collective goals that hold the relationship together. Because the business element is often presumed to be culturally disposed to seize every advantage for itself, there is a prevailing worry that corporate representatives will request or require forms of involvement that exceed reasonable limits.

University respondents to my study, however, reported few instances in which companies had asked them to do something even remotely uncomfortable or inappropriate. The rare examples of breaches of protocol or etiquette involved companies overstepping recruitment boundaries, which respondents tended to see as a pardonable offense. After all, one of the benefits of corporate participation in LEAD is that firms are given an opportunity to build long-term relationships with students that may lead to summer internships or permanent employment. In their eagerness to capitalize on this benefit, corporate recruiters occasionally seek more interaction with students than universities are willing to grant.

Return on Investment

Many academics believe that corporations, uninterested in any value other than profit, compute a strict return on their investment in partnerships. This view leads to the corollary belief that companies will always want something immediate in return for their involvement and so will micromanage the relationship to secure what they want.

But in LEAD, corporate return on investment is decidedly long-term and multifaceted. Moreover, the corporations involved do not see universities as solely responsible for ensuring them a suitable return. Certainly, most corporate participants will compete to recruit LEAD alumni over time, and some multinationals have left the LEAD fold over the years because their low recruitment yields did not justify their monetary investment.

But other benefits enter the corporate calculus, even ones as indirect and difficult to measure as “doing good for society.” Corporate officers invariably see value from many different angles and are willing to take a broad view of the benefits. The lack of quid pro quo, in fact, is almost astonishing; one school that received a six-figure contribution from a corporation was told that there was no expectation of any return.

Even the sales pitch for business is often played down. At a corporate site visit, an executive told the students, “If you have no interest in business courses, don’t take them.” The message was clear: this engagement was for student exposure and exploration, not corporate glorification. As if to underscore the point, the students were invited to ask frank questions of a panel, and they didn’t hesitate. The panelists fielded queries about child labor policies in overseas plants, how much the corporation donates each year, what it was like to be a woman or a minority group member at the firm, the work-life balance of employees, and what the manufacturing plants do with their waste.

Leveraging Collaborations

LEAD doesn’t necessarily represent all academic-business collaborations everywhere. There are a wide range of experiences—some good, some bad—in the vast and differentiated realm of interorganizational relationships. Yet LEAD’s example suggests that collaborations can provide spaces in which to challenge long-held assumptions, reset our thinking, and recognize areas of greater compatibility than we might have foretold. LEAD also points to several practical ideas for moving the dialogue on academic-corporate relationships to a higher plane, one that goes beyond “mine and thine” territorial interests.

For example, rather than imagine that we will dilute or destroy the integrity of the academic enterprise when we form alliances with business, we might take an approach that focuses on the public interest, asking what common good could come out of such collaboration. LEAD’s organizing principle, for example, is a commitment to help solve the social problem of minority underrepresentation in business. This commitment goes beyond the parochial selfinterest of any particular organization or sector. By recalibrating our dialogue to focus on the larger social purposes of collaboration, we may make real strides toward solving the most intractable problems of our times instead of falling back on protectionism.

And viewing other sectors or organizations as playing an integral “public-educator” role may make the proposition of closer ties more palatable and meaningful. When we embrace the idea that our interconnectedness can fashion a seamless educational experience for students, we may be less likely to view corporate overtures as just another turf incursion. After all, there is no better way to expose students to what happens on a shop floor than by physically putting them there to experience it firsthand.

At the Mars snack-food plant in Chicago, for example, LEAD students spend a day getting to know the research and development and manufacturing functions of a candy maker. At IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, students’ own preconceived ideas of buttoned-down corporate culture are radically transformed when they spend time in an innovative business unit whose workers are developing new software and marketing strategies in a compressed time frame. And at General Mills in Minneapolis, groups of partnerships. The unevenness with which corporate relationships are developing inside universities means that whole segments of our campuses are disconnected from opportunities to learn about them. Those involved in collaborative activity could hold sessions to share insights, lessons, surprises, disappointments, and recommendations for building more effective and productive future engagements. Of course, we can’t let any such sessions become public-relations campaigns for the cause of partnership or for particular companies; the express purpose should be to perform postmortems on partner students take the stage in a vast auditorium to present their new product plans to an in-house panel of judges. Following each presentation, the judges ask pointed questions about advertising, promotions, pricing, and packaging.

These scenes repeat themselves throughout the network as the corporate executives and representatives involved in LEAD devote time and resources to educating a new generation of leaders. Program partners consistently acknowledge that the experience of LEAD students would be substantially diminished if corporate partners did not provide the important handson component— an invaluable chance for students to learn in context.

We can do a better job of reporting back to our colleagues the special understandings acquired through ships to capture potentially valuable procedural knowledge.

Collaboration as a Corrective

Naturally, my suggestions here will not address all misgivings about academic-corporate relationships. But I hope they help to fill an information gap. It is easy to develop antipathy and antagonism toward corporations when we maintain a safe distance from them. But closer acquaintance can reveal the folly of many of our most destructive assumptions, just as it often does in interpersonal relations. More—or at least more purposeful—interaction can help us realize that we (corporations and academic institutions alike) are more multidimensional than we are given credit for. Collaboration is one way to facilitate this awareness.

David J. Siegel is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. His e-mail address is siegeld@ecu.edu.

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Comments

Excellent article emphasizing the role of university-industry collaboration. The take away message is that universities need to explore collaborations and should not make assumptions based on information gap. I think knowledge society is inherently participative in nature and knowledge (talent) producers and knowledge (talent) consumers need to talk, think and try. Polarization is inefficient and collaboration is indispensable.

Rahul C.

The trouble with this article is that it negatively characterizes valid concerns by tainting them with statements like "the folly of our most destructive assumptions" while ignoring scholarly research that clearly demonstrates that we're not merely experiencing paranoia. There are countless articles (especially on AIRs in science) that clearly demonstrate the negative influence of industry in academic science/research. From conflict of interest to demanding secrecy and postponing publication, the examples are endless. This doesn't mean that all relationships with industry are bad...of course that isn't true. But this article paints a naively rose-tinted picture of the implications of AIRs. Spend a few minutes reading journals like JAMA and NEJM...there are real concerns to be heard.

Emily

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