Universities Reject 'Tainted' Tobacco Money

Source from:  By Alan Finder, New York Times News Service 02/14/2008

Officials at the University of Texas business school in Austin became uneasy when they realized that a reliable donor to student activities - the parent company of the tobacco maker Philip Morris - wanted a more prominent role in sponsoring events, and more interaction with students. So the school decided two months ago to draw a line and refuse all tobacco money for student groups, as well as for faculty research. "What it came down to for us was the ethical dimension," said George W. Gau, dean of the Texas school, the McCombs School of Business. "The leadership of the school felt that in some sense it was tainted money, that it is money gotten from a product that is significantly harming people." Across academia, universities and graduate schools are wrestling with whether to accept financing from tobacco companies for research or student activities. In the past few years, 15 public health and medical schools have turned away donations from the industry; McCombs' move was unusual because of its longstanding ties to an array of corporations. But on some campuses, faculty who get tobacco money for research grants have led pitched battles over proposed bans. Last spring, because of such faculty opposition, Stanford University and regents of the University of California system rejected prohibitions on tobacco dollars. Many faculty members argued that the restrictions would infringe on academic freedom and lead to fights over money from other potentially controversial sources, like liquor, pharmaceutical or oil companies. They said that even if tobacco companies financed research, professors would guard their independence and not permit the companies to influence their results. "We take funding from corporations, from the Department of Defense, from many, many sources, but ultimately the responsibility for the science belongs to the faculty member who did the science," said Robert C. Dynes, president of the University of California system. The University of California Board of Regents decided in September that rather than ban tobacco money, it would require research financed by tobacco companies to be approved by the chancellor on each campus. The origins of the movement to ban tobacco money are traced to Australia, where nearly 20 universities stopped accepting money from the industry during the 1990s, said Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University of California, San Francisco medical school. Glantz was among the prime proponents of a tobacco ban in the University of California system. Universities also received a nudge from the American Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group created as part of a $206 billion settlement in 1998 of a lawsuit filed by 46 states against the tobacco industry. The foundation, dedicated to reducing tobacco use, awards research and other grants to universities, but only if the unit of the university seeking financing does not accept tobacco money. The medical school at Emory University and the public health schools at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State, Louisiana State and the Universities of Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina have also banned tobacco money. Enditem