 By Graham Trickey, Editor, Prospects. While Formula One racing cars have their sponsor’s name emblazoned across their chassis, PhD gowns have escaped this sign of commercial reality, but for how long? With a British American Tobacco-sponsored Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at Nottingham University and a Rupert Murdoch-funded chair in English at Oxford, the advance of sponsorship in higher education seems to be unrestrained by a sense of irony. Increasing quantities of business cash have been flowing into university research in recent years, and the government is keen to encourage the trend. Given that public funding continues to be inadequate, PhD students are only too glad to take private funding even if compromises with their paymasters may sometimes be involved. The issue of whether private funding can affect research results has not made a strong showing in the UK. In the United States academics have protested at various aspects of commercial influence including universities sacking academics who offended sponsors, confidentiality agreements preventing results being published and, on the other hand, many academics publishing research without revealing business ties. Private sponsorship of students’ research takes two forms. At national level, the public sector research councils collaborate with companies to share the costs of CASE studentships at various universities. At university level, institutions come to their own arrangements with companies. In both cases sponsors are supporting specified projects and are very interested in the results. While sponsorship is strong in science and technology generally, major recipients are health and medicine. A pharmaceutical company might want research into an up-and-coming drug to see how well it treats a particular illness. If the company puts up the money, the university would advertise a studentship and a student would be recruited, knowing the aim and terms of the project. The potential problem area would be who owns or controls the results. Most university departments would want a contract with the sponsoring pharmaceutical company allowing results of the research to be published whether or not the tested drug turned out to be any good - otherwise a university’s reputation for academic integrity would suffer. But confidentiality agreements are not uncommonly insisted on by sponsors, including government departments. These might prohibit publication of results completely or restrict the publishing of findings considered commercially significant. James Groves, general secretary of the National Postgraduate Committee, says: ‘As with any potential problem, the majority of students don’t have any difficulty and come to amicable arrangements. But there are problem cases on a regular basis and these relate to results that are potentially commercially confidential, with the student not being able to carry them away, or where the results are very commercially exploitable and a student suddenly finds that he or she has not got the rights over them in terms of making a fair income from them.’ If results are deemed commercially confidential, the student can still receive a PhD, or in some cases a Masters, but the thesis cannot be published in the normal way and follow-up conference papers are impossible. In a case handled by the National Postgraduate Committee a former PhD student went to work for a sponsor’s commercial rival. The sponsor had copyright over the PhD results and would not let them go, to the potential detriment of the student’s career. Some casualties may be the inevitable consequence of commercial involvement, and vigilance is necessary. But James Groves adds: ‘Much of this research wouldn’t be done at all were it not for private sector. So we certainly wouldn’t say it is a bad thing; it’s a very good thing because it enables people to do postgraduate training and research.’ Related topics
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