Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

As a Columbia alumnus, I want to applaud Spectator’s superb series on the University’s inadequate faculty conflict-of-interest policy. The documentary “Inside Job,” which revealed the Columbia Business School professors’ disturbingly close ties to the financial industry, greatly tarnished the public name and reputation of the institution. Unfortunately, as the film points out, this is not a problem restricted to business schools or one institution. One solution would be for Columbia (and other universities) to mandate public disclosure of outside consultancies above $10,000 on a comprehensive, easily accessible website. Such a site would also allow listed professors, if they wanted, to elaborate on the nature of their outside work and respond in advance to potential conflict-of-interest concerns. If they knew it would be publicly spotlighted, I suspect many shameless would-be moonlighters would think twice about their more dubious work for pharmaceutical, tobacco, lead-paint, and chemical companies (to name just a handful of overly cozy corporate-academic relationships that have recently come to light).

The past two years alone have seen a number of appalling episodes—the subprime mortgage crisis, the Massey Energy mine explosion, the BP oil spill, and the Japanese nuclear accident—that demonstrate the dangers of corporate negligence and recklessness to our collective well-being. We need our best scholars to monitor the conduct of these corporations vigilantly and independently­—not as lapdogs on corporate payroll.

Readers interested in reading more about this important topic should consult the special November-December 2010 issue of Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ magazine on academic affairs.

Merlin Chowkwanyun, CC ’05
April 18, 2011