Under the terms of the contract signed by Deutsche Bank, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, the bank agreed to put up €12 million, or $17 million, over four years, starting in 2007, to finance the Quantitative Products Laboratory, which would apply advanced mathematical techniques to the world of finance, and to pay the cost of two endowed professorships, one at each university.
In return the bank was allowed a say in the hiring of the two professors. It was also given the right to have bank employees designated as adjunct professors, allowed to grade student work. Appropriate topics for research and research strategy would be decided by a steering committee made up of two academics and two bank employees, with the managing director, a bank employee, casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie.
Deutsche Bank was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years. The agreement even specified that the laboratory would be located “in close proximity to the Deutsche Bank” headquarters in Berlin.
Finally, the whole agreement was to be secret, which ensured that when Peter Grottian, a political scientist and emeritus professor at Humboldt, obtained a copy last month after becoming a shareholder in Deutsche Bank, the ensuing scandal produced huge headlines in the German news media.
“You cannot avoid the impression that science is for sale,” Michael Hartmer, director of the German Association of University Professors, told Der Spiegel.
Jorg Steinbach, president of the Technical University of Berlin, repeatedly claimed that such terms were business as usual, but Humboldt’s president, Jan-Hendrik Olbertz, acknowledged that there was cause for concern. He said that in any future contracts entered into by the university, “the independence of science would be articulated clearly and unequivocally.”
Would such an arrangement raise eyebrows elsewhere? Jennifer Washburn said it should. The author of “University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education,” Ms. Washburn said in an interview that while collaboration between the academy and industry is common and often desirable, “no university should ever sign a funding contract that allows the corporate sponsor to control what happens in the classroom.”
“That is corporate training, not education,” she said.
“The financial pressures on universities today are enormous,” Ms. Washburn added. As governments cut financing and university endowments decrease in value because of the financial crisis, “there has been a sea change in the relationship between corporations and universities which, in their eagerness to establish ties with industry, risk losing sight of the need to address the potential for serious conflicts of interest,” she said.
“Withholding publication is never acceptable,” Ms. Washburn asserted, while noting that there “are no hard and fast rules, no accepted codification for such relationships.” In the United States, for instance, “every university can set its own rules,” she said, though government agencies offer guidelines. Those from the National Institute of Health, for example, reflect “a fundamental belief that the role of a university is to rapidly disseminate new knowledge,” she said.
“Many collaboration agreements allow for a short delay on publication to protect intellectual property, so patents or copyrights can be applied for,” she said. “The National Institute of Health recommends that the delay in such cases be no more than 30 to 60 days.”
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