Foreign Gifts With Strings Have U.S. Colleges Fretting

America’s universities have long been a global drawing card, with governments and wealthy families alike sending their brightest students to U.S. schools. Since the late 1980s, top universities have also attracted something more from abroad: grants establishing professorships and research programs on issues vital to donors’ interests.

Some American academics worry that donors, merely with the decision to give or withhold funds, are influencing the nature of the research. And when the Turkish government recently offered UCLA a million-dollar grant that contained some subtle wording, the controversy spilled far outside the academy.

The Turkish government publicized its offer of $1 million to endow a chair in Turkish and Ottoman history for a professor who would “maintain close and cordial relations with academic circles in Turkey.” UC rules do not allow donors to impose such stipulations and, beyond that, Armenian interest groups protested. UCLA finally tabled the offer.

There are plenty of other cases. At the University of Michigan last year, a number of Taiwanese investors highly critical of China withdrew a $450,000 grant after one of the university’s scholars endorsed a document calling on the United States to give priority to Beijing in its policies in the region.

Few schools let donors explicitly dictate the nature or tenor of research. Still, foreign as well as domestic donors have been able to wield influence because of two loopholes that the university trade group, the American Council on Education, should work on tightening.

* Inadequate disclosure. While federal law requires universities to disclose any donation over $250,000, disclosure of information regarding the provisions of the grant is not specified. Thus if UCLA’s Academic Senate were to agree to the Turkish government’s requirement that a professor “maintain close and cordial relations” with Turkish academics, it would not have to reveal such a requirement.

* Inadequate protection and enforcement of academic freedom. Theoretically most universities forbid their faculty from signing contracts that inhibit their ability to freely conduct research. But in practice that is not always the case. Take, for instance, UC San Francisco researcher Betty Dong, who in the mid-1980s signed a contract in which Knoll Pharmaceuticals required that she not “publish or otherwise release” her research results without its explicit consent. When Dong found in 1990 that the company’s thyroid drug was actually no more effective than cheaper generics, the drug company successfully suppressed publication of her research for more than six years.

Universities also respond to their own governments. For instance, Rebecca S. Lowen states in her recent book, “Creating the Cold War University,” that Stanford relinquished some scholarly independence after World World II by aiming its research programs at Pentagon needs and reaping growing federal research dollars in return.

Despite the buffeting from abroad, from corporations and from government, most scholars agree the American universities have generally succeeded at maintaining their academic freedom. The universities receiving the highest level of foreign and domestic donations--Caltech, UC San Francisco medical school, Yale and Harvard--are among the nation’s best. But only through full disclosure and vigilant oversight can that be maintained.