UC Irvine Accepts Taco Bell Endowment

UC Irvine last week accepted a $500,000 donation from Taco Bell Corp. to endow a chair in information technology management, highlighting the increasing practice of corporations funding higher education.

As the Taco Bell Chair in Information Technology Management at the university’s graduate school of management, management and computer science professor Kenneth Kraemer will use the funds to hire two research fellows, and develop case studies of innovative uses of information technology, possibly in food retailing.

All three of the management school’s endowed chairs have come from corporate interests. FHP International Corp., now part of PacifiCare Health Systems, endowed a chair for a professor in health care management, and Pacific Mutual Life Insurance provided an endowment for studying entrepreneurship. The graduate school has an active corporate partnership program that solicits donations from companies. Currently, there are more than 75 participants.

Critics of corporate giving to higher education argue that the donations can undermine the spirit of unfettered research and learning.

“Usually, corporations endow chairs in areas of interest to them, and usually that determines the type of research that’s done, the type of instruction and courses of the person who receives the chair. And oftentimes that person ends up as the unofficial corporate spokesperson of that company,” said Lawrence Stoley, professor of communication at Marquette University, who has written a book on corporate giving.

Stoley would prefer that the money be donated to a university’s general fund or to endow scholarships rather than for a specific purpose, such as courses or lines of research.

With corporations largely dictating the areas of study, less marketable fields, such as the humanities, tend to get less support. Also, corporations tend to buy goodwill and access through their donations, Stoley said.

Kraemer acknowledges that there have been instances at other universities in which corporate donations have influenced the results of research or improperly steered study. But he said UCI and Taco Bell both understand the proper role of corporate stewardship.

“Once the corporation gives the money to the university, they can’t take it back,” Kraemer said. “It doesn’t matter if they like what I do or not, so their control is zip.”

Taco Bell, which is based in Irvine, had initially approached the university in 1992 with the idea of an endowment to study real estate, but the university felt information technology was more appropriate, Kraemer said.

In 1989, Taco Bell endowed a $250,000 professorship at Washington State University for developing courses in chain restaurant management. The professor also was to serve as an “industry liaison.”

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Jonathan Gaw covers technology and electronic commerce for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7818 and at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.