Monday, August 06, 2007
Mom strikes again
Betty Yang has another meandering, emotion-driven nonsense piece about OMGTOBACCOMONEY!!! or something. The way questions and answers are phrased often tells us a whole lot about the underlying beliefs that a writer has. These beliefs aren't meant to be argued, or even noticed, by the reader, but they form the foundation from which the writer thinks all things follow, and thus need not be argued.
Two weeks ago, a question was posed to the readers of the Daily Cal: "Can academic integrity be preserved while Big Bad Tobacco is involved?" The answer? A strong and fervent "NO!" Nuh uh! The answer is yes! A strong and fervent one, at that.
Remember that, in order to say "No" to that question, you have to accept that:
1) Faculty are greedy pigs with no morals who will produce any result if given the right money, and
2) There's nothing wrong with having our faculty dominated by such members, as long as you keep tobacco money out of their reach.
In other words, the way to achieve academic integrity is to prevent every possibility of violating it. Say goodbye to risky research. (Unless, of course, you're Betty "Mom" Yang, and are driven by an emotional obsession with one issue, in which case you won't notice the incongruity between how this issue is determined and all others)
But why would we hesitate to accept such a policy? A great number of prestigious research and teaching institutions across the nation and throughout the world have taken a stance to refuse tobacco industry money, either at the university or individual academic unit level, and it's about time the University of California joined them. If a great number of prestigious research and teaching institutions across the nation and throughout the world jumped off a cliff, would you? (This is my counter-Mom argument)
I would argue that those institutions are prestigious in spite of their anti-academic freedom policies, not because of them. Certainly those policies decrease their prestige in my eyes, and I doubt I'm the only one.
What about the great number of prestigious research and teaching institutions across the nation and throughout the world which have supported academic freedom? Do they not count? Not if you're Mom in the middle of an anti-smoking lecture.
The University of California is one of the top university systems in the world, with some of the best faculty and students; our funders should be held to the same high standards. Apparently our faculty aren't good enough to not be bought. If we don't hold our faculty to that standard, how can we say that we're holding funders to the same "high" standards?
For that matter, sometimes it's the people with the shittiest situations which need the most help from academia. It's the ultimate in ivory-towerism to demand that all those who come for assistance prostate themselves before your (often-idealistic) values before you deign to apply your abilities.
Our financial backers shouldn't be involved in the number one cause of preventable death in the United States, our backers shouldn't be responsible for the deaths of over four million people worldwide in the year 2000, and even more today. Maybe this is a silly question, but why not? If a bunch of folks want to subject their bodies to harm in exchange for a smoke, who are we to say that their freedom is meaningless, and so we won't help their enablers?
There's no such thing as a "preventable death," only a "postponable" one. How a person chooses to spend their time alive is none of our business, even if they shorten their own lives.
But even setting the death tolls aside, our funders certainly shouldn't be industries that have already been convicted of being corrupt organizations! I think the same silly question is appropriate here.
More appropriate is to call into question the use of the phrase "our funders." Is Mom taking tobacco money? If not, who is she to claim possession of these funders? Again, that background thought leaks through: Her problem is not that she is working for tobacco companies, it's that those who are feel like they're too close to her. She stretches in order to secure some of that guilt so that she can declare that, for some reason, she should have a say. It's academic freedom, stupid. These arguments are arguments why she and each of us shouldn't take tobacco money (which we may each find to be more or less convincing). None of them are arguments why a policy should be in place prohibiting folks from doing so.
Just last fall, in August 2006, a federal court found Big Bad Tobacco guilty of using external research programs (sound familiar?) to "undermine independent research... to generate industry favorable results, and to suppress adverse research results," in violation of the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. What we want to prevent from happening at the University of California research institutions has already happened elsewhere; shouldn't we take a lesson from history and fight the problem at the source? Good question. Let's excise all those corrupt faculty members who were complicit. And those corrupt faculty members who might be complicit in the future (we know we have them, or else there's be no need for this policy). Wrong source? My bad.
Besides increasing profits through partnership, the tobacco companies in funding UC scientific research seek to undermine the research and peer review process and create public confusion. Just imagine the corrupt deals, the faulty research results and skewed science for the sake of better profit on a product that kills, all tainting the esteemed UC name. Imagine it. Feels pretty bad, doesn't it? Therefore, let's write our policy based on our emotional responses to potential results.
This is something that some folks refer to as "the price of freedom." People will do things you aren't happy about when they have freedom. If you prevent them from doing so, they simply don't have freedom. That's why I refer to the policy-creation approach embraced by Mom as "anti-freedom," and why I have such a strong distaste for the tobacconazis. They blindly ride their emotional high to the result they want, without the slightest glance about as to what that means for the principles that actually matter. I don't buy for a second that these people give a crap about "academic integrity." They just don't like smoking. They'll pick up principles and throw them around in order to bring down their hated foe, but those principles mean nothing to folks like Mom. Any other principles hanging around, including those they embrace in different contexts, simply have to give way to the grand goal.
But I digress a bit. Just how much does that esteemed UC name deserve to be tainted if our faculty can, in fact, be bought? It seems that preventing their purchase is simply an effort to hide our own corruption and lack of ethics. I think UC deserves every smear that it receives this way.
Another point to note is that the policy wouldn't ban tobacco funding for research dealing with issues other than tobacco. The industry can fund all the tomato plant or C. elegans protein research they want—as long as there isn't any tobacco involved. That's thoughtful. I assume that anti-tobacco advocates are similarly prohibited from funding tobacco-related research, right? We wouldn't want to see any corruption occurring by the abomination of folks funding things that matter to them.
So what's stopping us? Why haven't we joined those other universities around the world saying "no" to tobacco industry funded tobacco research? Rejecting this specific funding is only a drop in the bucket when compared to the millions upon millions the UC receives from other sources. Our goal as an institution of higher learning is to preserve academic freedom and seek truth, as the UC seal exemplifies: "Fiat Lux," "Let there be light" indeed! It sounds like Mom answered her own question. And apparently she doesn't even notice.
We must prevent the University of California from falling prey to the influence and persuasion of Big Tobacco and other similar corrupt corporations, and hopefully at this September's Regents' meeting, decisions will be made to accomplish just that. We seem pretty pathetic, don't we? Are we so close to "falling prey"? I think Mom/Betty Yang's main point here is that the University of California is extremely fragile, and made up of corrupt, money-grubbing faculty. Maybe we don't deserve all that prestige.
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