Missing the Mission | A University Sells Out to Big Tobacco

So you’d think that research into finding early warning signs of pulmonary disease and reducing harmful chemicals that spill into waterways during tobacco processing would be something worth shouting about, right?

But at Virginia Commonwealth University, where scientists are studying just those things, no one wants much to talk about it.

That’s because the work is being funded by Big Tobacco, and under conditions that run counter not only to VCU’s own explicit guidelines but also to generally accepted principles of scholarship. As the New York Times reported last week, the contract for the funding, between Virginia Commonwealth and Philip Morris USA

bars professors from publishing the results of their studies, or even talking about them, without Philip Morris’s permission. If “a third party,” including news organizations, asks about the agreement, university officials have to decline to comment and tell the company. Nearly all patent and other intellectual property rights go to the company, not the university or its professors.

Look, I know that research money is getting harder and harder to scare up. But it’s bad enough to get in bed with Big Tobacco, which has hardly distinguished itself in the sacred academic arena of the free exchange of information, in the search for funding. It’s even worse to keep the news under wraps; most of VCU’s faculty didn’t even know about the agreement. And worst of all are the terms of the contract, which are so egregiously restrictive that you have to hope the university extracted a pretty penny from Philip Morris for all of this trouble.

Then again, no one is saying how much VCU whored itself out for. Is that because the figure is astoundingly high … or shockingly low?