Once citadels of pure learning, universities increasingly are farms where corporate cash cows are bred.

The "academic-industrial complex" has been the target of varying levels of ire since the 1960s, when students demonstrated against universities that seemed to exist primarily as job training and industrial research factories.

So it is unsurprising that the University of Texas and three university leaders have yoked their futures to that of Introgen Therapeutics Inc. Nor does it seem odd that the deal has drawn fire from ethics watchdogs and students.

Introgen, an Austin-based corporation, hopes to profit from marketing a gene therapy developed by the university's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. UT regents voted in 1994 to license the company to market the emerging cancer treatment. The company recently went public, issuing 5 million shares of stock in its initial public offering.

Among the stockholders are the unversity; William Cunningham, who was the UT system's chancellor when regents voted 9-0 to give Introgen a license to market the therapy; Regent Tom Loeffler, who voted for the deal; and Regent Charles Miller, who owned Introgen stock before joining the board of regents in 1999. Cunningham is on a one-year paid leave from the university, but maintains an office on campus and says he will resume his association with the school in a teaching position.

UT officials say state law allows a regent to own up to 5 percent of the stock of a company that does business with the university without violating ethics provisions, according to a Houston Chronicle report on ethics aspects of the deal. The newspaper reported that neither Cunningham, Miller nor Loeffler owns as much as 5 percent of Introgen's stock.

Public Citizen, an Austin-based watchdog group, says the deal calls attention to the need for better ethics laws. The Daily Texan, UT's student newspaper, deplored the deal in an editorial headlined "It pays to be a regent, literally."

But mutual backscratching by universities and corporations is becoming commonplace. For instance, former UT President Robert Berdahl found himself mediating a controversy at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is chancellor. As recounted in "The Kept University," a March 2000 article in The Atlantic Monthly, Berkeley students and faculty are disturbed by a deal in which in exchange for $25 million the school has granted a Swiss pharmaceutical company rights to negotiate licenses to discoveries made in the College of Natural Resources. The company, Norvartis, provides about one-third of the college's research budget and helps determine how the money is spent.

Universities increasingly keep their eyes on profits and thus put disinterested inquiry at risk, the article notes. We agree that academic reputations suffer when universities allow corporate interests to milk and direct research. When the academic gatekeepers also stand to profit, as in the UT deal, the damage is double.
 
 

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