For the last decade, academia has been sounding alarms about the growing control of research at major universities by self-interested corporations. In a time of declining spending on public education, universities are becoming more and more beholden to corporate donors, who in turn can wield remarkable influence over what is researched and taught, and by whom.

A new low in academic subservience to corporate interest, however, was chronicled in a page B1 article in the Feb. 5 edition of the Wall Street Journal--and the school in question was our very own University of Washington. Oddly, none of our local mass media picked up the story from the notoriously unreliable, anti-business WSJ.

The article described two years of negotiations, eventually broken off a few months ago, between UW and the United Parcel Service (UPS). UPS offered UW's medical school $2.5 million to establish a research chair in occupational orthopedics--in other words, studying back injuries. A major claim of striking UPS workers last summer was the company's callous disregard of such injuries, and company work practices that virtually guaranteed them.

While companies now routinely specify and target fields of study with such research donations, UPS went one step further: as a condition of the grant, UPS wanted Dr. Stanley J. Bigos appointed to the chair and granted tenure (a lifetime appointment).

As the WSJ noted dryly, "it's understandable that UPS would want to endow a chair for Dr. Bigos...his research has suggested that workers' back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job. UPS has opposed recent government efforts to impose workplace ergonomic standards." The WSJ failed to add that UPS has poured millions of dollars into the coffers of both Republicans and Democrats to head off such workplace protections. What's a little extra to buy a lifetime of credible, favorable research from a chair at an internationally renowned research facility?

Bigos' back injury research, incidentally, was done on injured workers at Boeing. The UW/UPS courtship highlights the eagerness of many major universities nationally to win the favor of corporations interested in scientific justification for sociopathic behavior. But it also reminds us that the large research institutions are themselves run like big corporations--including the University of Washington.

The football team is hardly the only obnoxious aspect of UW. For years, its main Seattle campus has been cutting back liberal arts departments and de-emphasizing undergraduate instruction, while pouring money into lucrative research, especially grant-driven hard science enterprises, such as cancer research and the health sciences complex. Indeed, a lot about UW is rather cancerous; the "grow or die" ethic pervades its fundraising, its capital funds for construction, and its amoeba-like takeover of the land between 15th Ave. NE and I-5 south of 45th (drying up the supply of affordable housing for students along the way).

UW's corporate-friendly funding and faculty is not a new development; the notorious Forestry College, all by itself, helped earn UW the nickname "University of Weyerhaeuser" for its shrill advocacy of clearcuts. Military research grants dominate the applied physics department, among others. Private donations (such as recent high-profile ones from Bill Gates and Paul Allen) and Board of Regent appointments culled from captains of industry (Boeing, et. al.) don't have to directly influence research, hiring, and the like. The culture is established, and the food chain is clear. Under such conditions, academic diversity is possible--but not necessarily desired, and not frequently rewarded.

The corporatization of UW and other universities raises a question, sadly, that is increasingly relevant at all levels of education: is the purpose of learning to investigate and understand our world, or to train a servile workforce (and, at the higher levels, to learn to manipulate a workforce for maximum profit)? The UPS attempt to use UW to abuse labor seems to have failed, due not to principle, but to lack of subtlety. One wonders why there wasn't more local attention and outcry--and what other corporations are talking today with which other UW departments.