(I marked the 6th last paragraph with >>>.   Remedies put forth by John McMurtry.)

The University Wars:

The Corporate Administration versus the Vocation of Learning

Address to Faculty and Students

Neatby-Timlin Lecture Theatre

University of Saskatchewan

April 7, 2009

by John McMurtry Ph.D, F.R.S.C.

My experience of the university extends over almost half a century. For the first 20-odd years, I was worried the place was disconnected from the real world in self-referential guild specialties. For the next 20-odd years, I have observed the cumulative subordination of the university to corporate-market methods and to rising financial-management appropriation of public educational funds by central administrations – all with no accountability to academic standards.

This invisible occupation of the academy by a corporate agenda forwarded by central administrations within universities has been analysed by University of Saskatchewan’s own Howard Woodhouse in his forthcoming book, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market.¹ Tracking of this corporate invasion of the academy ultimately leads back to what is not examined – the unaccountable right of central administrations to spend public money on their own growth, privileges and salaries instead of the constitutional objectives of the university – advancement of learning and dissemination of knowledge. University presidents who once received a faculty member’s salary with a modest stipend now arrange with their business-dominated boards to be paid more than the U.S. President while incurring steeper debts and raising tuition fees for debt-ridden students.

This is why I wrote the president of my own university on March 30 a week ago as follows.

Subject: Verification

Dear Alastair:

I am giving a faculty-invited lecture at the University of Saskatchewan in a few days entitled “Corporate Administration versus the Learning Vocation”. I read in the Guelph Tribune, March 27, 2009, that you “received a $47,000 increase in salary last year, making his salary near $450,000” and that “were paraphrased as saying students “might have to work more, take on more debt, or not return to the U of G next year so they can earn more money before returning”.

I intend to cite these disclosures as exemplifying the conflict referred to in the title of my public lecture; but I seek verification first that there is nothing substantively inaccurate in this account.

I frankly hope this CEO appropriation of education funds in a time of public outrage at grossly inflated incomes of revenue administrations in times of rising debts and cutbacks elsewhere is not true at the University of Guelph under your presidency. It shames the office and the institution, and undermines the university’s shared learning vocation by a culture of irresponsible pecuniary selfishness at the top.

Critical reason without deference to established opinion or power is the right of academic freedom. Yet which university faculties have stood up for it on their own campuses as the university has been invaded by anti-academic forces for over 20 years?

How did this corporatization of the academy begin? To make a long story short, university presidents planned with corporate executives to defund the universities – I quote from their own records – “to provide a greater incentive in the university community to seek out corporate partners”.²  This early strategy was planned by the Corporate Higher Education Forum (CHEF), originally founded in 1983 to join 25 university presidents to 25 senior executives of major corporations in setting the “new direction” for universities. The acronym C-H-E-F – CHEF – reveals the CEO agenda. Corporations were thereby empowered to redirect university researchers by leverage-funding to only that research from which they could privately profit. Most academics were and are so caught up in their career micro-worlds that they collaborated to get funds.

“Bring your knowledge to market” has been the master slogan throughout. In the words of one professor promoted to deputy minister of education, and then to head of a major national research granting council at the beginning of the corporate market takeover: “I contend that the one global object of education must be for the people of Ontario to develop new services which we can offer in trade in the world market”.³ This position is incoherent in principle, but has increasingly reigned across the educational system.

The Deciding Collaboration

Few faculty penetrate the underlying contradiction in purpose and method between the market’s private exchanges for money and the university’s community of advanced learning – even as low-paid sessional teachers carry more and more of university teaching loads, multiplying fees and debt-loads for students put university out of reach of the poor, and salaries for those in privileged and management positions escalate as cutbacks on courses and programs are imposed. Yet students have been conditioned to the same program of winning pecuniary self-advantage as all that counts. When I have asked my large first-year classes in philosophy, “Who thinks the goal of a university education is to make more money?” about 95% have raised their hands. Once Ronald Reagan became popular as the US president with a credo of “American freedom is the freedom to get rich”, the value rot seemed to set in.

The results are not pretty. University presidents now conceive themselves as corporate CEO’s of hundreds-of-millions of dollars. Research is increasingly only possible with outside money backing it. Campuses are ever more pervasively festooned with corporate ads and brands in every medium. Student market surveys are the administrative measures of quality of teaching as they are made into debt slaves. Sessionals with non-living wages multiply in the university in place of research faculty. Academic spaces morph into sites for big-business commodity sales. Science and humanities buildings are renamed after leaders of the university’s marketization. And multinational corporations control the academic journal and textbook system across borders in accordance with money-first values.

Few seem to observe that this financial marketization has led the rest of the world to ecological, social and economic collapse; nor the coincidence of this profile with the academy as its knowledge servant. Even less do corporate administrations notice the contradiction of values between the academy’s purpose of critical search for truth and the corporate market’s final goal of financial self-maximization which lies behind the university’s stripping down to a commercial venture. In direct value opposition, good reasoning and research require educators and researchers to pursue the truth wherever it leads independently of money payoffs to self. To devote long hours to research and rewriting if it adds time-costs without money payoffs is irrational in the market, but what all in-depth pursuit of the truth demands.

Unfortunately, senior academic administrations now may actually assist wealthy corporate interests in the silencing of truth. In the now famous case of University of Toronto, Dr. Nancy Olivieri was censured for disclosing life-and-death information about an Apotech product’s effects. University attacks on her position occurred just as the President, Robert Pritchard, was in the midst of negotiations to receive a multi-million dollar donation from the very same corporation seeking to silence Dr. Olivieri. Administrators who presided over false attacks were promoted to more lucrative positions, including the current President of University of Toronto.

As the eminent scientist and humanist, Ursula Franklin, has memorably said from her own experience of the 1930’s era of Nazi Germany in Europe and the corporatizing academy today: “They had their collaborators, and we have ours”. On the government plane, the sell-out of research with public dollars for private corporate exploitation is made a national command. “Tripling of the commercialization of university research”, Paul Martin proclaimed as he became Prime Minister in 2004, “is not nearly fast enough”.

Giving Away University’s Research to Transnational Corporations to Exploit Students

A second level of contradiction between market and academic models is between the methods of dissemination. The control of all knowledge that corporations can copyright or patent is an ultimately regulating principle of the global market. Indeed, this right to market monopoly of ideas is pursued and extended to the utmost by 20-year patents on life-saving remedies, control of seed varieties, and corporate copyrights on journal articles and texts – all typically discovered within universities themselves. I myself have been unsuccessfully blocked from putting relevant article and chapter publications on reserve for students for their copy use although I was the author of them.

This is the extent to which university administrations have gone in enforcing the corporate agenda against students’ learning interests. It is now a general fact that academic journals themselves have become copyright-controlled by private corporations’ buying up the journals, and then multiplying the prices for their purchase and use by university libraries whose own faculties have created the material for no cost to the corporations. Indeed there is a standard copyright form required to be signed by faculty authors whose work is produced and refereed free for corporately owned journals, and these forms demand exclusive copyright in perpetuity to the private corporate proprietor for no returns to the author, the university, or the public who support both. I always add a specific condition removing this exclusive world copyright, but typically risk or am threatened with non-publication. There has been no such resistance to signing these forms, I am told, by other academic authors.

Thus the public, the students and the universities pay for faculties to research and publish and for all the university resources to support them, while private corporations buy the vehicles of publication to sell them back to the university communities who have created them – and at staggering rising prices that beggar libraries themselves. The academy’s freedom of knowledge dissemination is thus reversed, but university administrators and funders increasingly press for still more commercialization of university knowledge creation while they give most of it away to their corporate senior partners. When such hijacking of publicly-funded academic resources for external private profit at the expense of libraries and students is enforced by university administrations themselves, one wonders as to their cognitive competence even at asset trading.

The abandonment of the academy’s vocation seems to have reached into the identity of researchers themselves. Faculty and grad students conceive of their worth in terms of their money and grant revenues, and mould their work to maximize their money returns. Yet development of abilities of critical and autonomous thought is what the academy stands for and is tax supported to provide. In direct opposition, easy consumption of ready-made commodities is what the corporate market provides to those who can pay. We know that if anyone tries to buy their way into or through university, s/he is liable to expulsion as a cheat. But if the academy follows market values, why shouldn’t students buy their papers from sellers of their choice? If all that is involved is an exchange to get what you want for the least price, the free market way, why is this wrong?

Rallying in support of academic freedom and Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa who the grading system itself, Professors David Noble and Nancy Olivieri from York and Toronto have explained the purpose of Universities very well. I quote them now:

“Universities stand alone among our social institutions in their professed and acknowledged dedication to the pursuit and dissemination of the truth. They are the public’s only presumed repository of dependably disinterested expertise, drawn upon routinely by courts, government, and the media for the facts, authoritative assessments, and legitimacy. In a universe saturated by advertisers and public relations people with spin, deceit, fraud and fabrication the universities serve as a unique resource for citizens in need of the real story. This is one of the chief reasons why the public has so generously subsidized institutions of higher education and endowed its disciplined truth-seekers and truth-tellers with extraordinary protections from censorship – academic freedom -and job insecurity – tenure. These hallmarks of academia are not perks or privileges but obligations, calling upon academics to attend to their core responsibility of providing the public with the truth.”

Yet human reason and life coherent truth seeking are now incarcerated within a get-rich-quick program which corporate administrations imitate and impose on university communities at every level. In the global market as a whole, the ultimate drive-wheel of value is to turn money into more money for money managers and possessors in which the corporate rich at the top loot the world and the public treasury for ever more in cash, perquisites and command power for themselves.  Self-multiplying corporate university administrations have been an unidentified fifth column of imposing this meta-program on universities where they are at the front line of privatizing the knowledge commons for patent, proprietary and money-bearing accounts, and where their own corporate hierarchy of pay, privileges and servant positions is always growing.

Academically unaccountable to the learning purposes of the university, central administrations perpetually cut back on the teaching, learning and research front lines of the university to pay for this growth. This cancer-like pattern is then, in perhaps the greatest irony of our condition, defended against public critics under the public mask of “academic autonomy”.

Recognizing Corporate Administrations:

There are five properties by which we can recognize corporate administrations:

(1) They have exclusive hierarchical signing control of all financial expenditures, their ultimate lever of control and command which is mystified as their “leadership”;

(2) They do not perform the constitutional goals and primary functions of the academy – to advance learning and disseminate knowledge;

(3) They draw off ever more of the academy’s financial and physical resources to multiply their positions and incomes;

(4) They call themselves “the University” although they perform no function of advancing or disseminating learning;

(5) They selectively gang-attack faculty members for opposite to academic reasons  [as Professor of Sociology, Ken Westhues, superbly describes in his book, The Envy of Excellence : Administrative Mobbing of High-achieving Professors⁴].

Where administrators do not conform to this pattern, they may become genuine academic leaders – a possibility which has looked dim, but is worth robust support wherever it occurs.

At present, we may most deeply understand the university wars of corporate administrations versus the learning vocation by laying bare their opposite structures of rationality, method and purpose. Corporate administrators and their retinues follow the meta program of

(i) self-maximizing strategies in

(ii) conditions of scarcity or conflict over

(iii) desired payoffs at

(iv) minimum costs for the self to

(v) appropriate ever more for self with no productive contribution.

In direct opposition, those in the learning vocation follow an opposite inner value code:

(i) to maximize learning advancement and dissemination by

(ii) knowledge sharing without limit for

(iii) understanding and truth as ultimate value in itself at

(iv) any cost of difficulty to

(v) develop humanity’s more inclusive comprehension of natural and human phenomena.

We may see corporate administrations warring against the learning vocation by the following practices.

• University patent hunting and corporate research displace science;
• knowledge sharing is prohibited by contract and specialty lock-in;
• research is made dependent on external money received by faculty and graduate students;
• understanding and truth are not and ends in themselves, but are warped into what products pay more;
• every decision is increasingly financialized with money gain the supreme value;
• and those who follow the search for truth where it leads against the ruling value program are besieged by bureaucratic campaigns of anti-educative isolation and destruction of academic freedom – for example, inciting students to formal complaint, closing off academic resources, published personal attacks and – perhaps, as in the case of Professor Denis Rancourt – CEO banning from campus, handcuffing and firing of the heretic.

By these practices, the academy’s shared search for truth is suffocated and euthanized from within – that is, until faculties and students collectively stand for the learning vocation against its despoliation.

Financialization of the Academy: The Totalitarian Drift

To get a sense of the academy’s increasing submergence in corporate-market values, consider the words of the past Harvard President, Larry Summers, now chief economic adviser to the Obama administration. He was interviewed by the Globe and Mail in glowing admiration after a lecture to University of Toronto. (May 24, 2003). “The essential truth”, he declared, is that all “basic value” – including “literacy” – is “linked to market growth”.

We may formalize the equation of the paradigm corporate president as follows: More/less money-value sales = more/less market growth = more/less “basic values” for the world. No substantiation of the given equations is deemed necessary. No explanation of contra-indicative evidence is conceived. Yet mind-staggering implications follow that are not seen. Whatever is without a market price is, therefore, without any value – the world’s biodiversity of species, for example. Life itself is of no value except as it sells for a market price. So too research and knowledge. If they are not marketable, they do not exist. The truth is what sells.

An unseen onto-ethic rules here. As with soaps, so with universities. Sales pitches metamorphize reality into miracles of more value added in the market, and money sequences leave ever more money in the hands of money managers. This magical thinking is, of course, the very opposite of the search for truth. But the mind has become totalitarian. Recently, the New York Times gave much page and blog space to Stanley Fish, an academic servant to money and power as Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss before him. Fish’s tirade against academics following “the inner light” – his words – required, he concluded, the use of coercive force against them. Professors need to be reduced to a master-servant relationship with “their employer” as all other employees: that is, with university CEO’s and designates who hire and fire by unilateral control of purse-strings with no ultimate accountability to academic standards.⁵ Fish’s prancings for the boss in the New York Times are a sign of things to come.

The seductive kudo which keeps academics feeling on top, however, is that their work is the leading edge of the “global knowledge economy”. Yet who in the academy asks what the criterion of “knowledge” is here”? I have not heard the question raised, or the answer given. The reason is that what “knowledge” means here is symbolic sequences that reduce money costs or increase money revenues for money managers and possessors. That is what “accountability” means to them. Thus teaching comes to mean only what produces graduates to make more money in the global market than without their degree, with ever higher tuition fees as the costs for sale of their skills at a higher price. At the same time, selling campus grounds as marketing sites fits the same money-value program – corporate ads, junk foods and market franchises invading space and sightlines across university schools, buildings, lecture halls, and courses.

Perhaps the deepest level of violation of the higher learning vocation has been in corporate -partner research. At my own university, most of the agricultural and veterinarian research has been channeled into high-cost input products which distort animal bodies and adulterate foods (eg., bovine growth hormones and GMO’s). In general, the mission as elsewhere is to “bring research to market”, increasingly leveraging the academy into service to large private-profit enterprises. What was once unthinkable in the free academy – research and resources for private monied interests – has come to be the norm. Consider an official booklet on the research-market connection actively distributed by V-P- Research offices in the relevant universities. “Increasing competition for research funding”, it warned, “will demand that Canada identifies its research strengths and capabilities to focus on those areas with highest value and return on investment – – Priorities for applied research are set by the marketplace via partnerships eg. industry funds research that fits their priorities. – – Augmented private sector participation in research priority setting will – – ensure scientists have access to the appropriate market signals, are aware of the technology requirements of industry, and can focus their research appropriately”.⁶

Note how the university researcher is reduced to a reaction formation to market price-signals. Observe that government implicitly commands the conformity of university researchers to this market-servant role. The pattern is all too clear. Senior administrations propagate this imperative to faculty to abdicate research independence to compete for external funds so that administrations can take 25% off the top or off-load graduate education costs onto faculty grants. But who stands against the reversal of the academy’s vocation?  Which university’s faculty association takes up the cause of independent science and research?

In the standard “university-corporation partnerships”, university researchers must find projects which corporations are willing to co-fund for private profit. As a result, independent research in the public interest that is most urgently required is silently selected out – for example in the agricultural and food sciences, integrated pest management, organic farming for productive efficiency, management-intensive grazing, small-scale producer co-operatives, and alternatives to factory-processed livestock and to ecological contamination by genetically-engineered commodities. In fact, all of these domains of constructive research for sustainable agriculture and the public interest have been effectively defunded and attacked by conforming researchers – even as the public need for these researched alternatives becomes a matter of life-and-death significance for farmers and the world. Non-proprietary research for the public benefit does not attract corporate sponsors.

Thus at the general level, the most important scientific and rational innovations are pre-empted form the start – from unpatented low-cost pharmaceuticals to mandatory collective recycling systems, to non-profit alternatives to private-auto transit, to national public-water and energy programs, to any permitted critical reflection on values or depth research into the ruling economic system itself. What corporate or government funding agency will sponsor any in-depth research into any reigning social, political or economic practice and norm? Investigation of the causal mechanism of the ruling value system itself is out of bounds. A built-in gate-keeping against raising deep-structural problems is instituted at the money-management level.

In the humanities in many universities now, professors must bring in money from outside the university to defray the costs of their student’s graduate education, or they cannot have graduate students. Educational costs are thus downloaded onto faculty themselves who are forced to become fund entrepreneurs to stay alive in the game. Those not competing successfully at getting grants have no graduate students, a central demerit within administration’s annual rank and money reward process. Faculty are generally so wound up in getting the grant money they do not analyse what is going on, and even imagine this is what identifies original research. The entire higher learning process is thereby subjugated by financialization at another level.

Yet where is the structure of money rule resisted? Either faculty get money committed from private corporations who are structured to repel any finding against their interests, or they lose their lab space. Either they bring money into administrations’ revenues from a government or private funding body which will not fund system-critical research, or their research and graduate students are shut off. No financial mechanism for external control of postgraduate and faculty research could work better. Consider here what corporations find no profit in. It is not just preventative medicines for third-world malaria which kills over a million people a year, or diet-exercise routines to prevent epidemic diseases in our own society, or critical study of life-blind norms and social causal mechanisms. Nothing that does not pay off in more money to administrations is supported within the corporate university. This is why there may be no graduates or faculty now studying anything of what I have spoken today, or indeed any critical issue or thinker relating to the principles and reign of the total money-sequence order itself. Exceptions indicate the rule.

The ultimate assault on the university’s vocation is at the level of truth-seeking itself. The university is constitutionally committed to critically reasoned inquiry which goes wherever the quest for truth leads it. The truth is not an end state, but an open process in which partialities are continually exposed by thinking through deep assumptions, evidence and connections. This thinking through is the nature of learning and knowledge. Reason’s movement is always by a more inclusive taking into coherent account open to counter-evidence and argument. This inner logic governs all disciplines – from the problem of self and other in philosophy, to the nature of tropes in literature, to the hypotheses of subatomic waves and particles in physics. In one way or another, the critical search for more comprehensively coherent understanding leads the academy in every domain and the human condition itself. Deprived of the freedom to pursue truth independently of external money for administration to rake in, the academy’s learning vocation is blocked at the depths and at the leading edges across domains.

Yet surface images are what now rule as in Plato’s Cave where all are chained by their conditioning to see only projected illusions. In direct contradiction to the search for truth by life-coherent reason, the ruling global corporate order succeeds in all domains by one-sided conditioning of unconscious desires of buyers so as to maximize sales of products for money returns to money managers and possessors. This is today’s psychological law of motion to sell the system and its goods. This is why university managements now spin and lie as much as any other self-maximizing financial operation.  Excellence is what gets more money coming in. If sales increase by imaging and commercials that merely condition unconscious desires, then these are necessary to “grow business”. The corporate university thus joins in public relations reversal of reason as its own mode of thought and communication.

Forms of Faculty and Student Action to Reclaim the Academy

The known standard of research to guard against conflict of interest and cooked results is straighforward. Any research in which the funder has a financial stake in the outcome is a conflict of interest which must be ruled out. Yet this standard of research independence and validity has been usurped by the new order. For example, when a “research integrity” clause was explicitly specified on two occasions by decision of the Medical Research Council of Canada, it was annulled with no justification by the central administration.⁷ If universities are not to be so subordinated to outer control, such a research integrity condition must be re-instituted on campuses to protect higher research from conflicts of interest and cooked science – with all donations to a general pool of grants funds for independent research.

Just as research biased by conflict of interest must be stopped, so too the making of graduate student supervision dependent on external revenues captured by faculty. Faculty dependency on outside money determines the topics and direction of faculty research. One must usually spend countless hours in bureaucratic lock-steps to tailor research proposals ‘on spec’ to fit gatekeeper preconceptions so as to get funds. Solicitous grantmanship and dominant academic fads of the day thus supplant original and critical inquiry. This further level of financialization is, however, itself taboo to discuss for fear of offending the granting authorities.

Yet one has to wonder, why have the most self-evident defences of the academy’s research integrity been so easily overidden over by corporate administrations? Why have faculty and faculty organizations submitted to these pecuniary inversions of academic freedom and standards of research integrity? Collective academic presence has been lacking.

>>>   This why an independent Faculty Board of Academic Review (or Academic Freedom to fit current categories) – needs to bring active scholars across disciplines into one independent body on every university campus to review all administrative decisions so as to ensure against financially-led distortions and depredations of research and teaching – including by arbitrary administrative cuts of courses to claw back money to central administrations to spend on inflated executive bureacracies, self-display expenditures and corporate-management salaries. Cuts must begin at the top where they do not affect teaching, research and learning. Campus-based faculty associations and unions must in the end be willing to strike for protection of the university’s objectives against system-wide violations by corporate administrations. At the same time, such a faculty academic review body needs to institute formal evaluations of the performance of local central administrations by faculty questionnaires, just as faculty are evaluated by their students, with publication of the findings.

The faculty review committee needs also to press hard specifically for ceilings on academically wasteful balloon-salaries as an item of faculty negotiations – for starter norms, no salary higher than the provincial premier’s in public administration, and no faculty salary more than three times greater than the lowest-paid faculty. Once the facts on the systematic misallocation of public education funds are flushed into the open, corporate administration and overpaid faculty positions are made more accountable for expenditures on non-educative functions. Even right-wing politicians are shocked by the money and prerogatives unproductive administrations have increasingly showered on themselves and favorites with no teaching or research function. In fact, salary ceilings should be generalized across the campus and the saved costs applied to teaching and learning purposes. Those in the university for more money as their ruling goal would then be free to leave the academy where they do not belong.

The whip hand of financial cutback and self-serving in the hands of an unaccountable money management has terrorized long enough.  Bear in mind what has already happened and lies in store. In the last week before this lecture, I have observed a distinguished research professor in the U.S. being fired for questioning Israel state policies (Joel Kovel at Barnard), been informed that a long-term professor of physics is banned and then handcuffed for showing a documentary (Denis Rancourt at the University of Ottawa), and e-mailed by a professor colleague in Britain that the administration of a London University closed down classrooms to stop discussions of the G-20 summit. In the historical background, graduates of business programs have almost doubled, while social sciences and history have almost halved since the 1970’s in the United States. Overall, any research and learning space to stand back and ask ultimate questions of meaning, values and purpose or expose ruling assumptions has been systemically abridged.

Let me conclude. If the invading corporate-money forces are not pro-actively resisted at the level of collective contract – as distinguished from last-ditch defences of a few controversial victims – there will be no end to this usurpation of the academy’s independence and free inquiry. Consider that the courts have already ruled in the U.S. that “the state must have the ability to control the manner in which university employees (ie. Faculty) discharge their duties” and that “academic freedom cannot be invoked in a judicial proceeding” (as Stanley Fish seeks to be normalized).  Unless faculty stand up for accountability to academic standards of research and learning within the university, corporate administrations deploying unilateral financial levers and top-down restructuring will hollow out the academy like almost everything else on the planet – as the record already shows.

If it were not for the collapse of the wider global system of unregulated money-management, perhaps this slow-motion coup d’etat of Canada’s university system would just keep going under the radar. But it cannot go on if faculty and student bodies join in an institutional countervailing force in sustained commitment to the vocation of independent research and learning – where reasoning in the common interest, not unaccountable money control decides. In inherited daily practice, this right to seek and disseminate the truth is still alive, and no calling to account more effectively positions campus suits in their place.

Standing up for the university’s powers of reason, research and learning in everyday life and by independent faculty review is the long suppressed imperative. Collective academic monitoring, public exposing and strike where required can bring corporate financialization to ground in the academy better than elsewhere because the institutional vocation is the advance of learning, not more money control for corporate management. Reclaiming the university for higher learning is the one demand that cannot be publicly lied away.

1. Howard Woodhouse, Selling Out: Academic Freedom and the Corporate Market. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

2. Howard Buchbinder and Janice Newson, “Social Knowledge and Market Knowledge”, Gannet Centre Journal, 1991, 17-29.

3. Cited by William Graham, “From the President”, Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Bulletin, 6:15, 1989.

4. Kenneth Westhues, The Envy of Excellence : Administrative Mobbing of High-achieving Professors. Lewiston N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2005.

5. Stanley Fish, “Are Academics Different?”, Stanley Fish Blog, New York Times,

6. The Canadian AgriFood Research Strategy 1997-2002, Agriculture Canada, Ottawa.

7. “On two occasions”, a senior member of the committee reports, “the MRC board moved and passed a motion that Pharma contributions of $60 million per year should be given with no strings attached i.e. added to the general pool of grant funds and not be adjudicated by committees with industry representatives. On both occasions, the motion died even though the standing committee on health also voted the same way.” “As to the assassin”, he adds, “it is not possible to say with certainty because it is done behind closed doors from the centre, likely the PMO .”(Correspondence with Dr. Robert McMurtry, May 10, 2008). It is worth noting that this testimony is given by a former Dean Of Medicine and Chief Medical Adviser to the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (the Romanow Commission).