Dear All,

I have printed out two important items below. First, is the letter Robert Weissman wrote to President Bok of Harvard. Robert who is a graduate of Harvard law School, is Director of the Washington based organization Essential Action, and edits their influential bulletin the Multinational Monitor. The second posting is an interview that President Bok gave in 2003.

Robert Weissman’s letter is important in my view because it provides a very clear history of this issue and it comes from someone who has not taken an active position on water fluoridation. An honest broker if you like. More importantly it comes form someone who is acutely sensitive to the sometimes perverse influence multinational coporations have on both our regulatory systems and our academic institutions.

In his letter Weissman notes President Bok’s own concerns on this issue when he writes: “As you have long noted, the intersection of corporations and universities poses grave challenges for the maintenance of universities’ independence and best academic traditions.”

Weissman looks on President Bok as more of an ally than an adversary on this issue when he writes in his postscript, “I was quite pleased that the Corporation decided to call on your steady hand after the recent tumultuous times at the university, and that you saw fit to accept the transitional appointment.”

To reinforce this last comment Maureen Jones, from San Jose, California, shared with us the interview that President Bok gave in 2003 which is printed in full below. This exerpt will give the flavor:

Clearly, President Bok is on the horns of a dilemma with the Douglass case. Given his inclinations he probably has a very strong desire to do the right thing. But there are huge political and economic pressures on him not to do so. Where do Harvard’s best interests lie? Is it holding onto the lie that Professor Chester Douglass did nothing improper, thereby keeping their cash flow intact, or admitting the lie and holding on to their 370 year ideal “veritas,” so proudly worn on their shield? (see http://www.FluorideAction.net)

Which way Harvard goes on this will probably be determined by how much noise we, and others, particularly Harvard faculty, grads and current students, can generate. However, we should never underestimate what one ethical person can achieve when they gather the courage to act and do what is right - even when all around him or her are silent (think of Congressman Dan Burton on the mercury issue and Hardy Limeback on the practice of fluoridation).

Thus we need to write more letters to encourage President Bok to follow his own inclinations and do the right thing, but meanwhile we need to develop other ways to generate noise on this. If the press gets interested in this issue - really interested, then a point will be reached when even the most pragmatic Harvard official will recognize that Harvard’s best interests will be served by protecting “veritas”. Ultimately, the cash flows are dependent on donors believing that Harvard actually stands for this ideal. If they don’t believe that this “ideal” works for them why put money into it? How many ads for Coca Cola today feature Michael Jackson?

Why are we at the Fluoride Action Network so interested in “veritas”at Harvard? That is very simple. For over 60 years fluoridation has been pushed by those who have had the power but lacked integrity. This began in 1950 when the US Public Health Service first endorsed this practice without a single trial or health study being completed.

This lack of integrity continues today with the Oral Health division of the CDC charging ahead like a rogue elephant to support mandatory fluoridation everywhere it can, despite the serious health warnings contained in the National Research Council report published in March of this year.  Can we get some members of Congress, who believe in the need for integrity in government, to hold hearings so that CDC personnel may be cross examined under oath to explain and justify their “blind” allegiance to this practice?

Looking to the future, the fate of fluoridation rests on the willingness of the EPA’s water division to exercise integrity when they develop a new drinking water standard for fluoride. If they follow their own procedures honestly the new MCLG will be less than 1 ppm and end fluoridation forthwith. The EPA did not do so in 1985, will they do so in 2006? Can we get some members of Congress, who believe in the need for integrity in government, to make sure that the EPA proceeds with integrity on this issue?

Can we get the EPA to act with integrity and rescind their totally rigged health risk assessment for the fluoride residues left by the use of sulfuryl fluoride as a fumigant on food, in the face of almighty pressure from Dow AgroSciences for them not to do so. Again, can we get some members of Congress, who believe in the need for integrity in government, to make sure that the EPA proceeds with integrity on this issue?

Fortunately for us, we are not alone in Washington. There are some very good people in Congress: again, look at what Dan Burton has done on the mercury issue. We are making strides with others.

There are some very fine national organizations: look at the enormous efforts of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) on both sulfuryl fluoride issue and the Douglass affair. Again, we are making strides with others.

There are also some very good people within the regulatory bodies who are trying to uphold integrity within their agencies. In this respect the rock on which we build in DC is the union that represents the professionals working at the EPA headquarters. Not ony have they done stirling work on the fluoridation issue, but they offer the hope that other unions in other agencies will also secure “integrity clauses” in their employment contracts.

I hope I have said enough to stress that upholding integrity is important everywhere. Upholding it at Harvard is both important at both the practical level, since the issue at stake revolves around the evidence that fluoridation may contribute to childhood cancer, and at the symbolic level. In particular, how are we - especially those of us who are academics - going to interest people in Washington to get our much younger regulatory bodies to live up to this ideal, when administering the laws that protect our health, if we cannot get the oldest university in the country to live up to their 370 year ideal on the same issue?

We are still working on a new online letter to President Bok. This time we will be sending copies to people outside Harvard. Please send us names and email addresses for those who you think should receive copies of the letter. Stay tuned.

Paul Connett

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Robert Weissman

2022 Columbia Rd., NW #506
Washington, DC 20009

rob@essential.org

Dear President Bok,

As you know, the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group (EWG) has raised very disturbing allegations about the conduct of Professor Chester Douglass of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

EWG has presented evidence to suggest that Professor Douglass misrepresented his graduate student’s PhD thesis, which found an association between fluoridated water and an increased risk of osteosarcoma in young boys, a frequently fatal disease.

In response to the EWG allegations, the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) earlier this month issued a short statement exonerating Professor Douglass of all charges of misconduct. The statement was a disappointment. It gave no explanation as to why the evidence presented was dismissed and Professor Douglass’s behavior considered acceptable.

I am writing to urge a further review from your office, and a fuller and more open public accounting. This is not to urge that Professor Douglass’s legitimate privacy interests be overridden, or to contend that any allegation of misconduct requires an expanded response. But EWG has made substantive, well-documented claims relating to matters of public importance and the use of public research funding. In this case, it seems to me that more is plainly required from Harvard than the HMS/HSDM statement.

The Environmental Working Group reported that Professor Douglass, in a written statement to the National Research Council panel investigating the safe drinking water standard for fluoride, cited his student Dr. Elise Bassin’s thesis to support his claim of no significant association between fluoridation and osteosarcoma, when in fact the thesis contradicted this contention.

According to EWG, at the time the NRC panel members did not have ready access to Bassin’s thesis and were obliged to take Douglass’s claims at face value.

There thus seems to be a serious question as to whether this communication delivered at a critical moment in the NRC’s deliberation should be considered “intentional misrepresentation.”

There is nothing in the HMS/HSDM statement that responds to the substance of this concern, and there is no way to know whether, or to what extent, the inquiry panel and standing committee on faculty conduct actually examined this issue.

Moreover, it is disturbing that EWG was never contacted by those reviewing the matter for HMS/HSDM. It is hard to see how a thorough investigation could have been conducted without contacting the organization that uncovered Professor Douglass’s alleged misconduct and first raised the issue with Harvard.

As you have long noted, the intersection of corporations and universities poses grave challenges for the maintenance of universities’ independence and best academic traditions. Professor Douglass is the editor of an oral care journal funded by Colgate-Palmolive, which raises further issues about his conduct in the matter — and makes it all the more important that Harvard conduct a thorough review of this matter, and give a full public accounting.

The HMS/HSDM statement asserts that his editorship of the newsletter does not constitute a conflict of interest under university or federal guidelines. Considered on its own, this is quite likely true. Missing however from the HMS/HSDM statement was any sense of context — that his ties to a major toothpaste company constitute a relationship that might give him incentive to, at least, shade findings related to the potential health risks of fluoride, and possibly to engage in far worse conduct, if the EWG allegations are correct.

The HMS/HSDM statement says that “the [review] committees did not examine and took no position on the question of whether or not there is a correlation between fluoride in drinking water and ostesarcoma.” That seems to be the right posture. But it is precisely because the committees did not need to referee the underlying scientific dispute that they should have been able to issue a fuller and reasoned explanation of the basis for their conclusion, in the face of publicly available evidence to the contrary, that Professor Douglass did not engage in misconduct.

I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Robert Weissman, ‘88-’89, HLS ‘95

P.S. I should add that I was quite pleased that the Corporation decided to call on your steady hand after the recent tumultuous times at the university, and that you saw fit to accept the transitional appointment.

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 http://www.highereducation.org/crosstalk/ct0303/interview0303.shtml

An Interview: Derek Bok

       

Photo By Dana Smith, Black Star Derek Bok served as president of Harvard University from July 1971 through June 1991. His most recent book is The Commercialization of Higher Education, published in 2003 by Princeton University Press. This interview took place in Bok’s office on the Harvard campus, and was conducted by Kathy Witkowsky, a frequent contributor to National CrossTalk.

Kathy Witkowsky: In your book, you argue that increasing commercialization threatens to erode the values that are at the heart of higher education. But you also point out that profit-seeking isn’t anything really new. What’s different about today’s educational landscape that has you so concerned?

Derek Bok: Well, I think two things are different since around 1980. One is that the amount of profit-making activity has increased greatly, in part because there are very pressing needs for funds and greater competition among universities that increase the demand. But the most important reason is that, as the society gets more complex, and there are greater needs for expert knowledge, new scientific discoveries, and mid-career education, which has boomed in the last 25 years, frankly, the opportunities to make money from the things that universities do have increased enormously. That’s one change.

 The other change is that profit-making activity has moved from the periphery of the university, in things like athletics or extension schools or correspondence schools, into the heart of what universities do: into scientific research, and now with the Internet and distance education, which can be established on a profit-making basis, into education as well.

KW: What do you think is at stake here?

DB: First of all, I’d like to make clear that this is not all bad. The opportunity to make money is sometimes a very useful incentive, not just in the private economy, but in higher education as well. The fact that universities since 1980 have been able to get patents on discoveries made with government funds has meant that universities have become far more active in trying to see opportunities, to translate the scientific advances that they make into useful products and processes. And that, after all, is why taxpayers have given us the money, and is certainly, therefore, in the public interest.

Nevertheless, it’s very important how this process of profit-seeking goes on, because it can easily get out of hand and erode essential values of the university. The most vivid illustration, of course, is the form of commercialization that we’ve had the longest: athletics. You can see very clearly how big-time athletics has eroded the integrity of the admissions process, has affected the academic standards in the nature of courses, and sometimes even grading standards applied to athletes. What happens is those risks multiply when profit-making activities are not simply peripheral to the university but lie at the heart of what we do.

KW: Can you give me some examples, beyond athletics, of what turned on the warning lights for you about this commercialization?

DB: To begin with, it was the succession of get-rich schemes that came to me (as president of Harvard), and my recognition of how pervasive this problem was and how seductive a lot of these issues were.

For example, I mention in my book the proposal by a pharmaceutical company to give [Harvard] a million dollars a year, for the medical school to produce a series of programs on cardiology. We would control the content, but there would be commercial advertising. And the question is: Do you want to do that?

Well, it’s very easy to make a case that that’s easy money-take it. I mean, so there’s advertising. There’s advertising everywhere, including in the football programs at your own university. So what’s the problem?

Well, the more you think about it, the more you see that turning education into a commercial product with advertising does have subtle costs connected to it that probably are best avoided. But at least to me, it wasn’t immediately obvious that that was so. So I began to see: Gee, these are really tough problems. It’s easy to make mistakes here.

KW: Do you distinguish between advertising on campus, or perhaps an exclusive contract with a company to sell its product on campus, and advertising or some sort of sponsorship, as you are speaking of, with these medical programs? Is there a difference there?

DB: No, I think they’re all part of the same problem.

Advertising is helpful in many ways to companies, and I’m sure if they could advertise in classrooms and things of that kind we could get money for it. You have only to see what has happened in high schools.

Many people aren’t aware of the degree to which the desire to advertise has gotten into high schools-not only to get exclusive concessions, which of course always have bonuses for increasing the consumption of soft drinks and fast foods, but getting into the curriculum. So that you begin to provide math curriculum based on how many chocolate chips there are in a bag of somebody’s cookies, chemistry experiments on whether one brand of spaghetti sauce is really thicker than another, environmental courses based on the life cycle of a well-known athletic shoe. These are curricula that are actually in use in high schools as we speak. So we should not minimize the threat that this poses or the ingenious guises in which it can come.

 DB: Oh, I fear it could go pretty far. Again, one can look to athletics as an example of the process that has gone on for many decades. And certainly [the fact that] compromises have been made with values that most people would say are very fundamental-your admissions standards; your grading; the nature of your curriculum; and the fact that academic officials have acquiesced with those compromises-makes you believe that there are dangers that we need to look out for, and that it would be rather foolish to assume that somehow because it’s higher education and we have high motives and lofty purposes that we are not going to get into trouble if we don’t watch ourselves.

KW: Is some of that compromising going on now?

DB: Yes, there’s enough so that you can see the problems very easily. There are certainly cases of excessive secrecy. There are cases in which there have been corporate efforts to manipulate published academic research. There have certainly been instances of conflict of interest in which people had financial interest in the outcome of the research that they were carrying out.

We’re at an earlier stage in education-for-profit via the Internet, but as you see universities partnering with venture capitalists who expect to make a large return from the money that they put into distance education via the Internet, one can expect that decisions by some institutions for Internet education will be driven more by their moneymaking potential than by their capacity to enhance the learning of students. And those two are not the same. And profit-making efforts in education may in some circumstances produce high quality education, but there will be other circumstances in which it does not, and students will suffer as a result.

KW: How can you distinguish between the profit motive that is beneficial to education and the profit motive that is detrimental to education?

DB: That, of course, is the trick. And I don’t think I can give you a single formula. I think there are a series of categories of behavior. You have to look at each one and try to draw some guidelines.

I do point out in the book that simply looking at each situation as it arises on an ad hoc basis is almost certain to get us into trouble, because the benefits are real and immediate, and the costs are much more intangible, long-run, not easily attributable to any single decision. And so you’re bound, bit by bit, to slip into the same sorts of problems that you have in athletics.

So you do need guidelines. But there isn’t a single guideline that can be applied to all situations.

I think you have to be very careful about what your values are and then apply them to each category, such as secrecy, or conflict of interest in scientific research or profit-making ventures in education, and then you try to draw some lines.

KW: Who should be ultimately responsible for ensuring the academic integrity of each educational institution?

DB: At present, the responsibility lies very heavily in the hands of the president or the top very few officials at the university. And I believe that that is unwise, because the president is under enormous pressure to raise money. He or she is often judged on how much money they raise. And as a result, without some greater support from other constituencies in upholding the essential values of the institution, I fear that this process of erosion is bound to take place-just as it has in athletics.

So I believe there is a role for the trustees to play, not just in paying attention to how much money we’re raising, but by paying a lot of attention to how we’re doing it: not [by] getting into the micromanaging details of each research contract, but by making sure that there’s a careful review of corporate research to make sure that there are appropriate guidelines for secrecy and conflict of interest, and by doing their best to make sure that key officials, like the technology transfer officers, know that they will be rewarded as much for retaining values as they will for earning money.

I think, if anything, even more important is the engagement of the faculty. There’s a very dangerous tendency at work now to say that the faculty is sort of an obstruction-that in today’s fast-moving economy, universities cannot tolerate the delays and obfuscations of faculty, and that the creative administration has to be agile and move quickly and therefore needs more authority, and the faculty should be kept out of these things. I think that’s fatal.

KW: As you point out, the president has a very important role here. As these financial pressures come to bear on universities, do you think that we are now entering an era in which we’re hiring presidents more for their business savvy than for their understanding of academics?

DB: Absolutely. And I think to some extent it’s inevitable: Universities are much bigger and more complicated institutions than they were, and therefore administrative skill is more important than it was.

Presidents are being hired for their fundraising abilities. And I understand why: The need to raise funds is very great. But I do think it represents a real danger, because presidents are able to spend less and less time on the internal academic side of the institution. And in the end, they remain academic leaders. And I don’t think we will have distinguished leadership by people who are disengaged from the process of teaching and learning and discovery and scholarship that is the heart of what we do.

KW: How big a role do you think government should and will play in the future of higher education’s relationship with the marketplace?

DB: I very much hope that we can do a good enough job of policing ourselves so that the government doesn’t have to come in and do it. And I don’t say that as a sort of knee-jerk conservative reaction to government. I think that government is essential in many spheres of life.

But I don’t think that [legislators] do as good a job as really careful universities could do in drawing lines-in part because they don’t know so much about education, in part because institutions are so different that trying to make uniform lines from Washington is almost bound to create really awkward and unworkable situations on some campuses. And of course, because the administration of government rules is very time-consuming with lots of paperwork that inevitably results in mistakes that sometimes can be quite harmful.

KW: It seems like one thing government can do, as you suggest in your book, is provide stable financial support. How important is that?

DB: Stable institutional support is important because if there are sudden drastic declines in support, a campus will grow desperate. The cries of pain from students with lower scholarships and professors whose programs are yanked out from under them are sufficiently intense that people are simply not going to pass up any opportunity they can find to exploit new sources of funding. And it’s when you act in that way, out of a sense that, “I’m doing this for survival,” that talk of preserving essential values and so forth is going to go down the drain, because those values are intangible, they’re long-term, they simply can’t stand up against an acute need for funding now in order to avoid inflicting real pain and damage to the institution.

KW: So what is the solution to this slide into commercialization?

DB: Like most things in life that matter, eternal vigilance. You have to be aware of the problem; you have to try to establish safeguards in the form of guidelines; you’ve got to try to create incentives and job descriptions that make it in people’s interests to adhere to those guidelines and to respect those academic values. And you need to engage the different constituencies of the university in some appropriate way, so that you don’t simply look to one or two individuals who have extreme pressures on them to do the whole job.

And if you do that, you could probably do a pretty good job of resisting these problems. If you don’t, I think it’s pretty likely we’re simply going to go the road we have in athletics.

 DB: I think we’re in an early enough stage that nothing is irreversible in the areas of education and research, which are the areas that really matter. I think the problem with athletics is largely irreversible. I think we can make some improvements, but I don’t think we can ever overcome our problems completely. So that’s a kind of warning lesson: Don’t let it go on too long.

Fortunately, in education and research, the process is much younger, and I don’t see anything being irreversible. So if we are aware of the dangers and begin to pay more attention to resisting them, although we can never achieve perfection, I think we can do a pretty tolerable job of keeping our difficulties within bounds.

© 2003 The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education