A Reform Agenda for the Campus

A major new report - AAUP Principles & Practices to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships is available at this link: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/industry).

This book-length report offers faculty senates all the background history, rationales, and supporting scholarly documentation they will need to review and consider adopting these recommended Principles in handbooks and other guiding documents. But it begins with a concise action agenda: a summary of the Principles themselves in clear language that can be included in both handbooks and collective bargaining contracts.

The report is focused on the increasingly complex relationships between universities and commercial interests, relationships that now affect every category of institution and faculty members in a significant number of science, social science, and humanities disciplines. Yet the Principles we put forward for your consideration reach well beyond contracts for industry funded research. They represent a reform agenda for the campus as a whole.

Central to our Principles is a recommendation to win back faculty authority over the intellectual property that is a product of faculty research and scholarship, authority widely eroded over the last thirty years. Yet we also present a strong case for increased faculty accountability‹most notably by taking greater public responsibility for both individual and institutional financial conflicts of interest.

Although this report is the product of eighteen months of work by three permanent AAUP committees, and although it has been revised after review by a national panel of specialists in a variety of disciplines, we still present it to you as a draft. As the preface explains, we welcome your comments and suggestions about how it may be further refined.

Cary Nelson
AAUP President 2006-2012