Tobacco money debate continues in VCU community

Like most people, Grace Howard learned about the VCU-Philip Morris research contract when elements of the deal were made public by The New York Times on May 22.

“I heard about the issue and I thought it was kind of outrageous,” said Howard, a double major in political science and international studies.

The issue that continues to generate national media attention and fuel campus conversations across the nation is the 2006 research-services agreement held between VCU and tobacco-industry giant Philip Morris USA.

Howard said, while she doesn’t criticize VCU for dealing with corporate sponsors, she thinks it unethical for universities to deal with tobacco companies at all, especially a university known for its medical campus.

“The fact that VCU is a huge medical industry and the fact that the corporate sponsor is coming from a tobacco company is totally relevant and totally wrong for this reason,” Howard said. “Why should a product that kills you sponsor health?”

Howard was one of more than 100 interested members of the VCU community to attend the latest town-hall meeting in the University Student Commons this past Wednesday.

The meeting was the second and final of its kind, a forum where interested students and staff could offer feedback to VCU President Eugene P. Trani’s designated task force. The task force is charged with making recommendations to improve dealing with future corporate sponsors and was created after the deal sparked negative media attention.

Howard’s stance strongly resembled that of religious-studies professors David Bromley and Mark Wood, who together authored a statement and presented some disquieting facts to the task force.

The statement cites the number of American deaths per year caused by tobacco use, the “economic toll from smoking-related illnesses,” and the effect on the environment caused by the release of cigarette chemicals.

Bromley and Wood took turns reading aloud excerpts of their joint statement, which challenged the declared mission of the task force to include the consideration of ethical implications when dealing with specific corporate sponsors.

“The way the task-force mission was drawn up, it was a narrowly defined mission,” Bromley later said in an interview. “We felt that broader ethical issues ought to be raised in this context.”

Dr. Francis Macrina, VP for research, said the task force is not ignoring concerns of VCU’s affiliation with a tobacco company.

Howard disagrees.

“(The task force is) clearly not interested in the policies of the individual sponsors, but more interested in finding a protocol for the agreements,” she said.

Macrina said VCU has a climate where faculty has the academic freedom to pick the sponsors with whom they want to associate.

“I think it’s an individual decision and that if there were a department or a person who said ‘we shouldn’t be accepting it,’ then the department chair should legitimately go to the dean and say ‘I don’t think we should accept tobacco money,’ ” Macrina said. “There’s no reason why that can’t happen now.”

Macrina said no American universities ban tobacco money entirely.

While Macrina’s statement is correct, some individual schools or departments in the country have banned tobacco money.

According to the University of California, San Francisco Academic Senate Web site, the schools of public health at John Hopkins, Ohio State and Harvard Universities banned the acceptance of tobacco money.

Howard said she worries about the negative attention this deal has generated for VCU faculty and students.

“It’s disgusting that as a place of learning – an academic institution – it has to be run as this evil corporate business,” Howard said. “I don’t know if business and true academic freedom can reside together.”