COVER STORY :: OCTOBER 06, 2004



Dow’s knowledge factories: The MSU connection
By BRIAN MCKENNA

Dow and MSU
This is a condensation of an article that first appeared in From the Ground Up, a publication of the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental organization in Ann Arbor.
The full version can be read on the Web site
www.ecocenter.org/
200401/dowuniversity200401.shtmlIn May 1999, the British publication Lancet — perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the world — ran a news story reporting the latest dioxin findings from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It reported on Dr. Robert N. Hoover’s belief that “based on the current weight of the evidence ... TCDD [the most potent dioxin] should be considered a human carcinogen.”

But they found a skeptic in Michigan. Dr. Michael Kamrin, a toxicologist from Michigan State University, was quoted as saying that the dioxin data is “unconvincing and epidemiologically weak. These data don’t suggest to me that there’s any health risk from dioxin [TCDD]. I didn’t think so before, and I don’t think so now.”

Dow Chemical’s generosity to MSU includes a $5 million gift in 1996 to build the Dow Institute for Materials Research, a 46,000-square-foot addition to the east wing of MSU’s Engineering Building.

As people, fish and wildlife continue to cope with dioxin contamination downwind and downriver from Dow Chemical’s Midland plant, Kamrin’s affiliations throw off an ominous glow. He is on the Board of Scientific and Policy Advisors for the American Council on Science and Health, of which Dow Chemical has been a funding source, though their current list of supporters is secret.

Kamrin is also an emeritus professor at MSU’s Institute of Environmental Toxicology. According to a Spring 2002 IET newsletter, “IET-affiliated faculty will provide scientific expertise to Dow on advisory committees as additional study projects are proposed.”

In November 2003, journalist Steve Meador completed a 90-minute documentary titled “The Long Shadow,” a critical investigation of Dow’s dioxin dealings with Michigan’s state government. The film accuses Dow and state agencies of collaborating to weaken regulatory enforcement, delaying public notification of possible health hazards associated with dioxin, and investigatory foot-dragging. Meador produced the film alone and on a shoestring budget, as a master’s project for his environmental journalism degree at Michigan State.

Meanwhile, just down the hall from the environmental journalism offices at MSU’s Communication Arts Building, a fledgling undergraduate public relations specialization took wing under a $1.3 million gift to MSU from the Carl Gerstacker Foundation.

And who is Carl Gerstacker? The former CEO of Dow Chemical.

What is more, MSU’s endowed chair in public relations was named in honor of E.N. Brandt, whose 1997 book, “Growth Company: Dow Chemical’s First Century,” largely sings the praises of “one of the wonders of the modern business world.”

In short, Dow endowed the $1.3 million chair in the MSU public relations department.

Doubly troubling is the fact that Brandt’s Dow book was published by Michigan State University Press. This means that a book written by a PR professional working for Dow Chemical has the appearance of academic integrity, the assumption of independent scholarship and the legitimacy of a Big Ten university.

It turns out that Brandt had worked for Dow for 40 years, beginning his career in the public relations department in 1953 and rising to become Dow’s company historian. The Dow book — the research for which was largely financed by Dow — along with the Dow-endowed P.R. chair, will leave a lasting legacy at MSU.

Meanwhile, Meador’s documentary is still trying to find a distribution market. “Unfortunately, “The Long Shadow” was never shown on Michigan PBS,” wrote Meador in an email response to City Pulse Tuesday. Meador sent a rough cut to four stations — WCMU (Mt. Pleasant), WFUM U of M (Flint), WTVS (Detroit), and WKAR (East Lansing) in December 2003. “All of these stations had broadcast a previous documentary of mine entitled ‘A May to Remember’ about the Bath School bombing of 1927,” wrote Meador in an e-mail this week. “Strangely, all of the stations were completely unresponsive to ‘The Long Shadow’ (i.e., phone calls and e-mails not returned).”

“Granted, at 90 minutes, it was probably too long for broadcast,” Meador allowed. “However, there were no suggestions from anyone that it be edited, only silence.”

Meador says the film’s merits have been recognized by environmental reporters from the Bay City Times (Jeff Kart) and Detroit Free Press (Hugh McDiarmid). “The affected residents in the floodplain also had very nice things to say about it,” he added. “I’m not sure why the PBS stations didn’t bite. A number of people have suggested that the stations shied away because they are underwritten by Dow, and I think that is a possibility.”

Dow has been very generous to Michigan State University. In March 2000, to cite one example, the company made a biotech deal with Michigan State University in which it will pay MSU about $4 million over several years. The project focuses on plant oils that might be used in areas like low-cholesterol cooking oil and plastics.

In 1996, Dow gave $5 million to build the Dow Institute for Materials Research, a 46,000-square-foot addition to the east wing of MSU’s Engineering Building. In early 2002, Dow co-sponsored a seminar series at MSU’s Detroit College of Law called, “Creating Sustainable Cities in the 21st Century.” A March 19 talk was titled “Abandonment of the Cities.” The irony of the title was largely lost on the MSU audience. University of Michigan has an active Justice for Bhopal student group, determined to achieve an “adequate and just resolution” for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial chemical accident in history. But at MSU there was no such chapter, and so no one was on hand to ask whether Dow had “abandoned” the city of Bhopal.

In 2002, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality announced that it would conduct an aquatic risk assessment on the threats to wildlife in the dioxin-contaminated ecosystem of the Tittabawassee River flood plain. Dow responded by providing a grant to MSU to conduct a study of the threats to wildlife as well. It is unclear whether Dow will attempt to use the MSU findings to challenge the state’s conclusions.

It’s a good bet that only a handful of MSU faculty and students are aware of these Dow/MSU connections. MSU is not the only university to accept money and endow chairs in Dow’s name. Dow Chemical has spread its money widely, and it would seem, with some hope of a return on investment.

The most dramatic sample of Dow’s deep footprints on Michigan’s academic landscape can be found in Midland, where the company is headquartered. Midland “has more Ph.D.s per acre than you’ll find most anywhere else,” Don Whitehead reported in “The Dow Story” (1968). That’s just as true today. But all that brainpower has not translated into much critical intervention against Dow’s practices and policies in Midland, where citizens live under the conditions of a company town. Many are beholden to Dow for their livelihoods, and everyone’s property values are held hostage to the idea that dioxin is not really harmful and the contamination of yards, parks, playgrounds and water is not very significant.

One might expect Michigan universities located safely outside Midland’s geographical sphere of influence to be more independent and critical of Dow. But as Stanley Aronowitz makes clear in “The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning” (2000), the current craze for business in academia “has fudged the distinctions between training, education and learning.” Markets are what Dow is all about, and “markets don’t reward moral behavior,” as educational theorist Henry Giroux points out. “Educators need to take seriously the importance of defending higher education as an institution of civic culture whose purpose is to educate students for active and critical citizenship.”

Tim Martin, a journalist with the Lansing State Journal, spoke with Bob Huggett, MSU’s vice president of research and graduate studies about the 2000 biotech arrangement, in his April 17, 2000 article, “MSU weighs rewards, risks of research.” Martin pointed out that “critics worry that universities can get too cozy with corporations that sponsor their research, fearing that competition for money could lead schools like MSU to do research that does not help the public, or worse, skew research test results in favor of those paying the bills.” Martin reported that MSU officials said the source of money doesn’t influence their quest for truth.

Dow Chemical is the 51st richest company in the world. With revenues of $27.6 billion in 2002, it is worth more than 68% of the world’s countries (124 nations), according to World Bank statistics. That’s more revenue than Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, El Salvador, Uruguay, Panama, Bolivia and Jamaica, among others.

It’s like having a foreign country in your own backyard!

The political economy and culture of foreign countries is dispassionately and critically studied in many universities, and it’s very common for these programs to voice perspectives that are critical of capitalism.

But foreign countries seldom sponsor research at U.S. universities, and if they do it’s usually not advertised. Dow, on the other hand, is a big presence at most Michigan universities. Its name is plastered on buildings and endowed chairs, and its officials are well known to university administrators. As a result, criticism of Dow Chemical by professional academics at Dow-endowed institutions is a very different matter than dissecting the injustices or human costs exacted under foreign economic systems.

As early as 1918, educational critic Thorstein Veblen grew concerned about corporate influence on college life. In his classic, “The Higher Learning in America,” Veblen identified college as “a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output.” Historian Louis Hacker warned in Veblen’s 1918 preface that “universities had become... needlessly competitive in [their] hunt for endowments... their purpose was entirely vocational... [they’ve become institutions where] scholarship and teaching, as austere disciplines, necessarily went by the board.”

A century later, Dow’s influence on Michigan colleges and universities would surely have caught Veblen’s eye. Several schools tout their Dow connections and use their Dow colleges of engineering, applied science, and chemistry to attract students and faculty. Dow has spread its name by funding other university programs in journalism, public relations, and public health as well.

Veblen might note that the state’s universities are generally quiet when it comes to producing knowledge and scholarship that is critical of Dow. There has been little published research on recent Dow controversies in areas such as asbestos, vinyl chloride contamination in Louisiana, the purchase of Union Carbide in 2001 – the company responsible for the Bhopal disaster – labor decertification campaigns in Texas, union fights in Midland, and dioxin pollution in mid-Michigan.

He might also have noted that it was college students – not the faculty – who were at the forefront of speaking out publicly about Dow’s social and environmental record.

The timidity and silence of academics is analyzed by Jeff Schmidt in his book “Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives” (2000). Schmidt describes the socialization process in universities as a process of fostering political and intellectual subordination. The process “ultimately produces obedient thinkers — highly educated employees who do their assigned work without questioning its goals.”

Schmidt notes that there is an enormous gap between the opinions of professionals and their professional opinions. Salaried professionals, he argues, tend to be “liberal on distant social issues over which they have no authority at work and no influence outside of work.” For many professors at Michigan universities, however, Dow Chemical is not a distant social issue, but a big benefactor with a highly visible name. During these difficult times in higher education funding, university administrators actively court Dow, and this dependence brings abstract issues uncomfortably close to the workplace. To cross Dow under these circumstances is to risk cultivating the animosity of one’s superiors.

In 1967, the year of a Dow recruiting sit-in at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, historian Howard Zinn wrote a critique that holds true in the present day. “The University’s acceptance of Dow Chemical recruiting as just another business transaction is especially disheartening,” wrote Zinn, “because it is the University which tells students repeatedly on ceremonial occasions that it hopes students will be more than fact-absorbing automatons, that they will choose humane values, and stand up for them courageously.”

A new generation has rediscovered this fundamental truth, and again a focus of dissent is Dow Chemical. On Dec. 3, 2003 Dow faced its first nationwide student protests since the Vietnam War. Students from 25 colleges, universities and high schools organized protests around the country against Dow Chemical as a part of the first annual Global Day of Action Against Corporate Crime. Organizers included Students for Bhopal, Association for India’s Development chapters, and the Environmental Justice Program of the Sierra Student Coalition.

Students delivered contaminated water samples from Bhopal to the homes of 11 of Dow’s 14 board members, including the CEO, William Stavropoulos, and former U-M and Princeton President Harold Shapiro. They asked Dow to accept its moral and legal responsibility for the world’s worst industrial disaster. According to Justice for Bhopal, “actions took place in 16 cities across India, including Bhopal, as well as in the Netherlands, UK, Lebanon, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Philippines, China, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain, Bangladesh, Canada, and Italy.”

It’s time for faculty and salaried professionals at Michigan universities to respond to the lead of these students – and of those citizens struggling in the Tittabawassee River flood plain – and get involved in studying Dow Chemical’s dioxin scandal, as professionals and as citizens. The process will help awaken a broader social awareness of the corporatization of the university and the crisis of democracy.