The Des Moines Register reports a bit of a to-do at the University of Iowa about whether the College of Public Health will be accepting a “naming gift” from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Some objections have been raised on the basis that a giant of the health insurance industry might have (or be seen to have) significantly different values and goals than a college of public health:
Several faculty members whose e-mails became public Monday opposed linking the college’s name with Wellmark.
“While it’s good to get support, selling the name of the cph to a commercial interest and all that might imply (and be inferred) just seems like a horrible idea to me,” Jeff Murray, a well-known cleft lip and palate physician and professor in the U of I’s Carver College of Medicine, wrote [to College of Public Health Dean Jim] Merchant on July 1.
Also:
[I]n a June 27 e-mail, Merchant had told U of I Interim President Gary Fethke that naming the college after the insurance giant was not acceptable because it would hurt the college’s research funding and academic freedom.
You might think, from this, that the main consideration driving the decision about whether to accept a chunk of money to slap the Wellmark name on the U of I College of Public Health is what “strings” that money brings with it and what effect the Wellmark name will have on the credibility of the College of Public Health as its faculty teach and conduct research (not to mention seeking funding for that research and trying to get their results published in peer reviewed journals). Will the Wellmark name interfere with the ability of faculty to secure federal grant money? Will it scare away the best students and faculty members? Will it introduce a suspicion that papers written by CPH researchers have a pro-insurance-industry bias?
It turns out, though, that there may be more to the to-do than a worry about preserving the appearance of independence from industry interests:
Merchant said he talked to deans of other American public health colleges who agreed the $15 million was paltry in comparison with similar gifts at other schools.
“The deans I consulted all indicated that an offer of $15 million would be embarrassingly small and significantly undervalue our college which ranks in the top five or six nationally among public schools of public health in NIH funding,” Merchant said, referring to the National Institutes of Health.
The Wellmark offer was also less than the $20 million Merchant and fundraisers previously agreed would be an appropriate naming gift for the college, Merchant said.
This kind of makes it sound like the appearance of independence would be less important to the U of I CPH if Wellmark was prepared to pony up more money.
I’m not really sure how much effect the name of a school has to the day-to-day activities of the faculty and students working within the school. It’s not like Wellmark would have listening devices in all the lecture halls to make sure professors are only saying nice things about the insurance industry.
Heck, one of the rooms regularly used for the teaching of “Business and Professional Ethics” at my university is the Arthur Andersen Lecture Hall. Even before Arthur Andersen flamed out, the firm came up in class discussions of ethical business practices — not usually favorably.
What’s in a name here? How much would the Wellmark name influence your perceptions of a college of public health?
(Via Inside Higher Ed.)
Naming your school “(Insurance Company) School of Public Health” would serve as a sign to me that the college’s administrators are all completely brain dead. So, I think that they’re probably right to worry about the appearances on this one.
As a public health person I would have significant problems taking them seriously. It has to make you question their independence from commercial interests if they are actually willing to sell their good name to a corporate interest? How about Phillip Morris buys themselves a department of public health somewhere?
Naming a lecture hall is one thing but renaming the entire department? How much would it cost to rename the entire university? Hamburger University anybody?
The entire point of university style knowledge production is to get rigourous and independent information that is as free from bias as we can manage.
Although Sean has set up an easy shot with respect to what one can typically assume about university administrators, I am passing that one by …
So, is the feeling that the (industry-flavored) name of the college of public health is enough on its own to taint anything that comes out of that college of public health, even if nothing else changed?
(And, if that’s the case, why would it be OK to make this compromise for $30 million but not for $15 million?)
You can buy the naming rights to a University:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_University
And I’ve never left an A’s game thinking that I should buy anything from McAfee.
With the current (and continuously escalating) costs of health care, I’d be wondering why Wellmark isn’t using all that money to reduce the cost of insurance, especially if I was insured by them.
Sorry Janet
Should have answered the question.
Look at it from the point of the commercial organisation. They are expecting something to change given their investment. Commercial entities don’t spend that kind of money without some sort of reward or payback expected.
The output of the college will then come to be tainted by association. Not necesarily fatally tainted, but one might take their findings with a grain of salt in the same manner that one reads a manufacturer’s sponsored/run pharmaceutical trial. They can no longer be seen as undertaking truly independent research.
And to answer your follow-up question I don’t think that the sum of money that is exchanged makes any difference. It’s still a highly questionable move.
Uncle Fishy- the university in question is named after a person not a commercial organisation. It’s probably not offering public health advice and it doesn’t seem to have a medical school. Plus there’s a long history of philathropism in the US, as you know, which has resulted in many of the universities being named after individuals. The problem is that a commercial organisation doesn’t die of old age or leave bequests in it’s will. It can exist in perpetuity with the special access and influence that naming rights will probably incur.