The Ethics of Private Funding for Graduate Students in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities

Abstract

This article offers a review of the strategic opportunities and ethical risks involved in the institutional pursuit of private funding for graduate students in the social sciences, arts, and humanities (SSAH) fields. There is little existing research about private funding for SSAH research, and this article seeks to address this gap. In addition to reviewing relevant literature about trends in the privatization of higher education, shifting funding priorities, and the ethics of private funding, we offer a set of guiding principles for developing a private funding policy in SSAH fields. We also illustrate relevant considerations and concerns using the example of a private funding policy for graduate student within a faculty of education in a public university in Canada. The discussions in this paper are relevant to public higher education institutions questioning how they can ensure the integrity and sustainability of their research activities in a changing funding environment. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Critical Education, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Critical Education. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Educational Studies and housed at the University of British Columbia. Articles are indexed by EBSCO Education Research Complete and Directory of Open Access Journal. C r i t i c a l E d u c a t i o n 2 Compared to students and scholars working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, researchers in social science, arts, and humanities (SSAH) disciplines tend to have fewer and shallower sources of both internal and external funding. In particular, the contemporary context of global trends toward the increased privatization and marketization of higher education puts SSAH research at a considerable competitive disadvantage for funding, which affects not only faculty but also graduate students. In this context, public institutions are increasingly seeking private sources of funding for students. Yet there is a notable lack of literature about non-public sector funding for graduate studies in SSAH. Further, although concerns about private funding are increasingly widespread, many people lack a sense of how to actually address these concerns in their own contexts. Rather than argue “for or against” private funding, this article discusses both the opportunities and risks involved in the pursuit of private funding for SSAH fields in public universities, both in general and specifically as it relates to graduate student funding. In doing so, it offers scaffolding for further, contextspecific conversations about private funding for those working in higher education. In an effort to consider the ethical and practical dimensions of any decision to seek private funding for graduate students, this article addresses how these issues were presented in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada and their decision to pursue private external funding for graduate students. Although education is an interdisciplinary field, education scholars tend to work within SSAH traditions. As such, although this article emerged out of the particular context of a public university in western Canada, it is situated within broader discussions about the ethics and impacts of private research funding and accountability on higher education. In this article we explore the complexities and shades of grey that shape the landscape of institutional and faculty decisions about higher education research funding, foregrounding the ethical questions that arise. These discussions are relevant to public higher education institutions questioning how they can ensure the integrity and sustainability of SSAH research activities in a changing funding environment. We begin by discussing the wider landscape of privatization in higher education over the past several decades, and then consider how this landscape affects SSAH research funding in particular. We then address how ethical concerns around private funding have been addressed in other contexts, before turning to the example of the UBC Faculty of Education. Beyond the general need to ensure the ethical integrity of research, and to protect both critical research and research that is generally considered less “fundable”, we suggest that rather than a universal set of best practices, of primary importance when addressing the ethics of private funding is the local context, including institutional needs and faculty concerns. Thus, we offer a series of guiding considerations and accompanying discussion questions for faculty and administrators who are engaged in developing policies and procedures around private funding. Finally, we conclude the article by proposing a summary of possible frameworks that could be used to develop a policy and practice for private funding and donations for graduate students. Trends Toward Privatization Over the past thirty years, funding from non-governmental/private organizations for higher education (e.g. sponsored research, building projects, endowed chairs) has significantly increased. This has been framed as part of a larger global shift toward the privatization of higher education and declining public funding (Ball, 2010, 2012; Bok, 2003), and movement toward a more entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz & Zhou, 2008). This, in turn, has been described as a E t h i c s o f P r i v a t e F u n d i n g f o r G r a d u a t e S t u d e n t s 3 significant shift away from the public good orientation of higher education in the post-World War II era (Marginson, 2018; Newfield, 2016; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Indeed, according to Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), there has been a shift from a “public good knowledge/learning regime” toward an “academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime,” although they argue that the two regimes continue to coexist (p. 28). In the public good knowledge/learning regime, emphasis is on universities’ indirect contributions to capital accumulation, as well as the generation of knowledge with use-values that are not even indirectly commodifiable. Within the currently dominant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime, there is instead an emphasis on producing knowledge with immediate exchange-value. Although this paper does not examine or unpack in depth the underlying social, political, and economic reasons behind this shift, such an analysis should be part of any larger conversation about trends in higher education funding. As Marginson (2018) notes, within Anglo-American contexts, “The public dimension [of higher education] is defined narrowly in terms of a market economy in which individual benefits are paramount. Thus the master public role of HEIs is seen as their contribution to profitability, industry innovation, and economic growth” (p. 324). In other words, not only have we seen a shift in emphasis toward private as opposed to public benefits of higher education, but even public benefits are increasingly redefined as those that contribute to economic growth, with the dubious assumption that this will be a shared benefit. This means that the benefits of research and fields of study that are deemed to have no direct exchange-value on the market are devalued, such as those that are oriented to “create and distribute knowledge and ideas, and advance free expression; foster scientific literacy, and sustain intellectual conversations and artistic work; contribute to policy and government, and prepare citizens for democratic decision-making” (Marginson, 2018, p. 322). Within contemporary funding regimes wherein academics are increasingly encouraged to pursue private funding, fields considered to be “distant from the ‘market’” (Rhoades & Slaughter, 1997, p. 11) are at a serious disadvantage, not only because they are ideologically devalued but also because they tend to have fewer and shallower funding sources than more ‘market-adjacent’ fields. In particular, private research funding has primarily been oriented toward STEM fields, thereby disadvantaging SSAH fields in the new landscape of resource competition. This both reflects and deepens existing inequalities in public funding for different fields. For instance, in Canada in 2017-2018, the federal budget for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) was $547 million CAD, compared to $848 million CAD for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and $773 million CAD for the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) (Kondro, 2017). University collaboration and resource seeking from private sources, including industry, non-profit organizations, and philanthropic foundations, is hardly a new phenomenon (Lowen, 1997). However, recent growth has been driven by intensified government pressure for universities to contribute more directly to local and national economic growth, and institutional pressure for individual academics and departments to diversify their funding sources, particularly through the pursuit of external research funding (Ankrah & Al-Tabbaa, 2015; Metcalfe, 2010; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Wichmann-Hansen & Herrman, 2017). The policy priorities and research strategy of universities and faculties, therefore, involve balancing academic autonomy and integrity with societal relevance, while maintaining access to different sources of funding. It has been noted that private funders are going far beyond providing one-off grants or donations to institutions, being also increasingly involved in advocacy, policy-making, reform efforts and having influence over how the mission of higher education is perceived (Baker, 2017; Hall & Thomas