Jennifer Washburn

Academia and the Company Coin | Nature Biotechnology

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:35:00 -0400

In some cases, the problem may be that industry is taking over more study designs and doing so with marketing in mind. “It’s about ‘How can we broaden out the uses of this drug, how can we promote it among more populations’… studies are marketing designs rather than public health designs. It doesn’t advance the body of evidence-based medicine in this country,” says Jennifer Washburn, author of University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education and a fellow at the New

Jennifer Washburn in The New York Times | 'When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder'

Communications — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:06:00 -0400

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 started out with the best of intentions. By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery...

...“Bayh-Dole tore down the taboos that existed against universities engaging in overtly commercial activity. Universities really thought that they were going to make it rich,” said Jennifer Washburn, author of “University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education” (Basic Books, 2005). “Each school was convinced that if they came up with that one blockbuster invention, they could solve all their financial problems.”

Ms. Washburn says that was “extremely wrong-headed.” Initially reacting to the law by slapping patents on every possible innovation, universities quickly discovered that patents were an expensive proposition. The fees and legal costs involved in obtaining a single patent can run upward of $15,000, and that doesn’t count the salaries of administrative staff members. Instead of bringing home the bacon, university tech transfer offices were throwing money into the void with little hope of returns. LINK

Jennifer Washburn in Journal of Life Sciences on Academia & Industry

Communications — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:35:00 -0500

Merck and Harvard enter a collaboration that reflects the closer ties being forged between industry and academia, but it's a trend that is alarming to some. ...

At a time when federal research dollars have grown scarcer, universities are embracing industry partners interested in getting a first crack at their cutting-edge technologies.

The latest evidence of this comes from a recently announced agreement between Harvard Medical School and the pharmaceutical giant Merck. Merck and Harvard Medical School will collaborate to advance research programs in oncology and central nervous system disorders. Merck's decision to open a research facility just down the road from Harvard in 2004 put researchers at both institutions in walking distance of each other.

For Merck, the deal gives the company an early look at new discoveries and the right to negotiate licensing deals for technology that emerges from the collaboration before anyone else. For Harvard, the agreement provides not only funding, but a chance for researchers concerned about seeing their work commercialized an opportunity to interact with a major drug company. It also provides an avenue to advance their projects at a time when capital for early-stage development to carry potential products to a point they can… more

Science's Worst Enemy: Corporate Funding

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:14:00 -0400

In recent years there have been a number of highly visible attacks on American science, everything from the fundamentalist assault on evolution to the Bush administration’s strong-arming of government scientists. But for many people who pay close attention to research and development (R&D), the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money -- specifically, the decline of government support for science and the growing dominance of private spending over American research.

The trend is undeniable. In 1965, the federal government financed more than 60 percent of all R&D in the United States. By 2006, the balance had flipped, with 65 percent of R&D in this country being funded by private interests. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, several of the nation’s science-driven agencies -- the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and NASA -- have been losing funding, leading to more "outsourcing" of what were once governmental science functions. The EPA, for example, recently began conducting the first nationwide study on the air quality effects of large-scale animal production. Livestock producers, not taxpayers, are slated to pay for the study. "The government is clearly increasing its reliance on industry and forming ‘joint ventures’ to accomplish research that it is unable to afford on its own anymore," says Merrill Goozner, a program director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.

The full text of this article can be found at: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/sciences-worst-enemy-private-funding

An Unholy Alliance

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:20:00 -0400

Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money -- especially for a public university. When the giant oil company BP announced Feb. 1 that it had chosen the University of California, Berkeley, to lead the largest academic-industry research consortium in U.S. history, University of California officials appeared giddy.

If the deal is approved, BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, will give $500 million over 10 years to create a multidisciplinary Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. Berkeley would partner with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to establish the institute devoted to researching biofuels -- fuels derived from plants and other organisms.

Many university and state officials pronounced the BP alliance a victory for the environment. "A tremendous day for Mother Earth," UC President Robert Dynes declared when the partnership was announced. From a public relations standpoint, BP’s willingness to invest in alternative energy research vastly improved the company’s image, which had been sullied by a refinery explosion in Texas and a 267,000-gallon oil spill from corroding pipelines in Alaska.

But the terms of the research alliance -- and the implications for the UC system -- haven’t received sufficient scrutiny. Shortly after the BP deal was announced, Dynes said, "We are reinventing the research university in this public-private partnership."

He’s right. And that is what’s so troubling.

The BP alliance is not simply an environmental initiative; it is a plan to substantially reinvent -- and privatize -- America’s research universities. Such a radical proposal warrants careful public scrutiny, given that these same universities have given birth to many of America’s most remarkable scientific and technological achievements.

Unfortunately, UC officials haven’t encouraged public debate. After the deal was announced, UC withheld the agreement containing specific terms of the plan for a month. In late March, administrators agreed to let faculty participate in the final contract talks with BP, but only after more than 130 faculty members signed a protest petition calling for the chancellor to investigate whether there was adequate faculty senate review and consultation.

Traditionally, universities have strived to maintain a clear, arms-length relationship with their corporate benefactors over academic research. The BP alliance would break this relationship, effectively turning the university into a contract research organization for industry. As such, the alliance would undermine the university’s academic freedom, its ability to perform independent research and broadly disseminate results. And, possibly, it might undermine the public’s trust.

The plan’s fine print suggests Berkeley’s administrators might have been more concerned with beating out four competing universities to win the BP deal than they were in protecting UC’s public research mission.

The plan would allow BP to station 50 of its employees on the Berkeley and the University of Illinois campuses, where they would "be embedded within the campus research environment" and work with professors and students on research. It would further allow BP to operate its own private, commercial labs on the campuses, where research would be confidential and proprietary.

The plan also dispenses with numerous traditional safeguards designed to protect the university’s independence. It grants BP unusual control over the institute’s research agenda, makes no mention of peer review, downplays commercial conflicts of interest and contains provisions on publication that would violate UC’s written policies, which state: "There can be no fundamental limitation on the freedom to publish as the result of accepting extramural research support." Finally, the plan gives BP exceptionally broad commercial rights to co-own and license the institute’s academic inventions.

In short, for $500 million, the plan would allow BP, a company valued at $250 billion, to turn an academic research institute into its own profit-making subsidiary.

The proponents of the BP alliance are motivated by noble goals. Many are world-renowned scientists, who feel an urgent need to tackle the problem of global warming and are eager to secure research funding. In a Berkeley online interview, Steven Chu, a Noble Prize winner who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains: "Partnering with BP we will have the resources to actually carry out some of the things we want to do in order to help save the world."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also sees an alignment of interests. Under California’s new global warming law -- Assembly Bill 32 -- the state is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as from vehicles, industries and power plants, by 25 percent in 13 years. The governor believes that energy companies need to help develop alternatives to fossil fuels and has pledged $40 million on top of $30 million in state bonds toward the construction of a Berkeley science facility dedicated to the Energy Biosciences Institute.

Schwarzenegger and Chu are right that energy companies need to be part of the solution. But their participation should not come at the price of Berkeley’s academic integrity and the open scientific process, which the university has long embraced. Otherwise, the state could wind up adopting expensive, new energy alternatives that appear environmentally friendly and boost corporate profits, but fail to significantly reduce carbon emissions or slow climate change.

Berkeley has been down this road before. In 1998, Berkeley signed a five-year, $25-million agreement with Novartis, a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company and a producer of genetically modified crops. The deal allowed Novartis to pay for one-third of the research budget of an academic department; it also granted the company licensing rights to nearly all the department’s most valuable inventions.

This controversial alliance led Berkeley to pay for an external academic team from Michigan State University to study the Novartis arrangement at the request of Berkeley’s faculty senate. The study did not uncover any overt manipulation of the academic research, but it concluded that the Novartis alliance was "outside the mainstream" of academic-industry relationships and badly tarnished the university’s perceived independence on issues ranging from genetically modified agriculture to the environment.

The Michigan State team made several recommendations: Avoid industry agreements that involve complete academic units or large groups of researchers; carefully assess the potential for institutional conflicts of interest; and encourage broad debate early in the process when developing new research agreements. The current UC administration has ignored these in the alliance with BP.

Even when research is funded by industry, the university normally holds the reins of control. The alliance with BP is different. It asserts that the Energy Biosciences Institute’s director will be "proposed" by BP; its associate director will be "employed by BP" and other high-level positions will be filled by BP appointees, giving the company power to set the research agenda, control the purse strings and oversee daily operations. The plan acknowledges this shift: "(BP’s) business-industry leadership will strongly differentiate the EBI from other primarily academic research enterprises."

This is worrisome. Historically, universities have recognized they can’t serve two masters: objective science and the bottom line. That’s why most universities try to keep the academic and commercial spheres distinct.

The BP deal ignores this tradition. By allowing BP scientists to set up labs inside of academic facilities, the plan states it will foster the "flow" of information between the "open" academic and "proprietary" corporate sides of the institute and encourage extensive research collaborations between BP scientists, professors and students.

This information flow appears to benefit BP more than the university. Up to 30 percent of BP’s $500-million grant may be spent inside BP’s proprietary labs. Any faculty or student who wishes to enter BP’s labs would have to obtain "controlled card-key access." In contrast, BP employees would have open access to more than a dozen world-class, publicly funded laboratories at Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois. BP employees would also have privileges, usually reserved for faculty, including the ability to participate in designing and delivering courses and mentoring students. At one faculty senate forum, a graduate student remarked: "I didn’t come to this university to be lectured on climate change or energy by British Petroleum, which is in this to make a profit."

The alliance cavalierly suggests that the academic and corporate-proprietary sides of the institute will "comfortably accommodate" one another. But this contradicts years of university-industry experience. Industry scientists place a premium on secrecy and commercial profitability; academic scientists are more interested in the open exchange of scientific knowledge and fundamental research.

It’s worth remembering why this open culture is important to preserve: The biotechnology and the computer revolutions were born out of research performed in academia, not in industry. It’s possible that the next great breakthrough in environmental technology will also spring from this open academic environment.

The BP plan violates a bedrock academic principle: That all campus-based research be published, or openly shared. The University of California’s official policies on publication emphasize that the open exchange of information is fundamental to the advancement of science and education. That’s why Berkeley bans all classified military research from campus. Yet the plan specifies that BP’s 50 scientists on campus would "have no obligation to publish."

Intellectual property is another area where the alliance could distort UC’s public mission. Universities, as a rule, hold the intellectual property rights in their research, no matter how it is funded. To foster innovation and competition, universities generally try to permit more than one company to license their discoveries for commercial purposes. The alliance with BP, by contrast, would give the energy company privileged access to many of the institute’s inventions. It allows BP to co-own intellectual property in some instances and to receive exclusive, albeit time-limited, commercial licenses, as well. These two options, whenever exercised, would grant BP a monopoly, blocking commercial competition.

Beth Burnside,the vice chancellor of research, reassured Berkeley’s faculty senate that these intellectual property arrangements with BP follow "standard research procedures." But the plan notes that some of these terms "deviate from standard policy" and would "require exceptions to policy in order to be implemented."

Another area of concern involves the research. The plan states the Energy Biosciences Institute is dedicated to finding "long-term technological solutions to global energy challenges." However, when BP invited Berkeley and the other universities to apply for its research grant, it specified a targeted research area: The development of genetically modified crops and other organisms, which could be converted to lower polluting transportation fuels or be used to enhance the extraction and utilization of fossil fuels.

At campus forums and in the media, many Berkeley professors have challenged the narrowness of the institute’s research agenda, noting that it fails to consider solar, wind and other promising areas of energy research. Whenever you have one corporation issuing a research grant of this size, it can skew the university’s research agenda. In an effort to bring money into their labs, faculty will tailor their research to suit the sponsor’s interests. In this case, BP’s commercial interest is biofuels.

The plan promises to study the "productivity, cost effectiveness, land use, and environmental impacts" of biofuels. But given BP’s influence, many professors have questioned how balanced this research will be. Currently, biofuels require so much energy to produce that they are not energy efficient. And they pose other serious drawbacks, as well: Industrialized farms for biofuel production may further exacerbate topsoil erosion, water contamination, deforestation and other problems.

Jay Keasling, a chemical engineering professor affiliated with the BP project, told the faculty senate that "risk assessment" will be built into everything the institute does. But given BP’s commercial interest, will the public be able to trust this research?

Given that there’s nothing in the plan that calls for independent selection of specific academic research projects -- a process often governed by scientific peer review -- can the Energy Biosciences Institute be trusted to pursue research that might prove that biofuels are the wrong alternative energy choice?

BP executives and university leaders from the partner institutions are working out a final contract. An agreement could be ready for the UC president and the regents to sign in July. It’s possible that the current plan could be re-written to better protect the university’s autonomy.

However, this would necessitate major reform of the plan: The university would have to remove BP’s private labs and employees from campus; rescind BP’s leadership role in the institute; and adopt a truly independent system for selecting research projects and allocating funds, one driven by scientific merit not commercial criteria.

BP has already accepted the current plan as the basis for awarding its contract to Berkeley, so major reform is unlikely. The best option now is to throw out this deal and start fresh.

Tadeusz Patzek, an engineering professor at Berkeley who worked as an industry scientist at Shell, recently commented in an op-ed article for the Daily Californian that the BP alliance would turn Berkeley into a better corporation. "But if UC Berkeley becomes yet another corporation," he asked, "will there be another great public university to take its place?" That’s what UC officials and regents need to ask themselves before they sign this deal.

Stanford's Deal with Exxon Mobil Raised Concerns

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:22:00 -0400

The alliance between the oil giant BP and the University of California, Berkeley, stands out because of its $500 million price tag, its commercial scope and the potential for BP to exert excessive influence over the academic research. But it isn’t an isolated case.

The second largest such partnership is a 10-year, $225-million deal Stanford University signed with Exxon Mobil and other energy firms in 2002 to fund a Global Climate and Energy Project.

The Stanford deal was controversial from the start, but one aspect recently captured headlines. The San Jose Mercury News reported March 11 that Steve Bing -- a movie producer and environmentalist -- was withdrawing a $2.5 million donation to Stanford and all future donations. (Bing had already donated $22.5 million to the school.) Why? Because Exxon Mobil has exploited its close relationship with Stanford in ads -- on TV and in print -- that seek to portray the company as a "green" company.

The most egregious of these was an ad in The New York Times, part of a series appearing on the commentary page, which celebrated the company’s new research partnership with the "best minds" at Stanford.

The ad suggested the global warming debate is ongoing: "Although climate has varied throughout Earth’s history from natural causes, today there is a lively debate about ... the climate’s response to the presence of more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." The ad was signed by Lynn Orr, who directs the Global Warming and Energy Project.

About this time, Exxon Mobil was pushing the U.S. government to reject any mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases; it was also continuing to call for more research on whether human use of fossil fuels actually caused global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that it does. Many observers found the university’s blatant endorsement of Exxon’s PR campaign shameful.

The Stanford deal has many unusual features. A management corporation, with representatives appointed by each of the corporate sponsors and one university representative, Orr, approves the budget and the areas of research that will receive funding. This gives the sponsors considerable power to shape the institute’s research priorities.

The sponsors also enjoy an automatic, exclusive license to any of the project’s discoveries. The sponsors can block outside companies from gaining access to the university’s discoveries for up to five years. What’s more, they don’t have to pay any royalties to the university.

Criticism of the Stanford deal has been more muted, but from time to time the deal continues to raise eyebrows. During the campaign for Proposition 87, which called for a tax on oil extraction to raise public money for alternative energy research, some observers detected something strange. James Sweeney, a Stanford professor, began giving quotes to the media opposing Proposition 87. Sweeney’s ties to Exxon were never mentioned. But his research with the Global Climate and Energy Project was funded by Exxon, and he also served as a consultant.

Big Oil Buys Berkeley

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:59:00 -0400

On Feb. 1, the oil giant BP announced that it had chosen UC Berkeley, in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to lead the largest academic-industrial research alliance in U.S. history. If the deal is approved, BP will give $500 million over 10 years to fund a new multidisciplinary Energy Biosciences Institute devoted principally to biofuels research.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, UC administrators and BP executives immediately proclaimed the alliance -- which is not yet a done deal -- a victory for higher education and for the environment. But here’s another way to see it. For a mere $50 million a year, an oil company worth $250 billion would buy a chunk of America’s premier public research institutions, all but turning them into its own profit-making subsidiary.

This is shameful. The core mission of Berkeley is education, open knowledge exchange and objective research, not making money or furthering the interests of a private firm. In the last two decades, however, Cal and other universities -- increasingly desperate for research dollars -- have signed agreements that fail to protect their essential independence, allowing corporations excessive control over their research.

The BP deal magnifies this trend. Most corporations sponsor university research one study and one lab at a time. With the Energy Biosciences Institute, BP would exert influence over an entire academic research center (spanning 25 labs at its three public partners), bankrolling and setting the agenda for projects that cut across many departments.

What’s more, BP would set up shop on campus: 50 scientists employed by the company would work on joint projects with academic scientists at Berkeley and the University of Illinois. BP also would set up private labs on these campuses, where all the research would be proprietary and confidential.

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and now a professor of public policy at Berkeley, has warned that -- because of its size and commercial scope -- the BP alliance could be either "a huge feather in Berkeley’s cap or a huge noose around Berkeley’s neck." The question is, do rules and practices set up to safeguard academic integrity and independence stand up to a corporate deal of this magnitude?

The fine print of the plan, which UC made public only after it was leaked, doesn’t create much confidence. Californians need to know that their public university is dedicated to pursuing the best science, not just science that generates profits for BP. Unfortunately, the plan indicates that narrow commercial criteria could guide much of the Energy Biosciences Institute’s research.

Normally, even when university research is corporate sponsored, professors alone direct and shape it. Often, funds are assigned and research proposals are accepted through an independent, peer-review process. In the BP deal, however, the institute -- with a director to be "proposed" by BP and other high-level positions to be filled by BP employees or appointees -- would play a major role in setting research agendas and controlling purse strings. The plan touts the company’s role: BP’s "business industry leadership will strongly differentiate the EBI from other primarily academic research enterprises."

The plan also would hand unusual control to BP in other areas. A bedrock principle of academia is that campus-based research should be published. That’s why Berkeley bans classified military research from campus; the open exchange of information is fundamental to the advancement of science and education. But those 50 BP scientists on campus would, according to the plan, have "no obligation to publish."

Universities also, as a rule, hold the intellectual property rights in their research, no matter how it’s funded. In order to foster competition and innovation, they generally allow more than one company to use their discoveries for commercial purposes. This plan allows BP to co-own intellectual property in some instances and to receive exclusive (albeit time-limited) commercial licenses as well. The plan itself notes that such terms "deviate from standard policy" and "require exceptions to policy in order to be implemented."

Ultimately, there is an even more basic question to consider. Would the institutionalization of BP at Berkeley call into question the essential objectivity of the research generated by the collaboration? BP is clearly investing its $500 million not just in public-good research; it’s hoping to advance an energy source it’s already committed to commercially. Given that there is nothing in the plan that calls for truly independent selection of research proposals, can the Energy Biosciences Institute be trusted to pursue research that might prove that biofuels are the wrong alternative-energy choice? Would its social sciences arm freely investigate potential ecological and economic downsides?

UC President Robert Dynes has characterized the BP deal in telling words. "It is my belief," he said, "that we are reinventing the research university in this public-private partnership."

Five hundred million dollars is a nice chunk of change, but does any amount of money justify "reinventing" UC Berkeley’s academic integrity? That’s what UC officials should ask themselves before they sign this deal.

Jennifer Washburn Condemns Corporate Sponsored Education on WABC-TV

Communications — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:23:00 -0400

Westchester - WABC, October 26, 2006) -- A new trend in being seen in higher education: Big business spending big bucks to influence what's taught in college classes. Eyewitness News education reporter Art McFarland has the story.

Matt Ganis is teaching computer programming at Pace University in Pleasantville. But he's not paid by the university. He's an IBM employee, brought in to give this lecture as part of a worldwide, $100 million IBM program to shape college curricula in information technology...

IBM has invested more than a quarter of a million dollars at Pace, for hardware, software, faculty training and student field trips to IBM research labs. But critics say businesses should not have such influence.

New America Foundation's Jennifer Washburn writes on the subject.

"We really depend on our institutions of higher education to be independent institutions that train students to be very versatile and creative in their thinking," Washburn said. "We don't turn our institutions into corporate training grounds..."For the complete article, please visit the WABC-TV website.

Textbook Foolishness

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:03:00 -0400

An important education bill -- sponsored by state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) and supported by prominent education groups -- is sitting on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk awaiting his signature. The bill would allow publishers to develop textbooks for the state that would be designed to foster the language skills of non-native English speakers.

Virtually everyone agrees that these English language learners, who make up about 25% of the state’s student population, need more help mastering English. According to a 2006 state-commissioned report, fewer than 40% of English learners in California schools are likely to meet the linguistic and academic criteria needed to reclassify them as "fluent" in English after 10 years.

In 2005, only 3% of English learners in the 10th grade scored "proficient" in English on the California Standards Tests. Meanwhile, on the California high school exit exam -- a graduation requirement -- only 50% of English learners in the 11th grade passed the portion testing English skills.

Sadly, the chances that Schwarzenegger will sign the bill are slim -- despite the fact that it has the support of the California School Boards Assn., representing 95% of the state’s school boards, as well as the Assn. of California School Administrators, representing 16,000 school superintendents, principals and other administrators. Both groups say educational materials available to help English learners are woefully inadequate. The new textbooks would integrate basic English-language instruction into every lesson and would be fully aligned with curriculum and testing standards.

Shelly Griffith of the administrators association says her members see an urgent need for new textbooks that would enable early-stage English learners to "keep up with grade-level subject matter, even as they are improving their command of English." She emphasizes that individual school districts could choose whether they want to use the textbooks.

But the bill may well be vetoed because of an old political debate about bilingual education that has nothing to do with this measure. Ron Unz, who led the 1998 initiative campaign that eliminated most bilingual instruction from California’s public schools, recently told the Los Angeles Times that he suspected the Escutia bill was a "backdoor" effort to bring back bilingual education. Some newspaper editorial boards have made similar claims.

It’s true that Escutia is a well-known supporter of bilingual education, and her strong-arm political tactics have alienated many. But this bill has nothing to do with bilingual education. It calls for textbooks written in English for use in English-only classrooms.

If a school has a large number of English learners who are below grade-level in reading and writing, such textbooks may be advantageous. If a school has only a small number of limited-English students, it may choose to use this alternative curriculum in tandem with standard textbooks, giving the teachers more instructional tools to work with.

The other main criticism of the bill is that it might lead to English learners being segregated in classrooms where "they tend to get a dumbed-down, second-rate education," as The Times recently editorialized. This is not an unreasonable fear because many school districts serve disproportionately high numbers of English learners.

But it’s pretty clear that the current situation is no better. When limited-English speakers are placed in classrooms where they cannot comprehend most of the instruction, it is de facto segregation. As Holly Jacobson of the California School Boards Assn. told me: "Many English learners have to sit through a big chunk of their day not understanding most of what is being taught."

The proposed books and materials are designed to give English learners the second-language instruction they are supposed to receive but often do not. Some kids do learn English through the sink-or-swim total-immersion approach, but too many struggle and fall behind.

Just ask Jane Schrenzel, an elementary school teacher in Laguna Hills. Last year, she taught a fifth-grade class that had close to 95% English learners. Many of her students were born in the U.S., but most were reading one to two levels below grade level. Five were recent immigrants who spoke no English. Just getting through one seven-page story in the state-approved textbook was challenging. "There are so many basic vocabulary words the kids just don’t know," she said. "And the supplemental materials we have are extremely limited. It’s very time consuming to modify all the time and scrape together the materials ourselves."

These textbooks may not be the magic bullet. But we would be giving teachers and school districts more and, we hope, better choices.

Jennifer Washburn on Company-Designed University Curricula in the Wall Street Journal

Communications — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:56:00 -0400

RALEIGH, N.C. -- When graduate students at North Carolina State University took their seats on the first day of a class called Services Management, the kickoff lecture wasn't delivered by a professor. Instead, it was given by a manager from International Business Machines Corp.

The company, in fact, helped develop the curriculum and awarded grants to the school with the expectation that the course would be taught -- all with the aim of producing graduates better prepared to work for IBM. The guest speaker, a regional manager, began his lecture by saying, "My name is Craig Nygard, and I am a services professional," later adding, "You have started thinking about tackling big problems and turning them into revenue opportunities."

A fast-moving, competitive economy -- and the perception that students are unprepared for its demands -- is creating a new phenomenon at colleges and universities: courses supported by, and tailored for, potential employers. In addition to IBM, other major corporations seeking to increase their presence and influence on campus include Credit Suisse Group and German auto maker BMW AG...

To read the rest of the article, please visit The Wall Street Journal website.