This piece from the City writes extensively of how students rights are being trampled by speech code.

The First Amendment forces got a lucky break when the university signed a foolish contract with Reebok, in which it received millions of dollars in exchange for the use of the company’s footwear by campus sports teams. The contract included a clause forbidding negative comments on Reebok products by any “University employee, agent or representative.” The clause greatly irritated the anticorporate campus Left, which had usually been lukewarm or indifferent to free-speech concerns, helping convert some of its members to the anti-speech-code side. Later, a strong defense of free speech by a homosexual professor, called a traitor to his identity group for his courage, brought in other campus leftist allies. CAFR was amazed at how quickly many would-be censors backed down when confronted with controversy and threatened lawsuits. Wisconsin rescinded its faculty code—the first university to do so without a court order.

Hillarous. While left leaning liberals will ban free speech when it might hurt a minorties feelings free speech to crtiticize Reebok is just to sacred to be sacrificed. What if a minority working at Reebok gets their feelings hurt when facutly members critcizes the company?

Over at personal responsiblity Darwin writes:

I agree that scientists on public money have to go out of their way to adress topics of interest - that’s why every study looking at face processing has to have a paragreaph about autism in the proposal - but I’m not sure that that affects the results of the studies. Marlboro clearly has a stake in the results of a study into the health effects of smoking; but while the government may want to look good by allocating a certain amount of money to autism research, I don’t think they care whether it ends up being caused by a problem in the fusiform or in the amygdala or in prefrontal cortex or whatever.

If a bureaucrat ends up having family member with autism he might be more eager to shift funding to researchers that have found promising results for new autism therapy. Smart labs pursuing other forms of therapy would begin to shift there work to this therapy as a means to stay funded. One might be even tempted to fix some of the data to secure a large project grant from this particular bureaucrat.

I suspect, though I have no evidence to back it up, that most corporate research is actually performed by university labs. If this is the case, its hard to see researchers treating data sets differently simply because of differentiation in funding. When they are publicly funded the researchers are honest about the results and when they are privately funded they lie. Take for example Lihong’s work. At least one of her projects was funded by a pharmaceutical company. If memory serves me correctly, that particular study failed to show the effects the company wanted. Yet from what I could see no one in our lab was fixed the data. It seemed to me that our lab was treating that privately funded data set in the same way it treats publicly funded data sets.

It’s less likely that individual researchers change their ethics based on funding and much more likely that a small set of researchers behave unethically irrespective of funding. This small set of unscrupulous scientists would be willing to fix their data regardless of the study being privately or publicly funded. I see no reason to believe privately funding research would draw more or less unethical researchers then publicly funded studies. What reason would you give?

Even in cases were a corporation has its own division conducting studies on its products the science itself still has to pass through peer review if its to be published in a reputable journal. You suspicion about corporate funded research ignores this rather obvious point. Unless of course you are suggesting that corporate funded research is a threat precisely for the fact that it ignores peer review. In which case your observation is trivial since all studies that ignore peer review should be looked at with skepticism and disbelief regardless of how it was funded.

I can’t help but think there is underlying assumption in your position, one that seems to inform many, if not all of your positions. That underlying assumption is that profit is a bad thing. That somehow driving to acquire more resources is bad. Or if you prefer, that greed is bad. In the case of privately funded research one can’t help to characterize your argument in this way.

1. Profits make people do unethical things
2. Private companies fund studies to make profits
3. Therefore, privately funded studies will make researchers behave unethically.

You no doubt regard this argument as unfair characterization of your position. I eagerly await a revision.

In the meantime I want to address that first assumption. Profits make people do practically anything. That’s why free markets are so damn effective. Do profits drive people to behave unethically? Absolutely. Do profits force people to behave unethically? Absolutely not.

You wish to ascribe unethical behavior as a function of profit making. This explains your aversion to privately funded research. I won’t deny that profit making gives incentive for some people to behave unethically. However I don’t think the actual profit making causes the unethical behavior, it simply encourages it. Understanding the cause of unethical behavior requires making sense of genetics, family structure, historical context and myriad of other factors. Some people will have a disposition to behave unethically and in a profit making context will express that unethical behavior as means to acquire profit.

Profit making generates incentive for action. Regrettably some of that action will be unethical. Fortunately the vast majority of it will be both ethical and innovative. The cost of innovation is profit making. To throw out profit making simply to prevent unethical behavior seems foolish for two reasons.

First, it’s unclear why other non-profit making systems (socialism, communism, and to certain extent mixed economies) will reduce the propensity for unethical behavior. Particularly when you consider that those systems consolidate more power into less hands thereby reducing accountability.

Second, to reduce profit making is to reduce innovation. Inevitably this innovation enables everyone to enjoy a higher standard of living even those that make that make the least profit from that innovation. Ironically, others systems criticize profit making on the basis that’s its incentive system actually harms those that make the least from the system. You have made this argument countless times. This turns out to be patently false. Compare the standard of living of the poorest in countries that emphasize profit making to those that reduce it. Very quickly one can see just how much harm a profit making system in comparison to non profit making system is for the least advantaged in each system.

You, much like many people, need to reign in the negative conations you associated with profit making. Profit making is not bad. Some will acquires profit in an unscrupulous way but many more will find novel and innovative ways to acquire that profit inadvertenly increasing the standard of living for all . Profit making is arguably the single hand most important drive a system can tap into to improve the lives of everybody.