Universities manage research conflicts as risk exposure, like banks do

Evidence

The empirical literature reveals that instances of such conflicts are pervasive in biomedicine, and, not surprisingly, “Strong and consistent evidence shows that industry sponsored research tends to draw pro-industry conclusions.” Perhaps because of its ubiquity in the modern commercialized university, bureaucratic approaches to conflicts of interest in biomedical research tend to congregate in the area of risk management—that is, formal protection of the university from the lethal fallout from conflicted research—rather than proactive attempts to control bias and corruption in the research itself. If one detects certain affinities with the concepts of risk in the banking sector, one would not be too far off. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 593

Categorization

• XREF: The university-as-bank parallel echoes the book’s core theme of how market ideologies seep into every institution.