Posted by mz
on March 12, 2009, 1:12 am, in reply to "Re: Business ethics with doctors "
128.54.163.43
Interesting. Personally, I'm a little more acceptive to schools accepting money from companies - just from personal experiences.
In the Computer Science & Engineering department, we are good partners with Intuit, developer of TurboTax. They hire a lot of UCSD students as interns and full-time employees because of the quality of work that UCSD students have shown over the years. They give the CSE department thousands (something like half a million maybe? don't remember.) of dollars just so that we can afford to hire more tutors to help students in the labs. However, as students, we were never taught anything biased toward Intuit or financing companies - we just get the benefit of 20+ tutors in one of our hardest classes. The company's name was only mentioned once or twice in that class too. The benefit that Intuit gets is not from curriculum change or anything like that, they get the benefit of more visibility, they get to partner with the Jacobs School and hire more good quality employees in the future, and this is very valuable to companies.
Jacobs School partners with a lot of companies through CAP (Corporate Affiliated P...rogram?), and the school itself was named after the founder of Qualcomm, but students who gruaduated from our school have always had good reputations in a variety of fields, not just in industry or a specific company. This means that we're doing something right with the money and partnership. I think it's up to the school how they want to use that money; it's probably a little less than the CEO-shareholder relationship - the school get to decide a little bit more, not necessarily has to do corp whatever the corp wants.
In general, I doubt that companies' gifts would affect too much of what we learn because the curriculum has to be approved by this and that, and it's so hard even to make a tiny change. It's also a practical issue - I've heard from people high in the industry that a lot of academia research right now is not as advanced as company research, the reason due to the lack of funds. Schools are poor. Look at how much they charge us and still trying to get more students. They have to get money somewhere. If they have to get it from companies in order to push its goal of education and research forward, then it will do so, because it's for its goal - like today's lecture examples :D
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