Outrageous! Payola Profs

For the right price, they'll betray our trust.

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Last year a writer in Austin, Texas, named William Adler was thumbing through his local newspaper when he happened to discover something odd. An engineering professor at the University of Texas had written an opinion column about nuclear waste that sounded awfully familiar. Adler, who kept large files on nuclear issues, checked the Internet and found another column on nuclear waste in a South Carolina paper. The language was not just similar to the piece in the Austin American-Statesman -- in some places it was identical.

But one thing was very different: the byline. The second had been written by a mechanical engineering professor at the University of South Carolina. Or, more accurately, it was signed by him.

Adler explored deeper and found that both columns had been written by a public relations firm working for the nuclear power industry. As it turned out, the Washington-based firm had been cranking out pro-nuclear columns for years and getting engineering profs around the country to attach their names and submit them to local papers. The result was great press for the nuclear industry, and red faces for a bunch of academics when the PR strategy was exposed.

So much for truth in advertising. At least those professors claim to believe in what they didn't write. Others take the money and hype.

A recent Harris Poll found that professors were near the top of a list of most trusted professions in America, with a trust rating of 75 percent. It's no surprise, then, that corporate America wants to take advantage of that faith. What's shameful is how many of those trusted teachers are playing along. "Companies are trading on the reputations of people who pretend to be independent, but who are really shilling for products," says Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy.

For instance, some college professors appear to be influenced by textbook publishers who pay money to the teachers in hopes of getting their company's books assigned to students. As a sales rep for one publisher told the Chronicle of Higher Education: "To be blunt, you have to find a way to buy off the professor."

That can mean paying a prof hundreds of dollars to "review" a textbook. North West Publishing offered as much as $4,000 for a review. One person who didn't bite was James Williams, an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He says that the North West deal required him to distribute student feedback forms and return them to the publisher. But he thought the book North West wanted him to assign was outdated and, at around $70, overpriced. "My ethics overcame whatever greed I have," Williams says.

An investigation by the Chronicle of Higher Education found numerous professors, from Michigan to Tennessee, who had accepted big bucks from textbook publishers. One said she wanted the cash for a new washer and dryer; another pleaded that she needed money because she had failed an IRS audit. Henry Rosovsky, a Harvard University professor emeritus who has written about academic ethics, says that there should be "many, many considerations," when it comes to assigning a book, such as its price and accessibility, "but one is not personal gain to the teacher."

Let's call it what it is: payola. And professors aren't the only ones pocketing the dough. Columnist and television host Armstrong Williams was in the news earlier this year when he admitted taking $241,000 from the Education Department to promote Bush Administration policies. More recently The Wall Street Journal exposed James Oppenheim, a magazine technology editor who admitted taking payments from big companies to praise their products in TV appearances. And last year, one public relations firm sent out an e-mail offering to pay business experts $25,000 retainers and $10,000 per TV appearance if they would defend its client, the insurance giant American International Group. Apparently, word of the embarrassing offer leaked out before anyone signed up.

Then there are the 13 scientists who were secretly paid more than $150,000 by tobacco companies in the 1990s for letters and articles disputing the dangers of secondhand smoke. In some cases, tobacco-industry lawyers actually edited the pieces before publication. One scientist was paid $10,000 for a single short letter to a medical journal.

So whom can you trust? If a new marketing tactic catches on, not even your friends and neighbors. One firm, BzzAgent, specializes in getting ordinary folks to casually promote products by talking them up to their friends or asking local stores to stock them. Last summer the company had its agents bring a new brand of chicken sausage to Fourth of July picnics and recite talking points about their quality. "You might have a neighbor throwing a sausage on the grill because he's been recruited to do it," says Rampton.

Sad to say, money corrupts honesty all the time. Trust me.

From Reader's Digest - July 2005

 

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• Outrageous! $54,000 Per Hour
• Too many hotshot execs rake in a ton of cash -- whether or not they earned it.
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