It is no longer necessary to argue that corporatization, the neoliberal application of business practices to the university, is occurring at UIUC. The latest example is the proposed public-private UI-Carle medical school spearheaded by Chancellor Phyllis Wise. “This article resonates with me because our goals of a COM [College of Medicine] in Urbana-Champaign will rely predominantly on our convincing many of our generous and passionate donors of the critical importance of our project.”

“This article” refers to a New York Times piece linked by Fox-Atkins CEO Peter Fox in a March 14, 2014 email to Wise, which she commented on and forwarded to 14 folks. The article, “Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science,” describes how since the 2010 Tea Party takeover of Congress, the previous “bipartisan consensus” that lead to federal science funding “rising steadily for decades” has “eroded,” leading to an approximately 25 percent fall in spending on basic research in 2013, “one of the sharpest declines ever.”

Not only do Fox, Wise, and their cronies see nothing wrong with this Tea Party-driven defunding of public research and concomitant increased funding by billionaires. They cynically embrace it, seeing it as another golden business opportunity, to profit still more from the American for-profit healthcare system.

Conservatives like to complain about what they see as big government over-regulation and slow-moving bureaucracy. But at least the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation make an attempt to allocate research funding based on rigorous professional standards, open competition, and peer review. Their overall goal is improving the general welfare of everyone.

“Fundamentally at stake,” however, “is the social contract that cultivates science for the common good,” as the Times says. For today, the more research is privatized, the more money targets the personal interests, and pet projects of the super wealthy. This is especially true of medical research, where “a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer.”

Meanwhile, taxpayers in Urbana are reeling from Carle going off the tax rolls, because it successfully lobbied Springfield through the Illinois Hospital Association – which Carle CEO James Leonard headed at the time — to expand the definition of so-called “charity care” in 2012 legislation. After paying $4.6 million taxes in 2009, Carle paid zero in 2013.

This is the exact opposite of what Leonard and Carle Clinic CEO Bruce Wellman pledged in 2009 when the two entities were merged into a non-profit. “If a merger bringing the currently for-profit Carle Clinic under the not-for-profit organization of Carle Foundation Hospital is approved, Carle plans to make payments in lieu of taxes at the current tax level.”

Back in 2002 Carle agreed to make a lump sum payment to Urbana in lieu of taxes, generally referred to as PILOT, of $450,000 to the school district and $175,000 to the park district, plus $20,000 per year for the next five years. Late in 2014, and long after Urbana had taken Carle to court over nonpayment of taxes, Carle independently made its own guessestimate of what it owed Urbana, and cut checks totaling $100,800. With a pending lawsuit, Urbana tore up the checks. However, they would have constituted only a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $5 million dollars Carle had paid previously.

That’s not all. Medicare is fining Carle for readmitting too many patients within 30 days of their initial visit for medical issues requiring treatment. Carle is weighing whether to do what is necessary for the government to recognize it as an Ebola treatment center, a certification that the UI Chicago medical center – with whom they are competing for the proposed UI medical school — has already received.

In addition, the Chancellor sent staff to testify in July 2014 in support of Carle’s request for additional surgical beds, a request that had nothing to do with the UI-Carle medical school. After the staffer in question was criticized for conflict of interest, she tore up rather than cash the checks Carle wrote to reimburse her.

No wonder Urbana-ites have formed Concerned Citizens of Urbana (CCU) to push back against Carle. They have created a website, organized community meetings, and dotted Urbana with yard signs. “My Family Pays Carle’s Share of Taxes,” says one. “Carle’s ‘Charity’ Medical Care Paid for by Urbana School Children,” reads another.

Attention has focused, therefore, on Carle. But the 800-pound gorilla in Urbana’s room that goes mostly undiscussed is UIUC. As a nonprofit, the University also does not pay taxes. Some years some chancellors have made some payments in lieu of taxes, de facto PILOTs. Below are the annual amounts paid to the school district (first column), from which an amount went to the library (second column):

1994-1995 $158,000 $14,950
1995-1996 through 1999-2000 $317,000 $30,000
2000-2001 through 2009-2010 $365,300 $34,500
2010-2011 $240,000 $22,560
2011-2012 through 2014-2015 $100,000 $9,400

Chancellor Wise’s office has informed Urbana that funding will end in 2015.

Moreover, UIUC has bought up significant amounts of land between 1985 and 2005. The National Center of Supercomputing Applications, the Seibel computer science building, plus the parking structure east of the Beckman building – all were built on land formerly on the tax rolls.

To top it off, Urbana is home to the research park that didn’t happen. That’s right: along with what is referred to as the South Campus research park in Champaign, there was discussion of a North Campus research park in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In May 1999, a 50-plus page Request for Proposals for a “Science & Engineering Technology Commercialization Initiative” for both a North and South center was issued, with what response is unclear.

While Chancellor Wise is ending PILOTs in Urbana, she also has raised the possibility of “a ring of [tax-paying] businesses associated with biotech” surrounding her proposed medical school. What she did not tell Urbana is that if such a venture materializes the smart money is on it being located in the Champaign Research Park. Rubbing it in, she declined Urbana Mayor Laurel Prussing’s invitation last month to meet and discuss Carle in a public forum.

Meanwhile, the Wise-led public-private proposed medical school has hit some road bumps. For as long as the Steven Salaita affair continues – and it continues unabated – it acts indirectly as a powerful drag on getting her medical venture off the ground, and getting “generous and passionate donors” on board.

The UI Board of Trustees has also raised more questions than the friendly audiences in Champaign-Urbana. It has charged UI President Robert Easter with evaluating the competing UI-Carle and UI-Chicago medical school proposals in March. Given his loyalties to the Urbana campus — including loyally seconding the Chancellor concerning the Salaita matter — this assignment will certainly put his professional judgment to the test.

Wise faces a similar test, although she likely sees it simply as business as usual. When she was named to Governor Bruce Rauner’s transition team, the consensus of her supporters was that UIUC was ensured thereby a seat “at the table” of the deciders. Her Republican and neoliberal views fit Rauner’s neo-liberalism-with-a-vengeance to a T. A private sector member of the top 1/10 of one percent of all Americans governing the public sector, Rauner intends “to use the governor’s residence to do the government’s business… and I’m going to entertain them [companies] at the governor’s residence… and make it a nice place to do the people’s business.”

Rauner will generously serve the people for an annual salary of $1 and no benefits. To fight “corrupt” public sector unions, he has already amassed $20 million in his PAC, including $10 million of his personal fortune, for his new, right-wing, anti-union campaign. All this springs from his idea of “ethics,” his wanting the state to act “ethically.” Like the business practices he pursued in becoming wealthy.

The ethically-challenged do not understand by “ethics” what the rest of us do. Wise — the decades-long serial self-plagiarizing researcher, sending her staffer to lobby for Carle — engages in prima facie conflict of interest by sitting simultaneously on the UI Research Park Economic Development Advisory Group with the Busey Corporation board president, and on the Busey Corporation board. As Chancellor, sees no contradiction in overseeing annual ethics training at UIUC from the top down, but not from the bottom up.

Given the virtual certainty of Rauner’s impending higher education spending cuts, how exactly will Wise spin her role? Voting to slash the budget of UIUC, the institution that she was hired to serve?

It all comes together in neoliberalism, “capitalism with the gloves off.” A proposed public-private UI-Carle medical school. Chancellor Wise acting in concert with Carle’s Leonard, the Research Park’s Fox, and Busey Corporation’s board president. But not consulting faculty regarding Salaita. Taking a page from the national Tea Party playbook concerning billionaires, who pursue their private research agendas that dovetail sometimes with those of the general public. Not to mention wealthy donors. Carle and UIUC refusing to compensate Urbana for lost revenue from properties they have rejiggered off the tax rolls. All the while, their economic interests trumping good citizenship.

Is Phyllis Wise a public sector CEO? A private sector Chancellor? Is there any difference? Yes, yes, and no.

January 13, 2015

 This is the second in a series of articles. The first can be found online at www.http://publici.ucimc.org/?p=50834

David Prochaska formerly taught colonialism and visual culture in the UI History department

OverCriminalized

Tuesday, Feb. 10th, 7:30PM.
Art Theater, downtown Champaign,

Champaign County ACLU is sponsoring this free showing of a film on alternatives to criminalization. Panel discussion to follow.

OverCriminalized profiles three promising and less expensive interventions that may actually change the course of people’s lives. It’s time to roll back mass criminalization and focus on what works.

On Monday night, January 12, 2015, Aaron Ammons sat in the front row of the audience at the Urbana city council meeting. The purchase of Tasers for police was being discussed. He got a call and stepped out of the room. He came back and sat back down. During public input on the topic, Aaron spoke of his opposition to Tasers, which he and his group CU Citizens for Peace and Justice, has fought for a decade. He also announced that he had just received a pardon from outgoing Governor Quinn.

In the early 1990s, Aaron took a plea bargain to a felony drug offense. This felony, what he calls the modern day “scarlet letter,” has followed him ever since. Today, Aaron is not afraid to talk about his past in the underground drug economy. He performs poetry about his time on the streets at SPEAK Café, which he founded and MCs. He also started the group Citizens With Conviction, made up of those with felony records. In Spring 2014, they successfully won a “Ban the Box” initiative in Urbana, eliminating the question about felony history on job applications. Congratulations to Aaron!

University of Illinois (UIUC) Chancellor Phyllis Wise, already at the center of the Steven Salaita affair, is proposing that UIUC and Carle partner to build a medical school. A public university pursuing a large-scale project with the private sector is again all about the neo-liberal corporatization of the university. An already large, expanding corporation selling health has everything to do with the American for-profit healthcare system.

For some, Wise’s plan is a game-changer of limitless opportunities with nothing but upsides. For others, “the devil is in the details” of a tiny number of individuals engaging in largely out-of-the-public-eye discussions, possible conflicts of interest, and unethical dealings that, nonetheless, will impact the public at large.

From Front Story to Back Story

The UIUC/Carle proposal is clearing administrative and political hurdles on its way to becoming a reality, if its backers have their way. With Chancellor Wise in the lead, UIUC is spearheading the project slated to open in fall 2017 with an initial 25 students that would meld bioengineering, biomedical, and related UIUC strengths, with a research-based medical school. Carle is to provide $100 million, and UIUC would seek donors for $135 million.

According to an October 2014 publicly released business plan, classes would be held initially in upgraded buildings at Carle or on campus, whereas an earlier plan called for a new $100 million facility. Meeting since at least last February, and likely earlier, an Economic Development Advisory Group convened by Chancellor Wise that includes Provost Ilesanmi Adesida, Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement and UI Foundation Senior Vice President Dan Peterson, UI Research Park developer Peter Fox, UI Research Park administrator Laura Frerichs, Carle President and CEO James Leonard, Busey Corporation board chair Gregory Lykins, and local businessman Richard Stephens, has led to speculation that the medical school would be sited in the UI Research Park. A February 2014 letter from the Fox Development Corporation CEO to the Research Park director states that it “is very supportive of the proposed Carle [redacted] Facility in the Research Park,” but the October 2014 business plan skirts the issue, saying a new facility is yet “to be determined.”

So far, a succession of institutional bodies have signed off on the proposal, including the University Senates Conference, and the UIUC Academic Senate, with the UI Board of Trustees (BOT) still to go. Meanwhile, the project has garnered enthusiastic approbation on and off-campus, including from the local business booster community, speaking primarily through its mouthpiece, the News-Gazette. Chancellor Wise: “Without a college of medicine, we are less competitive…We think this is a defining moment.” Local entrepreneur, I-Hotel owner, and Jimmy John’s multiple-franchise-lessee Peter Fox: “I think [the idea] is the salvation of the community.” Carle CEO Leonard is “absolutely committed.” News-Gazette publisher John Foreman: a UI-Carle medical school is “a dream worth living.”

With everybody who is anybody apparently on board, what is there not to like? The University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) does not like the plan. It proposes “a competing vision” that would partner with UIUC to offer expanded engineering-centered doctor training through the existing UIC medical school, whereas Wise’s plan would create “conflicting, competing entities.” UIUC has bluntly said “no” to UIC’s alternative plan.

Provena Presence Hospital does not like still more competition from rather than cooperation with Carle, which it says is trying to “drive [it] out of business.” Last summer Carle wanted to add 48 medical/surgical beds, but Provena objected, arguing that the state itself had determined that there was already an excess of beds in the region. At first the state rejected Carle’s request, but after Carle lobbied, with help from the Chancellor’s office, it was approved.

Residents in Urbana do not like the fact that Carle’s property tax-exempt status, effective 2012, has resulted in plummeting city revenues and a 10 percent spike in 2013 individual property tax bills. Pushing back, Urbana-ites have formed Concerned Citizens of Urbana (CCU), which has created a website, organized community meetings, and dotted Urbana with lawn signs. As part of her meetings with area stakeholders, including Urbana Mayor Laurel Prussing, Chancellor Wise has raised the possibility that “there will be a ring of businesses associated with biotech” surrounding the new medical school. If so, Urbana wants the school sited in the city so as to receive any additional tax revenue.

Dr. Andrew Scheinman does not like the Chancellor’s office lobbying in favor of Carle’s bed expansion. An Urbana native, UIUC grad and local patent attorney, Scheinman has galvanized residents into action through CCU. He argues that it is unethical for UIUC to involve itself in Carle’s bed expansion, and that Carle supplied talking points to and paid the Chancellor’s office to lobby on its behalf. He has filed complaints alleging unethical conduct with the University Ethics Officer plus Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office.

Carle enjoys a reputation as a center for medical research, although not everyone agrees. In 2009, Carle’s Leonard fired then-recently-hired Vice President for Research Dr. Suzanne Stratton, who had accused a Carle cancer researcher of systematic ethical violations in a story that made the New York Times. Wise herself has published research in medicine that has been called into question. Numerous stories have appeared in, among other places, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Retraction Watch, and Electronic Intifada, that report on Wise’s “self-plagiarism,” the practice of publishing research results more than once. On a number of occasions between 1990 and 2006, Wise allegedly republished entirely, or in only very slightly altered form, previously published work. In at least one instance, she admitted as much. “The author wishes to correct a number of serious errors in the writing of her [Neuroscience 2006] publication,… the paper is written in a way that misleads the readers to think that it is an original article. The author wishes to correct that impression with the following changes in the text of the published paper…” Such self-plagiarism can occur in all academic fields, given the pressure to “publish or perish.” It is especially pernicious, however, in fields such as medical research where an artificially inflated number of article citations could have real-life consequences for prescribing drugs, establishing medical procedures, and the like. Both the Stratton case and Wise’s self-plagiarism revolve around medical research ethics.

“Super Surprising”

The other side of the coin of Wise lobbying for a medical school is her simultaneous campaign, along with President Robert Easter and the UI Board of Trustees (BOT), against appointing Professor Steven Salaita to a tenured position. The anti-Salaita people are literally falling over themselves to line up behind the Chancellor’s initiative, while pro-Salaita folks are either not involved, or not consulted. Moreover, Wise began pushing her proposal last spring around the time that the Provost, seconded by other high administration officials, refused to reappoint another faculty member, adjunct professor James Kilgore, whom they also anathematized. The same anti-Kilgore individuals then are anti-Salaita now. Having ratified Wise’s decision not to appoint Salaita at their September meeting, the BOT, in a surprise decision at their November meeting, voted to allow Kilgore to be reappointed. Clearly, the BOT is deeply divided. After four hours in executive session engaged in what they themselves termed a “robust debate that represented a wide range of divergent viewpoints,” they failed to reach a consensus. In fact, it is not too much to say that the BOT is in disarray, at war with itself. The implications for the Salaita affair are not lost, moreover, on Kilgore supporters. “In light of the recent abrogation of academic freedom in the de-hiring of Professor Stephen Salaita… this [paving the way for rehiring Kilgore] is a very small step forward… We must continue to back his [Salaita’s] cause.”

Wise is at the center of both the Salaita affair and the medical school plan. Clearly, she sees the medical school as her signature achievement. Wise appears caught off-guard by continued faculty and student opposition over Salaita that has forced her into damage control mode. Certainly, BOT Chair Chris Kennedy was caught off-guard, saying that the response the university had received was “super surprising.” Were the reputation of Wise – not to mention that of the university – continue to suffer due to the ongoing Salaita affair, then her standing to lead the medical school plan would suffer by association.

Lifting All Boats, Or A Tub Sitting On Its Bottom?

The more we learn about the medical school proposal and how Wise is handling it, the more questions arise. Where does working for the common good leave off, and conflict of interest begin? When she was University of Washington provost, Wise was criticized for simultaneously sitting on the Nike board. Now at UIUC, and still on the Nike board, she was paid $290,000 in 2013 alone. Since the beginning of 2014 she also sits on the Busey Corporation board. She leads simultaneously the aforementioned Economic Development Advisory Group that also includes the Busey Corporation board chair, which appears to be a conflict of interest. Wise gave a keynote at a Republican Congressman Rodney Davis event held last July in the midst of his 2014 reelection campaign. Governor-elect Bruce Rauner has named her to his transition team. The machers, big shots, make out, and seem fine with it. Their politics and worldview nestle with their agendas like Russian dolls.

How did we get here? The short answer is short. It is all about the neo-liberal corporatization of UIUC at a time when state budget support has fallen to an execrable 12 percent. It is all about a corporation selling health as part of the American for-profit healthcare system in the era of Obamacare.

These are national issues, reproduced locally. And locally, the Champaign/Urbana elite, like all-too-many others elsewhere at other times, acts as though what is best for them is best for everyone. They do not notice, or do not care, that their socioeconomic calculus leaves out somewhere between Mitt Romney’s 47 and Occupy’s 99 percent of the population. However you calculate it, this amounts to a disproportionately high number of the lower classes, women, and minorities.

This is not new. The history of American philanthropy is the history of trickle-down, paternalistic largesse. An online comment in the News-Gazette gets it right. “There is a consistent push by the ‘movers and shakers’ in C-U’s economic development plans that local residents and particularly those that are mid-to-low incomes [sic] can,… for the foreseeable future, well,….uh,…just leave, and make way for out-of-town people who are wealthier. Thanks. Here is a map to Rantoul or Tolono if you need re-locating options.” In contrast to UI-Chicago’s larger, more inclusive medical school student body, UIUC’s would be smaller, and tuition would cost at least 20 percent more. The October 2014 business plan projects annual tuition at Urbana ranging from $45,000 for in-state students (UIC $35,442), to $60,000 for out-of-state residents (UIC $72,442), and $75,000 for international students (plus $9,000 in fees). The new college of medicine dean would make $500,000, top administrators between $100,000 and $250,000, and 75 new faculty between $140,000 and $270,000, not to mention 40 to 50 new Carle physicians.

Carle is largely tax-exempt, largely because of their “contribution” – read: “lobbying” –rewriting the 2012 state law concerning charity contributions. Yet they cannot cough up from their $1.8 billion in assets a voluntary “charitable contribution” to Urbana, otherwise known as payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT). Instead of making up anything close to the $5.8 million Urbana lost in 2013 tax revenue, Carle has voluntarily cut checks for $100,800, based on their own calculation of their fire and police costs.

Locally, it is mostly Republicans who stand to profit from the medical school project, but these are not Democratic vs. Republican, or even conservative vs. liberal issues. Look at Barack Obama, his former chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago schools chief and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and their neo-liberal ilk. In this country in 2014 it is “radical” to be a post-1945 European social democrat. “Radical,” not radical, because in the late 1940s Europeans creating single-payer health-care systems and the rest of the then-new welfare state were not radicals, but liberals. Similarly, European universities charge students even today a fraction of what both public, as well as private, U.S. colleges do. The difference between then and now is a measure of how much we have eviscerated the state, and undermined its legitimacy in pursuit of the chimera of the “job creator,” “free market.”

Are there other ways of doing business? Of running a university? Of course. And they are not theoretical, but empirically tried-and-true ones. For the last 65 years, European and Canadian social democracies have been delivering, despite scattered objections and cutbacks, the overwhelmingly popular social goods of single-payer health insurance, and largely state-subsidized university education.

November 14

This is the first of two articles.

David Prochaska formerly taught colonialism and visual culture in the UI History department