The University Senate is modifying Columbia’s two-year-old conflict of interest policy, although some faculty members think the new rules might negatively affect perceptions of their work.
At Friday’s senate plenary, the ad hoc conflict of interest review committee presented recommendations for altering the policy the senate passed in 2009. The most significant change is that researchers will be required to disclose potential conflicts—financial and nonfinancial—in most work “where the credibility of the work relies upon the faculty member’s affiliation with Columbia University.”
The committee’s report specifies that this policy will also apply to policy briefs and white papers—reports on public policy issues usually prepared for government use. Under current policy, researchers are required to disclose potential conflicts only in University-sponsored research. The recommendations specifically exempted newspaper op-eds from the expanded disclosure requirements.
At Friday’s plenary, several student and faculty senators offered critiques of the new policy, although no one said they would oppose the changes.
Computer science professor Julia Hirschberg said that explicitly disclosing potential conflicts in talks, publications, and grant proposals—which the recommendations seem to require—is not normal practice in computer science and other fields. As a result, she said the recommended policy would have a “chilling effect” on members of the computer science department.
“Most people I have talked to in computer science about this policy think that people reading articles or going to talks where such conflicts are explicitly mentioned would feel that there is something wrong about the research that’s being presented,” she told Spectator.
Alex Frouman, CC ’12, said the committee report is a “very well-thought-out document” except for the clause exempting op-eds, as well as the lack of a provision allowing for random audits of researchers.
Frouman said in an interview that op-eds shouldn’t be excluded because they are “one of the most common venues for the public to read the opinions” of Columbia researchers. Political science professor Sharyn O’Halloran, the chair of the senate’s Executive Committee and a member of the conflict of interest review committee, said at the plenary that she’d be open to looking into the op-ed issue.
Jose Robledo, GS, said at the plenary that a random auditing process would help make sure that faculty members are making the proper disclosures. “We only learn if people do not comply if the entire public knows about it,” Robledo said.
The University currently audits faculty members when issues are raised about individuals, said Associate Vice President for Research Compliance Naomi Schrag, who sat on the conflict of interest committee.
The committee report also recommended that Columbia hire extra staffers to deal with new reporting requirements handed down this summer by the National Institutes of Health. Among other guidelines, the NIH determined that the amount of money constituting a significant financial interest—the threshold that measures whether an individual can continue to do research related to the company compensating him or her—should be decreased from $10,000 to $5,000.
Chemistry professor Ronald Breslow didn’t critique the content of the policy, but he said that he feared that hiring new staff to enforce the policies “increases the bureaucratic layer.”
“It’s becoming increasingly bureaucratic by federal mandate,” O’Halloran said.
The committee recommended that the University better communicate its disclosure policies to students, staff and faculty through annual information sessions and reminders from the provost.
O’Halloran said some faculty had been “referencing the old handbook” and were initially unaware of the 2009 policy.
The 2009 senate policy mandated that this two-year review take place. Even so, conversations in the senate and elsewhere in the University were influenced by the October 2010 documentary “Inside Job,” which alleged that some top economists—including Columbia Business School Dean R. Glenn Hubbard and Business School professor Frederic Mishkin—had not properly disclosed conflicts of interest.
O’Halloran told Spectator that the new policy is meant to “harmonize our standards across the university campuses.”
The University-wide requirements serve as a minimum disclosure standard, but since the release of “Inside Job,” the Business School, the Law School, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have passed policies which exceed the newly recommended University-wide requirements.
Under the Business and FAS policies, faculty members are required to disclose on their websites all outside activities that create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Law School professors are required to disclose potential conflicts in course lectures and media appearances, when possible.
O’Halloran added that it’s not clear that the senate will have to vote on the recommendations. The senate’s external relations and research policy committee will decide whether a resolution needs to be brought before the senate.
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