When the House of Representatives banned earmarks last week they probably figured that American companies would find a loophole to get around it, but who would have thought that American colleges and universities would be the ones to help them do it?
Earmarks are the $150 million thank-you notes that members of the house use to thank big companies for their generous campaign contributions by directing no-bid government contracts their way. It's just one of the many ways that special interests use to gain access to taxpayer money.
The real news -- as explained in a New York Times article over the weekend -- was that in many cases it was colleges and universities who were now being awarded the contracts and then passed them on to local companies to spend. You can read the Times article here.
For example, General Electric Company would get as much as 80 percent of a $2-million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning locomotives. The proposal gets around the ban by listing the university as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, a faculty member told the Times.
This is technically legal, but ethically it is bankrupt. At the very least it is an abuse of colleges' tax-exempt status and it certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Is this really where we want our colleges and universities to be?
Responsible faculty members should protest these deals and demand that colleges return to more ethical activities.
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