Buying Respectability: Pepsi funds a Yale fellowship to study obesity and diabetes

[marmar]

from OnTheCommons.org:




Buying Respectability
Pepsi funds a Yale fellowship to study obesity and diabetes.

By David Bollier


Imagine that you’re a company that is increasingly besieged by complaints that your heavily advertised junk foods and sugary drinks are contributing to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. The First Lady has even gotten into the act, making “eating healthy” a personal priority. Naturally, the company wants to neutralize public criticisms about its unhealthy products and refurbish its corporate image.

What better way than to buy a slice of respectability and high-minded objectivity from an Ivy League school – say, Yale University?

That’s exactly what PepsiCo did recently when it announced that it would fund a graduate fellowship in nutritional science at the Yale School of Medicine. The masters or PhD student will explore “obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.” The depressing part is, Yale was only too eager to play along and sell its name for peanuts. It will receive $250,000 over the course of five years. For this, the dean of Yale School of Medicine, Robert Alpern, praised “PepsiCo’s commitment to improving health through proper nutrition” and called PepsiCo’s partnership with Yale “a visionary investment in…the future of science.”

Now, corporate grants to universities are hardly novel, and the PepsiCo grant is hardly the most egregious. Yet this grant does exemplify a troubling trend for our times – academia’s willingness to sell its moral authority and independence to corporations with an agenda.

Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong! Yale officials insist. The dean told the Yale Alumni Magazine that “there has been a huge disconnect between perception and reality” when it comes to this donation. “There are numerous safeguards in place to protect the integrity of our research.” PepsiCo will not choose the student chosen for the fellowship, nor will it oversee the research or whether and where it is published. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/buying-respectability

[Saturday]

1. This is just like the oil companies....

spending millions to tell us how green they are.

[LWolf]

2. I wonder what contingencies the grant depends on. nt