http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2019/01/university-calgary-influenced-big-oil-2015-controversy-academic
University of Calgary influenced by Big Oil in 2015 controversy,
academic report concludes
David J. Climenhaga
January 10, 2019
It's not every day you see terms like "corporate obstructionism" and
"institutional corruption" used to describe the way things are done at
one Canadian university in a peer-reviewed academic paper written by
scholars from two other institutions and published in a respected
academic journal.
This is one reason I think the stuff may be about to hit the academic
fan when the conclusions of University of Victoria sociology professor
Garry Gray and University of British Columbia PhD student Kevin D.
McCartney start to sink in on this side of the Rocky Mountains at the
University of Calgary.
The conclusions of Gray and McCartney are also unlikely to be popular
with corporate media, in particular Postmedia's Calgary Herald.
Their paper -- Big Oil U: Canadian Media Coverage of Corporate
Obstructionism and Institutional Corruption at the University of
Calgary, hot off the presses at the Canadian Journal of Sociology --
certainly doesn't mince words, as the title alone suggests.
The backstory, extensively covered by the CBC in 2015, involved a modest
$2.25-million endowment by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. to be paid over a
decade to what was then called "the Enbridge Centre for Corporate
Sustainability" within the U of C's business school.
When Enbridge, the company that then wanted to build the controversial
Northern Gateway Pipeline, was accused of trying to use the university
"as a PR machine for themselves," as one unhappy U of C academic put it
at the time, and senior university administrators appeared to go along
with the corporation, claims academic freedom was being undermined and
the mission of the university subverted soon went public.
The CBC journalists' exposé was based in significant part on freedom of
information searches that pried revealing U of C correspondence from the
hands of reluctant university administrators. As was said in this space
at the time, the contents of the correspondence that the network's
investigative reporters uncovered showed administrators willing to
uncritically accept almost any corporate instruction, regardless how
questionable it seemed from the perspective of maintaining the
university's independence.
Taking their cue from those 2015 CBC stories, McCartney and Gray reached
conclusions about corporate, university and media activities unlikely to
surprise anyone who has paid attention to news coverage of the Canadian
fossil fuel industry in the context of growing public concern about
climate change.
The authors' analysis of 70 news stories from various Canadian news
sources published in the aftermath of the CBC's initial reports argues
there was a parallel effort by the Calgary-based energy company and the
Calgary university to frame the central issues of corporate
obstructionism in public post-secondary institutions and what they term
"institutional corruption" as if they were part of the university's
mandate and purpose.
Moreover, they argue, there was a "stark contrast" between the way
corporate and non-corporate media covered the controversy -- with the
CBC and non-commercial media emphasizing the debate about academic
freedom and the proper role of public institutions while corporate media
"sought to defend the integrity of the relationship between the
university and Enbridge during the investigative process."
"Corporate media sources also attempted to downgrade the seriousness" of
concerns the university's president was at the same time a director of
an Enbridge subsidiary, they said.
The two B.C. researchers argue corporate news coverage of the 2015
controversy at the U of C should be seen in the context of a historical
tendency to downplay the social and environmental impacts of fossil fuel
development on Indigenous people, and similar history of emphasizing the
impact of climate change on business interests over its long-term
consequences for the environment.
"We place this academic scandal in the context of global carbon
capitalists making strident efforts to shape and manage social change
efforts around energy, and equally, the deeply Canadian tension between
the recognition of a climate crisis and the centrality of carbon
extraction and transportation to the Canadian economy," the researchers
wrote.
"Such tension is the foundation of institutional corruption," they
continued -- defining "institutional corruption" as violations of public
trust embedded in the structures, norms and practices of any
professional environment.
In their conclusions, McCartney and Gray observed that "the profit
motivation of corporate media, their advertising license to do business
and use of official sourcing were clear when compared to how
non-corporate media treated the same controversy."
As for the university, they said, the willingness of administrators "to
sell the legitimacy of the university to corporate interests" and of
academics to contribute by "producing research under the guise of
apolitical scientific progress" show how "normalized functions of an
institution cause harm and break public trust."
Finally, they said, the trend of corporate donations switching from a
pure philanthropy model to a role that involves more day-to-day
involvement in what universities decide to do shows how "fossil fuel
companies are leveraging publicly funded centres of education and
learning to promote a carbon-intensive future."
This, they concluded, "is the very definition of corporate obstruction
in democracy."
We should stand by for a brisk response from the U of C, I would wager.