Over all last year, Virginia Commonwealth, with nearly 32,000 students, received $227 million in research grants from government and private sources, a sum dwarfed by the amounts the nation’s largest research universities take in. For example, the University of Washington received $1 billion in grants last year, while Johns Hopkins got $1.4 billion in federal money alone.

I think this is key to understanding VCU's decision to compromise on academic ethics and knuckle under to Philip Morris. A university's status determines its ability to attract highly qualified students & faculty, large donations, and research grants. High-status universities can afford to adhere to academic ethics (I hope), and low status institutions are pressured to bend the rules to get their research grants.

We ought to consider if the inequalities in resources among colleges breeds these shameless policies where low-status, low-resource colleges become the research arms of large corporations. It will be interesting to see if agreements like the one VCU had is actually more common than we may want to believe. The article quotes a Philip Morris official saying the company has similar agreements with other universities. I bet that most of those universities are not prestigious schools like John Hopkins or University of Washington.

Maybe if we leveled resources among colleges and universities we could make relinquishing research ethics a less attractive option.