Senate review of conflict-of-interest policy yields concerns

BY RAY DELGADO

A proposed modification of the university's 10-year-old faculty conflict-of-interest policy was kicked back to the Faculty Senate committee that recommended the changes after several senators and top administration officials expressed concerns.

The Committee on Research was asked to revisit its proposed modifications to the "faculty policy on conflict of commitment and interest" during Thursday's senate meeting due to concerns that the threshold for disclosure of financial interests would be set too low.

Under the 1994 policy, prior to entering into certain transactions on behalf of the university, faculty must disclose significant financial interests in the company on the other side of the transaction. In terms of equity ownership, the financial interest was deemed to be significant when it amounted to at least 0.5 percent of the company's equity or if it was valued at $100,000 or more.

The Committee on Research, chaired by engineering Professor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, recommended that the financial interest disclosure threshold be lowered to $10,000 to be consistent with other institutions and with the guidelines employed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on projects it is involved in.

Several faculty members, including President John Hennessy, expressed worries that the lower threshold would entangle many faculty members who have complicated portfolios managed by investors or other third parties that may involve companies the university does business with.

"I don't think it's terribly hard to own $10,000 worth of stock in a publicly traded company," said Stephen Fortmann, medicine. "I don't know what stock I own at any given time, because someone else manages it for me."

Paté-Cornell said the committee decided to take a more conservative approach in setting the threshold "to be in line with a certain number of institutions," but particularly NIH. "We preferred to adopt the more conservative position in this respect rather than having to justify ourselves under other circumstances," she said.

Hennessy cautioned against the low threshold, saying that many would unwittingly violate the policy and would then bring more scrutiny on themselves and their departments.

"I think we're going to set ourselves up for innocent violations of rules by people who are not intending to do anything wrong," Hennessy said. "And that will be extremely unfortunate."

After further discussion, Provost John Etchemendy recommended that the committee revisit the policy again and particularly address the $10,000 proposal. The senators unanimously approved a motion to that effect.