Inside Higher Ed: BMW professors
Clemson University’s two new BMW endowed chairs are among the most well endowed chairs there are. The auto giant — which while based in Germany has a major plant in South Carolina — contributed $5 million for each one. The state matched those dollars, creating endowments for each chair to support a professor’s salary, lab, graduate students and more.
The chairs are part of BMW’s support for the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research, which includes research park facilities for the university and companies and a new graduate program in automotive engineering, which enrolled its first Ph.D. students this month. An article in the International Herald Tribune Thursday used the Clemson center as an example of the increasingly close connections universities are making with businesses.
Clemson officials objected to much of the article, saying that it overstated BMW’s influence and ignored Clemson’s land grant role of promoting economic development. But the university did not dispute a brief mention in the piece to a practice that was news to the university’s Faculty Senate and is unusual in academe: letting donors of endowed chairs interview all finalists for the position.
The university portrayed the practice as perfectly normal, but many others see it as dangerous to institutional independence and academic freedom.
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