Vanderbilt University Register: Nader denounces corporate funding for research Former candidate encourages students to better utilize once-in-a-lifetime resources

Nader denounces corporate funding for research

Former candidate encourages students to better utilize once-in-a-lifetime resources

Nader

Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, Green Party presidential nominee and author, has long been a national political figure. And recently, Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century. In an exclusive interview, Nader spoke with the Register regarding his role in the 2000 election, his views of corporate-sponsored research in higher education and how students can become active members of their communities. Nader is scheduled to speak Thursday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m. in Langford Auditorium. The event, sponsored by the Vanderbilt Speakers Committee, is open to the public. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased through TicketMaster.

Q: What do you think was your most important role in the presidential election?

A: Well, it was to provide progressive Americans with an alternative party to support if they were dissatisfied with the increasing similarities between the Republican and Democratic parties and their indentured status to the money of big business and politics. That, of course, was an opportunity to focus on a whole number of issues that both party candidates ignored. And those are all on the Web site www.ralphnader.org.

Q: What impact do you feel you had on the election?

A: Well we started a long-term political reform movement, which of course goes beyond Nov. 7 and we'll continue building the Green Party all over the country with thousands of local state and national candidates entering the electoral role in the coming years, and that's what we were doing. It wasn't really designed to be a one-time effort. It's just a building process for public funding and public campaigns and paying attention to many of the unmet needs of the American people from healthcare coverage to public transit, to consumer health and safety protection, to environment, etc. To a living wage as well.

Q: And what is your role going to be with the Bush administration?

A: The Bush, the Gore, the Clinton administrations, they're all tied to the same powerful corporate interests. It's the corporate government that runs Washington, not the two parties, they just take marching orders. So, we'll oppose Bush administration's bad policies just the way we did Clinton's, and we will propose good policies.

Q: Do you have plans to run in 2004?

A: That's too early to say. What I am doing is helping to build the Green Party, helping to encourage new candidates for Green Party ballot lines at the local, state and national level, helping them to raise some money from the citizenry, not from business or other special interests. [I'm] encouraging them to connect with citizen groups that are ... dealing with such things as environmental health and safety protection, living wage, affordable housing, healthcare, against tax-funded stadiums. All these struggles that are going on with citizen groups very rarely have a political party standing side-by-side with them, and that's what the Greens are going to do, connect the political with the civic.

Q: What do you see as the role of higher education in this process?

A: Well, one is there are students who are starting to solidify the coordinators that we had on a thousand college campuses and universities, and they want to establish a thousand campus Green chapters at universities and colleges all over the country. It's led by a student from Carlton College in Minnesota and New York University. Now, in terms of higher education generally, it's very encouraging to see the students take hold at some universities on the anti-sweatshop efforts and also to take hold on raising serious questions on the excessive corporatization of universities where you have far too many commercial deals compromising the independence and integrity of the university with corporate profits. When too many professors moonlight too much with consultantships and corporate deals, it begins to affect the kind of research that is done at a university. Is it really corporate research or is it research for the public well being? And who pays the piper, plays the tune.

And then the graduate students begin saying to themselves, "Well, I better pick a topic that my professor is connected with -- some computer or biotech company -- because I'll get a better result. So you see, the academic commercial context filters then filters down to the graduate students, and then undergrads don't really know whether the professor who's teaching them is also being paid by corporations and having the course curriculum compromised.

So, commercialism has no place on college and university campuses. The independence of the academy, historically, the free exchange of scientific information is being eroded, because when professors cut deals with corporations they have to sign confidentiality agreements. So, whatever they discover they can't share with their fellow professors and grad students the way it used to be, they have to keep it secret and that undermines the free scientific exchange at the university and college levels that has benefited the country so much.

Q: So what advice would you give today's students, and tomorrow's scientists?

A: I'd encourage students in their extra-curricular work to get involved in some advocacy project, whether it's environmental club or whether it's something dealing with the anti-sweatshop movement. They ought to get involved in justice movements. It tends to improve their own curiosity intellectually and it makes them more of a whole human being. And I would also encourage the students at Vanderbilt to look at what students have done at other places in the country. [They] have set up public interests research groups, PIRGs, such as in New York, and Massachusetts and California and Michigan, 20-something states, but not Tennessee.

And the students should realize what their assets are. When again in their life are they going to have their own newspaper, their own radio station, their own gathering halls, their own scientific laboratories, their own experts, their faculty, their own level of idealism, their own ability to combine their independent work with subject matter they feel strongly about? When again are they going to have all these combinations? ... Once you graduate, are you going to have your own newspaper, your own gathering halls and your own radio station, sometimes television stations, and your own biology labs and physics labs and chemistry labs where you can test Nashville's drinking water and put out a report on it? See, it's a very rare opportunity and a lot of times students are too much in the forest to see the trees.

Q: At this point in your career, what would like future generations in history to remember most about you?

A: That I helped build a stronger democracy, the most important instrument ever devised to advance justice and the pursuit of happiness in the world.