For Stormy Chamberlain, it wasn’t about the money as much as the title: an endowed assistant professorship.
Endowed positions typically go to faculty members much further along in their careers. Getting one so soon after starting at the University of Connecticut, when she was still an assistant professor of genetics and genome sciences, meant that Chamberlain had something impressive to put on her CV. It helped her land federal funding for her research, she says, which is critical for young academic scientists to advance their careers. She’s now an established researcher, having led three National Institutes of Health-funded studies of rare genetic conditions that affect children at birth.
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
For Stormy Chamberlain, it wasn’t about the money as much as the title: an endowed assistant professorship.
Endowed positions typically go to faculty members much further along in their careers. Getting one so soon after starting at the University of Connecticut, when she was still an assistant professor of genetics and genome sciences, meant that Chamberlain had something impressive to put on her CV. It helped her land federal funding for her research, she says, which is critical for young academic scientists to advance their careers. She’s now an established researcher, having led three National Institutes of Health-funded studies of rare genetic conditions that affect children at birth.
But the title of Chamberlain’s professorship has taken on a different tenor since she got it, around 2010. It’s the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Endowed Assistant Professorship, named in part for a patriarch of the family that is alleged to have profited off the opioid epidemic through the development and marketing of OxyContin, an opioid painkiller. (As part of one high-profile lawsuit, lawyers for the company that Raymond Sackler helped run offered a settlement in which the Sackler family would admit no wrongdoing, the Associated Press recently reported.)
Charitable donations from members of the Sackler family have been under public scrutiny as lawsuits across the nation have blamed them and their company, Purdue Pharma, for bringing about the opioid epidemic. Among other beneficiaries, colleges have received some $60 million in donations from Sackler family foundations in just the past five years, the Associated Press reported last week.
A few institutions have said they will no longer accept Sackler donations. Brown University pledged in September to donate a recent Sackler gift to charities supporting opioid-addiction treatment and research. Most colleges, however, haven’t said what they’ll do with their Sackler money, the AP found.
ADVERTISEMENT
The souring of the Sackler name has prompted some grantees to wrestle with having benefited from money that may have been earned as a result of addiction.
The University of Connecticut was one institution named in the AP report.It received about $4.5 million from Raymond and Beverly Sackler from 1985 to 2014. The money funded artists, composers, biomedical research unrelated to opioids, and a lecture series on human rights. The souring of the Sackler name has prompted some of those grantees to wrestle with the moral calculus of having benefited from money that may have been earned as a result of addiction. Some say they’re soothed by the fact that the money is now going toward good causes. But they predict problems in the years to come, as cuts in government funding leave private donations — which may turn out to be tainted — to pick up the slack.
As of last week, UConn was defending the utility of the Sackler grants, with a spokeswoman saying that returning the money “would hamper the work of UConn students, researchers, and others.”
But this week Stephanie Reitz, the spokeswoman, said in an email that the university was in the process of rerouting most of the remaining Sackler funds toward addiction research and education. The exception is a regenerative-medicine lab whose members would lose their jobs without the Sackler grants. When asked what would happen to other programs that have received Sackler money, a spokesman said he didn’t yet know.
‘They Were Trying to Do Good Things’
ADVERTISEMENT
Critics have called the Sackler wealth “blood money,” but most recipients of Sackler grants to the Connecticut campus who were interviewed by The Chronicle argued that the donations, even if compromised, went to helpful projects. “They were trying to do good things with their money, as evidenced by endowments to science and to the arts,” Chamberlain said.
Bruce Mayer, a professor of genetics and genome sciences who has a Sackler endowment for research, said his funds “have been used for good purposes for research on important biological problems.” He studies cell signaling in cancer. Even when donations come from controversial sources, he argued, “research is a tremendous good, and funds that are donated for research are a good thing for society.”
In addition, recipients in the arts and humanities at UConn noted their fields’ dependence on private funds, and the inevitability of controversy. Steven Sametz won the Sackler Music Composition Prize in 2013. Winners write an orchestral piece, then receive $25,000 at the piece’s premiere, on the Connecticut campus. Sametz composed a tribute to the children murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
Children and teachers across the country sent him notes and drawings to help inspire him. “I might personally ask more questions about the sources of the funding than I would have in 2013,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle, “but the arts in the U.S., from public radio to small nonprofits like my professional choir, would cease to exist without philanthropic support.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Indiana-based composer David Dzubay won the Sackler Music Composition Prize in 2015: “The [National Endowment for the Arts] has such a paltry budget,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “More and more, it seems we artists (and arts organizations) are going to be relying on support from companies and wealthy individuals, which is obviously going to bring these sorts of issues up.”
Even Albie Sachs, a renowned anti-apartheid activist from South Africa, who gave the 2017 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in a campus auditorium, noted that his visit was inextricable from the potential of dirty money. “The fact is that some degree of Faustian frailty is inevitable on the U.S. market-influenced academic lecture circuit,” he wrote in an email.
Sachs didn’t say whether he had received an honorarium and, if so, how much; a UConn spokesman said he didn’t have that information.
The Sackler Distinguished Lecture series, which has brought social-justice advocates to speak on the campus, seems to trigger particular revulsion among some faculty members. At a spring meeting of the Faculty Senate, Gary English, a professor of dramatic arts, said he didn’t “want to go to another Sackler lecture on human rights.”
“It’s fairly well agreed upon that it’s not really appropriate to have Sackler lectures on human rights,” he told The Chronicle by phone. “There’s no controversy about that on campus.”
ADVERTISEMENT
For some who study the ethics of philanthropy, the emergence of good works from bad money is not justification enough. “When the money was made in a way that produces great harm, my own view is that it should be accepted in a reparative mode, or in a mode of undoing the harm that had been done in the first place,” said Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University and author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better.
In the case of Sackler donations, he argued, that would mean recipients should use the money only toward healing and preventing opioid addiction, as Brown University has.
If a thief stole someone’s watch, pawned it, and then donated the proceeds to a worthy nonprofit, Reich said, the watch’s owner would still feel she was owed repayment. “The people who are suffering from the opioid crisis, who are the source of the money in the first place, are owed a repair,” he said.
On the one hand, at least they did something good with their money. On the other hand, should a dirty name be associated with your university?
Chamberlain, the assistant professor, has had thoughts along those lines. When she accepted her grant, she didn’t know that Sackler family members owned Purdue Pharma, nor that the company made and marketed OxyContin, an addictive painkiller. She learned soon, though. “Being in Connecticut for a while, it’s pretty hard not to figure that one out,” she said. (Purdue Pharma is based in Connecticut.)
ADVERTISEMENT
She has reserved judgment, waiting for the results of lawsuits against the family and the company. “Companies make drugs, and some of them do bad things that are unintended, and sometimes the drugs do bad things and the company knew about it. Until the legal proceedings come out, you never know which it was,” she said.
Indeed, although states began suing Purdue Pharma for causing opioid addiction in the early 2000s, direct evidence that members of the Sackler family knew about and encouraged the company’s marketing tactics didn’t emerge until this past January, when the attorney general of Massachusetts filed a complaint, citing documents previously not made public.
Chamberlain declined to say what she wants to see the University of Connecticut do with its Sackler grants. “On the one hand, at least they did something good with their money. On the other hand, should a dirty name be associated with your university? If the money’s given back, do they owe that money to somebody else who needs it more? That’s way above my pay grade.”
Knowing what she knows now, Chamberlain said, she “probably wouldn’t” accept the endowed assistant professorship if she were back at the beginning of her career. “At least I hope I wouldn’t,” she said. Yet when interviewed on Monday, she said she didn’t plan to reject her endowment now, either. “I’m not necessarily going to lead the charge to give it back, but if UConn had asked for it back, absolutely,” she said. “I think that is a university decision.”