Student involvement in academic-corporate partnerships can lead to fruitful research, but confusion in roles and incentives can hamper a young person's career. Publication must not be delayed in a way that compromises the completion of theses or dissertations, and regularly constituted faculty must have primary responsibility for establishing the standards of student research. Well, it's not good enough for me. The final quality judgment about the student's research resides with university faculty. Universities must be prepared to make ethical judgments.
Most academic institutions have a commitment to certain principles, such as non-discrimination.
Standing behind those principles occasionally means taking a hit financially, but we have to have confidence in our own value system. Most of us are pleased, for example, to have Reserve Officer Training Corps operations on our campuses, providing leadership training and opportunities that some students are anxious to avail themselves of. This is an uncomfortable compromise, but we cannot disavow all relationships with our government, so we try to work it out and have an influence on the government's own policies. A corporate funding source, likewise, can taint an academic institution through illegal or predatory behavior. Other aspects of academic-corporate collaboration are important, though they are not equivalent to principles.