Keep tabs on consultancy work to avoid ‘Uber-style controversies’

Academics should share the details of any corporate consulting work with their university as a safeguard against concerns about their integrity, an expert has said.

The advice comes after The Guardian newspaper reported that the ride-hailing company Uber paid academics €100,000 (£84,000) for a report that talked up the company’s economic benefits to the areas it served.

The fee for the 2016 report, produced by David Thesmar at HEC Paris and Augustin Landier at the Toulouse School of Economics, emerged as part of a cache of emails leaked by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist for Europe.

Messages showed that the research was used as part of a wider public relations strategy developed in response to a regulatory crackdown by authorities in France and Germany, the newspaper said.

Hubert Horan, an independent transport economist who has previously raised concerns about Uber’s use of academics to bolster its PR work, told Times Higher Education that disclosing the nature and value of corporate consulting work would help to protect researchers.

“Consulting fee information would not be disclosed publicly, but would provide a safeguard in case of future controversy about the professor’s academic objectivity or integrity,” he said.

It was also important for institutions to publicly distinguish between peer-reviewed work and corporate projects making use of proprietary data, to which even the researcher themselves might have limited access, he said. Outsiders should not be allowed to think that “paid advocacy work had met the same standards as traditional academic research”, he added.

Alex Engler, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said after the recent leaks that the “huge information asymmetry” between technology corporations and the public was highly problematic, adding that Uber could choose friendly researchers, and direct what questions they ask, to ensure favourable results. The company had not responded to these claims at the time of writing.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act, approved this month, includes a right of access to data from platforms with more than 45 million monthly users, including for academic research. But Mr Engler said it was not clear if Uber would hit that threshold.

In a statement responding to The Guardian but not addressing academic consultancy specifically, Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s senior vice-president of marketing and public affairs, said that the company had transformed itself under its new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and that 90 per cent of current employees had joined after he started.

Dr Thesmar and Dr Landier did not respond to requests for comment, including whether their Uber consultancy work had been disclosed to their institutions.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com