Corporate money keeps university ag schools ‘relevant,’ and makes them targets of donor criticism

A major donor to the University of Illinois wondered what the heck was up. 

Robb Fraley, a top Monsanto executive at the time, emailed the dean of the agriculture college in 2018 complaining about a professor saying publicly that one of his company’s flagship products was causing widespread damage to crops. Monsanto was also a major donor.

Fraley accused the professor of being “biased” and “prone to exaggeration.”

U of I officials had spent years courting Fraley, and they had listened to him before when he’d complained about a lack of progress on an endowed chair he’d funded.

But the 2018 episode highlights potentially thorny situations for public universities, which have cultivated powerful agricultural corporations as donors while public funding has stagnated.

Dicamba posed a particularly critical issue to Fraley. After all, he was as responsible as anyone for leading modern agriculture into using lab-designed seeds that could withstand spraying from weedkillers. That Monsanto-branded Roundup Ready pairing of biotechnology with glyphosate herbicide revolutionized grain farming around the world.

When glyphosate lost its punch — after weeds grew resistant to Roundup — Monsanto shiftedto teaming different genetically modified seeds with the dicamba herbicide.

But farmers who’d not adopted the new genetically engineered seeds started complaining about “dicamba drift” and of seeing their crops perish from the effects of the herbicide migrating to their fields.

So when U of I weed scientist Aaron Hager spoke about a controversy as big as any in commercial agriculture in ways that didn’t sit well with Fraley, the university benefactor let the school know about his displeasure.

“Hate to see the U of I take these positions,” Fraley, a U of I graduate, wrote to Hager’s boss.

Fraley, the former chief technology officer at Monsanto, could not be reached for comment despite phone calls to publicly listed numbers, inquiries through companies he serves on the board of or through Bayer.

In the end, the school’s dean stood up for Hager as a faculty member voicing his professional opinion and backed by science.

Across the Midwest, corporations have become critical, aggressively pursued sources of money for agricultural colleges as tax dollars become increasingly elusive. But that money can put the same schools in awkward positions, vulnerable to criticism from those private donors entangled in public controversies.

U of I officials had gone all out to win over Fraley. That meant things like responding to a request from Fraley’s wife for a slick booklet showing what their donations meant to the university and securing a signed football from head football coach Lovie Smith.

In the end, those efforts figured in an ambitious, nearly decade-long campaign to land an “innovation center” on the school’s Urbana campus.

Since 2010, corporations have given at least $170 million in donations to public university agricultural programs, according to data collected by Harvest Public Media and Investigate Midwest in four states.