In 2018, a University of Illinois professor said a widely reported truth: Monsanto's dicamba — a commonly used pesticide — was drifting and damaging crops. A company executive, who also happened to be a major university donor, had a strong reaction.
He emailed the professor's boss. The professor was "biased" and "prone to exaggeration," the executive wrote. In a "Blind Side Alert," the incident made its way up to the chancellor.
We reported this incident and others last year in our "Big Ag U" series with Harvest Public Media. The series enumerated how much money major agricultural corporations had given to four major college ag programs over the years. It also highlighted potentially thorny situations for public universities, which have cultivated powerful agricultural corporations as donors while public funding has stagnated.
We are resharing the series this week because Investigate Midwest and Harvest Public Media have been named finalists for the 2022 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Awards for Investigative Reporting in the small newsroom category. We are proud to be among the talented finalists.
— Sky Chadde, managing editor
Corporate money keeps university ag schools ‘relevant,’ and makes them targets of donor criticism
Large donors can put universities in potentially awkward positions when faculty conclusions conflict with the interests of those benefactors. Data collected by Harvest Public Media and Investigate Midwest shows corporations have given at least $170 million to ag colleges in the past decade.
OSHA cites Seaboard Foods pork plant for failing to document worker injuries and illnesses | Madison McVan, Investigate Midwest
At Seaboard Foods in Guymon, Oklahoma, management failed to properly document worker injuries and illnesses on at least 51 occasions over a period of two months in early 2022, according to a citation issued Friday by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Most Iowa colleges lack land acknowledgment statements | Olivia Allen, for Investigate Midwest
One step colleges and universities in the U.S. are taking to raise awareness of Native issues is through land acknowledgment statements. Interviews with Native American students in Iowa, tribal members and state higher education officials over six months reveal the significance of such statements.
GRAPHIC: Public funding of agriculture R&D has dropped precipitously since early 2000s | Sky Chadde, Investigate Midwest
Meet our 5 summer fellows and interns
We are delighted to introduce our summer fellows and interns. We are grateful four of the five positions are supported by the Gary Marx Journalism Fund established by longtime Chicago reporter David Jackson. The fellows and interns include:
- Intern Heather Robinson (not pictured) is a senior journalism and French studies student at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, where she is the editor of the student newspaper.
