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A university's struggle with chiropractic - York University, Toronto, Ontario

Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Michael De Robertis

York University recently rejected a merger with a chiropractic college. The deliberation process leading up to this decision illustrates how susceptible universities can be to overtures by colleges of alternative medicine. Lessons learned from this situation may prove helpful for institutions facing similar temptations in the future.

"Senate's approval in principle has been negated." With these words on April 26, 2001, York University rejected an affiliation proposal with the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. The unfolding of the six-year deliberation process leading up to this announcement provides a good illustration of the current political climate within universities and the temptations they face. Since such pressures will only increase as the popularity of alternative medicine grows, it is important to chronicle York's story and to reflect on the lessons that have been learned.

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York University located in Toronto, Ontario, is the third-largest university in Canada with over 1,000 faculty and an enrollment of 40,000 students. Though it has a relatively small science faculty--the Faculty of Pure and Applied Science (FPAS)--it has no medical school or large-scale health program.

The Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC), also in Toronto, has about 100 faculty and admits about 160 new students annually into its four-year Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) program. The College was opened exactly fifty years to the day after D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, gave his first adjustment, and hence the "Memorial" in the College's name. More than three-quarters of licensed chiropractors in Canada have graduated from CMCC (Kopansky-Giles and Papadopoulos, 1997) and less than 19 percent "rejects traditional chiropractic philosophy as espoused by D.D. and B.J. Palmer and emphasize the scientific validation of chiropractic concepts and methods" (Biggs, Hay, and Mierau 1997).

CMCC has sought affiliation with Canadian universities over a dozen times in its history (Brown 1996, 1994). Shortly after being rejected by the University of Victoria (British Columbia) in 1992, CMCC adopted a "revenue-neutral" model for attracting prospective partners, meaning that CMCC would remain fiscally separate from its university partner after the merger. York was among three Ontario universities that found this new approach appealing and in 1995 signed an agreement to enter into exclusive negotiations with CMCC. The basic understanding was that CMCC would provide a sum of $17 million (U.S.) for new buildings, infrastructure, etc., while York would mount some courses for chiropractic students and offer a D.C. degree.

Deliberation Prior to "Approval in Principle"

Thus began a seriously flawed, six-year adjudication process at York University that spanned two administrations and spawned numerous committees. Throughout this period, neither York's administration nor its Senate expressed the slightest reservation that the pseudoscientific and anriscientific attitudes harbored by contemporary chiropractic and evident in CMCC's curriculum would be legitimized by an affiliation, compromising York's academic integrity. Moreover, they continually ignored pleas to solicit expert opinion from the external biomedical community on the grounds that York was entirely capable of dealing with this issue on its own, despite the fact that there were no experts on campus. An informed decision was particularly important in this instance because York was poised to become the first major university in the world to merge with a chiropractic college.

The first act of York's then-Vice President of Academic Affairs was to create an internal six-member Task Force whose mandate was to advise the administration on the academic integrity of CMCC's programs and curriculum and the opportunities for academic links between CMCC and York University. The fact that the Task Force Report strongly endorsed an affiliation and found no areas of concern for York's integrity was not surprising: none of the Task Force members was an expert in chiropractic, and the most influential member, one of only two scientists and a distinguished biologist, had been advocating a closer relationship with CMCC for more than two decades. Even had members been aware that CMCC's course descriptions referred to unscientific "subluxations," that CMCC supported pediatric chiropractic that has been soundly condemned by the Canadian Pediatric Society, that CMCC officially advocated "choice" in immunization, that its curriculum emphasized chiropractic radiology, etc., it is unlikely the report wo uld have turned out differently, as future events were to reveal. (For more details about difficulties with CMCC and contemporary chiropractic, see De Robertis et al. 1999, Barrett 1999, and Homola 2001.)

The way was now clear to draft an affiliation proposal that would come before the Senate in spring 1998 for "approval in principle." Why was York's senior administration so supportive of this proposal and confident of its merits? There are indications that it felt that a merger would make York an instant "player" in the burgeoning field of health-care policy in Canada, something considered important by influential social scientists on campus.

A university's struggle with chiropractic - York University, Toronto, Ontario

Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Michael De Robertis

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