… conflict of interest may ensue. When professors are really consultants or salespeople, or when they’re cooling their heels waiting for higher paying work, or … who knows what they’re doing on campus, but when professors aren’t really professors, conflict of interest may ensue.

Here’s an example from George Washington University.

A prominent professor in the GW School of Public Health and Health Sciences is under scrutiny this week because of allegations that he knowingly misled people about the safety of the District’s water while under contract with the city’s main water utility.

Tee Guidotti, a former professor and department chairman at SPHHS, published an article in the National Institute of Health journal in 2007 that said the extraordinarily high lead content in the D.C. water supply from 2001 to 2004 was not harmful, a statement cited locally and nationally as evidence that the city’s water supply was safe.

Last month, however, another study concluded that there is a correlation between elevated blood-lead levels in children and neighborhoods that had high lead levels in drinking water during the city’s water crisis, The Washington Post reported. The study found that hundreds of D.C. children had dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

After closer review, editors of the journal said Guidotti’s conclusions were questionable and that he may have been influenced to publish his conclusions by the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, who contracted the study.

WASA paid Guidotti and GW $750,000 over a three-year period for his work on the study, according to The Washington Post.

On Friday the Post published a front-page story about the alleged conflict of interest, highlighting e-mails Guidotti sent to colleagues prior to the journal’s publication showing he knew a key portion of the article was inaccurate, though it was published anyway…

Here’s the Washington Post story.