Editorials

Why shouldn’t public universities welcome big grants from big corporations? After all, times are tough, and they need all the money they can get to keep tuition costs down, right? Well, maybe, but let’s take a look at the real costs of inviting the fox to sleep over in the henhouse.  

In California the state-supported University of California is granted a privileged independent position under the state constitution. This was originally intended to protect the academic freedom of faculty members, but it’s been used as the excuse for other more dubious claims of sovereignty. UC’s branches now answer only to themselves, and claim that they don’t have to follow any local laws regarding, for example, zoning. That’s why the University of California at Berkeley plans to build a couple of big new labs and a gymnasium right on the Hayward fault while thumbing its august nose at local attempts to raise safety questions regarding disaster evacuation and other details.  

These days only about a third of UC funding, depending on how you count, comes from the state, so all the rest is raised from outside sources. That includes grants from governments and foundations, and also big contributions from those with financial interests in what the university is up to. Barclay Simpson, a big time manufacturer of construction widgets, has both been board chair of the school’s art museum and is lending his name and presumably his bucks to the proposed gym. Elsewhere in this issue you can read about Richard Blum’s revolving door relationship with UC as regent, contractor, spouse of senator, and donor. 

But the new deal with British Petroleum (now cozily called just BP) puts all of that in the shade. Presumably Mr. Simpson may put in a good word from time to time on behalf of a favorite artist or athlete, but he surely has acquired no contractual right to control the organizations he supports with his dollars. The BP deal, like others similar which have attracted less publicity, will have all sorts of links in it which give the corporation control over things they should never be allowed to influence. The proposal which won the prize for UC included an offer to bend the university’s s public relations effort to tout the virtues of the products produced by the joint venture. Corporate scientists will be working cheek-by-jowl with academic researchers in Strawberry Canyon, creating an atmosphere not conducive to reporting any bad news about the results. 

Many years ago, courtesy of the National Science Foundation, I had the privilege of participating in a seminar at Stanford sponsored by what was then called the program on Ethics and Values in Science and Technology (EVIST). It had two major goals. The first was stimulating “research on ethical aspects of contemporary issues involving scientific and technological research and development and on social values that influence and are influenced by the work of scientists and engineers.” The second was improving “discussion, understanding, and policies and practices affecting and affected by science and technology.”  

Seminar members came from many fields: medicine, history, business and ethics, to name a few. At that time I was a journalist at the Center for Investigative Reporting and recently admitted to the California Bar, so I looked at the several case histories we studied from both angles. Two of the most interesting were the crash program attempting development of an artificial heart, described by Wikipedia as one of the long-sought scientific Holy Grails, which is still not close to success, and the widespread use of the synthetic estrogen DES on pregnant women, which resulted in many problems for their offspring. The most striking lesson I learned from our studies was how often the profit motive contaminated the results of what should be scientific research.  

The project produced one major book, Worse Than the Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress, written by principal investigator Diana Dutton with Thomas Preston and Nancy Pfund. I wrote a couple of magazine articles myself on related topics, and learned a lot in the process. One was about the role of drug companies in promoting dangerous kinds of birth control pills to doctors, and another was about how cigarette companies successfully avoided dealing with the fires caused by their products. They were hot news at the time, but now many people are well aware of the dangers posed by the involvement of what we’ve come to call Big Pharma and Big Tobacco in what should be unbiased scientific study. Many recent stories have exposed pressure put on researchers by both industries to conceal risks created by their products. 

But it’s a different story when it comes to Big Green. Intelligent people desperately wishing for an easy fix to the real problem of climate change are suckers for greenwashing, the practice of painting dubious for-profit projects and companies as environmental salvation. Our state university’s new partner BP has frequently appeared on Top Ten lists of the world’s worst greenwashers compiled by non-profit environmental watchdogs, but you didn’t see that in the public relations blitz which accompanied the announcement of the deal. You also didn’t see anywhere except in the Planet that the planned research was exclusively aimed at producing fuels from genetically modified organisms—GMOs—now causing almost as much concern in authentic environmental circles as global warming itself. 

Politicians were quick to jump on the BP bandwagon, with both Mayor Bates and Assemblymember Hancock (who should know better) appearing on the platform at the press conference which led off the campaign. The mayor’s city-funded publicity blog, the Bates Update, trumpeted the news on Feb. 27 that an organization called SustainLane Government “analyzed U.S. cities to see which led in combining Cleantech investments, infrastructure and supportive policies into a physical ‘cluster.’ Berkeley was named the third best in the United States.” 

You had to click through the included link to discover that the award was given only because of the BP-UC deal, which didn’t involve the city. “The city of Berkeley’s participation ... is in the planning stages,” the SustainLane report said.  

Before those plans go much further, Bates and the City Council might want to consider whether their constituents are likely to be fans of one of the biggest GMO projects ever conceived. And if there are still people at the University of California—faculty, students, even administrators—who still care about the tattered remnants of what used to be called academic freedom, they might still think about whether taking half-a-billion dollars from Big Green could pose any ethical or environmental problems downstream. The contract technically still hasn’t been signed, not that there’s much doubt that it will be.