In defense of Berkeley’s contract with BP
Why its critics are full of BS
By Deaglan Halligan and Jessica Mintz
From the April 2007 Print Edition
On February 1, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau announced an unprecedented half-billion-dollar research contract with U.K. petroleum giant BP that will partner the university with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in a monumental effort to develop alternative sources of energy. A new group called the Energy Biosciences Institute will be created on campus to focus on developing biofuels from plant materials.
The Berkeley team was pitted against other influential institutions such as M.I.T. and Purdue in a competition for the contract and won because of the impressive linkage of Berkeley science and engineering with University of Illinois biosciences and agricultural expertise. (The junior college across the bay was not even invited to apply despite unmatched arboreal expertise.)
This agreement is nothing short of a colossal opportunity for Berkeley, BP, and society as a whole. Birgeneau, in an interview with the Berkeleyan, claims that “this is research that is just so well-suited to both us and Illinois, as public institutions with a commitment to research that will serve the public.” He has even gone so far as to call the project “our generation’s moon shot.”
BP CEO John Browne praises Berkeley’s track record in delivering “‘Big Science’ — large and complex developments ... that can be deployed in the real world” in a Berkeley press release.
Surprisingly, many students and faculty at Berkeley have issues with the contract, apparently arising mostly from a putrid admixture of ignorance and Berkeley’s own special brand of Luddite anti-capitalism.
The recent faculty forum held for the purpose of discussing the partnership with BP provided an opportunity for a plethora of jealous, ignorant hippies to rant irrationally about the deal. More than 200 faculty and students attended, and quickly replaced a reasoned discourse on the energy development contract with a predictably insipid diatribe on the university’s perceived values and culture. Even more disturbing is the blatant hypocrisy displayed by attendees who opposed the plan; the same environmentalists who whine about ‘Gore’bal warming and Hummers don’t want to let companies sponsor alternative-energy research at universities.
Anthropology professor Paul Rabinow likened the contract to the 1998-2003 deal between Berkeley and Swiss biotech firm Novartis for the creation of genetically engineered foods that caused a similarly ridiculous uproar. On the current deal, Rabinow whines that “this is silly. You should have given us more time to debate this.”
Art history professor Tim Clark also criticized what he saw as a lack of discussion about conflicts of interest between a public university and a private corporation. Credentials aside (few professors in relevant departments were complaining), it is enlightening to discuss the motives for such witless complaints.
The expressions “conflict of interest” and “academic freedom” come up frequently among the opposition to the deal. Professor Robert Reich, a panelist at the faculty forum, noted that safeguards are in place to protect academic integrity. In fact, there are also restrictions on blocking professionals’ research because of the source of its funding. Berkeley researchers at the EBI will be working alongside researchers from BP, and, as with all university-corporate collaboration, the interests of the university are always placed first.
Birgeneau has taken a strong and admirable stance on the issue, silencing troublesome critics who would try to block researchers involved in the deal. He has clearly stated that “people who attack corporate funding deny the value of the resulting research,” according to a Contra Costa Times report. He has also explicitly called such academic sabotage based on protest of the source of funding “abhorrent” and a violation of “the basic principles of academic freedom.” Thus, those who originally made the accusations are now rightfully under fire on the same grounds.
Despite concerns about Berkeley being an instrument of a private corporation, one must recognize that this kind of collaboration goes on frequently, particularly in engineering, and that such agreements have positive effects on academics, industry, and, ultimately, society.
Consider, for example, the fact that many of the underlying hardware and software technologies that constitute the support structure of the Internet were pioneered by collaborations between companies such as AT&T and Xerox and universities such as UC Berkeley. Such companies have doubtless made fortunes off of the Internet, but our academic body of knowledge has been advanced considerably and society has unquestionably benefited in countless ways.
Berkeley also currently hosts a prolific group known as CITRIS — the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. CITRIS works with corporations such as IBM, HP, Intel, and countless others to usher in new technologies that benefit society through research in communications, transportation, energy efficiency, defense, emerging economies, and health care. Surely these corporations have some pecuniary interest in these pursuits, but society arguably has a greater interest. Shankar Sastry, the current director of CITRIS, was a panelist at the faculty forum.
It is Berkeley’s successful record in projects such as this that has made it a logical participant in the BP contract. Based on the success of such current endeavors, the idea of corporate sponsorship seems much less maleficent than some clamorous faculty and students make it out to be.
Steven Chu, Nobel Prize winner and director of LBNL, states that the partnership with BP will result in “new, sustainable technologies that can transform the landscape.” While some protesters call for discussion, it is really time for action. Jay Keasling, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering, says that researchers cannot afford to fail on such an important project. The university, academia, and, most importantly, society will reap the benefits of alternative energies long after the present contract is complete. Certainly in the case of alternative energy, the cost of inaction will be very high, incomparably greater than if prudent investments such as the EBI are made today.
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