Beyond BP: Berkeley needs to open up on biofuel deal
Sacramento Bee 4/19/07
The university's handling of this deal -- dribbling out details, then accusing faculty of subverting "academic freedom" when they insisted on more information -- has now been well documented. The question is whether Birgeneau can work to address legitimate concerns of faculty and stop casting critics as ill-informed obstructionists.
As Jennifer Washburn detailed in The Bee's Forum section on April 8, the company formerly known as British Petroleum wants to create an Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The institute would help develop biofuels, such as ethanol and methanol, potential substitutes for gasoline in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
Berkeley stands to receive roughly a quarter of BP's 10-year, $500 million commitment, but public monies and public interests are also at stake. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger committed at least $40 million to the deal. Officials hope to establish the institute in July. Berkeley is preparing to give an oil company unprecedented access to its world-class faculty and its expertise in engineering and biotechnology.
It's hard to put a value on this expertise, which is why an open university must be careful not to compromise its basic principles. There are also concerns with biofuels, such as whether their production, generates more pollution than the biofuels are designed to reduce.
Unfortunately, UC officials have been so secretive about their negotiations with BP that it is difficult to know whether the deal ultimately would protect both the environment and UC Berkeley's integrity.
Here's what we do know, based on documents UC Berkeley has released so far:
• Some 50 BP employees would be "embedded within the campus research environment" at Berkeley and the University of Illinois. The oil company would have its own proprietary labs on those campuses -- off limits to other faculty without adequate security clearance.
• BP employees, unlike other research faculty, would have no obligation to publish their findings. That means that if they developed a commercially promising fuel with some negative societal consequences, they would not be obligated to publish those findings, or subject them to normal peer review.
• BP would retain exclusive licensing rights over products developed at the institute. That gives BP extraordinary control over which products emerge, and which don't, from funding that comes partly from the public.
Undoubtedly there are students and faculty at Berkeley who won't tolerate any partnership with an oil company. Birgeneau, however, has lumped together all his critics, including those simply asking for more details and safeguards on the deal.
Last month, the UC chancellor went so far as to accuse faculty critics of trying to stifle the research of their colleagues, scientists involved with biofuels studies. "I consider that abhorrent and to represent a violation of the most basic principles of academic freedom," Birgeneau said.
That last claim is Orwellian. Birgeneau needs to go back and read "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," a book by UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. In it, Lakoff describes how certain politicians use language to frame debates, shut off dissent and consolidate power.
Today, the university's Academic Senate will consider a proposed resolution to delay the signing of the BP deal until the faculty has a chance to formally review it. At an open campus, the chancellor should encourage such debate, not try to stifle it.