Don't stifle debate

Fresno Bee 4/20/07

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of the University of California, Berkeley, should delay signing a contract with the oil company BP that would create the largest academic-industry consortium in U.S. history.

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 The Sacramento Bee reported, 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.

Here's the problem. Berkeley is preparing to give an oil company unprecedented access to its world-class faculty and their expertise in engineering and biotechnology.

It's hard to put a value on this expertise, which is why a university must be careful not to compromise its basic principles. There are also concerns with biofuels, such as whether methods used to produce the fuels generate more pollution than they are designed to reduce.

Unfortunately, UC officials have been very secretive about their negotiations with BP. 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 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.

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. The chancellor should encourage such debate, not try to stifle it.