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The very name “University of California” exudes respect and elicits images of academia’s hallowed halls. 

But not for everyone.  

There are those who argue that in recent years the public has lost confidence in the university community, which has traded free academic inquiry for meat market standards, where the quest for knowledge is sold to the highest bidder. 

A discussion on industry-academic partnerships on the UC Berkeley campus Wednesday brought out defenders of such liaisons as well as their naysayers. 

Robert Tijan, professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, is the chancellor’s science advisor and an unabashed proponent of the university-industry marriage. 

Tijan told the gathering of some 75 students and faculty in a wood-paneled conference room on the third floor of Wheeler Hall that the partnership brings the university, among other advantages, access to cutting edge technology. 

“Biology is highly technical,” he said. “We need the technology.” 

The partnership entices private science-related industries to locate close to universities, and the synergy assists academia in attracting the best minds. “They’re here because we’re here,” Tijan said. “There’s feedback back and forth.” 

There are practical, bottom-line reasons junior faculty would choose to locate where they have the opportunity to work in industry, Tijan said. “If graduate students want to build a family and buy a house” they will go where they can earn a living and do research. 

Others, however, pointed to major pitfalls in the marriage between industry and academia. 

Charles Weiner, a visiting professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who teaches courses in bioethics, pointed to the danger of conflicts of interest “when one’s professional judgment may be influenced by a financial interest in the outcome.” 

A researcher might have “a different stake in the outcome than doing good in the world,” he said. 

The drive to patent one’s findings engenders secrecy among researchers, where otherwise, the scientific community might share its work. “Informal communication is the lifeblood of science,” Weiner said. 

The partnership might skew research priorities. When biotech funds come in, other fields are ignored, he said. 

“We’re way out of balance,” he said. 

While Weiner talked about today’s problems with outside interests dictating university priorities, Laura Nader, professor of anthropology, pointed out that the university has long been under the influence of entities that give them funding.  

Weapons labs, for example, became part of the university during the cold war, when the university’s role was to “protect the interests of the ‘security state,’” she said. 

Nader addressed the negative side of the synergy between industry and the university: if the university cut its ties with industry, the corporations “would loose the (graduate students’) cheap labor,” she said. 

Nader pointed to a growing threat to independent academia from the role of drug companies in medical school.  

There is a solution, she said: “Make all corporate funding of the university anonymous gifts.” 

When it was time for the audience to chime in, most were skeptical of the public-private partnerships. 

Miguel Alteiri, professor in the College of Natural Resources, spoke out about what had happened in his department. “We used to have research into alternatives to pesticides,” he said, but private research money has taken the department in a different direction. 

A former chairperson of the former Zoology Department said as a result of the pressure of private industry’s relationship to the university, his department was a victim of “urban renewal.” They’ve “torn down zoology,” he said. “They set up a highrise – molecular biology.” 

But others argued that the university culture, by necessity, is not stagnant. In the ’60s, UC Berkeley had a large psychology department and more people were studying social sciences, one person noted, adding emphatically, “The university has to change.” 

Vice Chancellor Beth Burnside heads up a committee that is exploring these questions. She can be reached at 642-7540. Students for Responsible Research are meeting to talk about such questions Wednesday 7 p.m. April 25, 112 Hilgard Ave.