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To Alan P. Rudy, the furor surrounding the developing half-billion-dollar research pact between BP and UC Berkeley is deja vu writ large. 

“I’ve been following it closely, and lo and behold, it reminds me of something I have seen before. It seems like the same players as before. It’s striking,” he said. 

A professor of sociology, Rudy was one of nine Michigan State University researchers hired by Berkeley’s Academic Senate four years ago to review Berkeley’s previously most controversial corporate/academic research grant. 

Their widely publicized 188-page report, issued on July 13, 2004, examined the research agreement between Novartis, a Swiss agricultural and chemical industry giant, and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB) of the College of Natural Resources. 

While concluding that the worst fears of critics hadn’t been realized, the MSU team concluded that massive corporate grants posed vexing problems for academia, and recommended special steps to avoid them—recommendations which one MSU researcher said provoked only “a sort of resounding silence after we handed them in.” 

Among nine specific recommendations, the first three are strikingly resonant with the ongoing controversy over the BP grant, which involves 40 times the money and many more faculty: 

“1. Avoid industry agreements that involve complete academic units or large numbers of researchers. 

“2. Reassess in a comprehensive fashion the implications of non-financial and institutional conflicts of interest. 

“3. Encourage broad debate early in the process of research agendas.” 

With the Novartis agreement, the investigators concluded, “debate came too late for some participants to exercise meaningful degrees of freedom.” In the future, they concluded, Berkeley faculty and administrators may wish to engage in timely reviews of institutional commitments to the dominant paths of scientific research in their formative years, especially when faced with public controversy.” 

Novartis 

On Nov. 13, 1998, the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute and the university signed a five-year, $25 million funding agreement, of which two-thirds would go to PMB and the remainder to covering indirect costs. 

Critics voiced fears that by signing on a whole department the university risked losing autonomy to a corporate funder which could—among other things—control research into channels that were profitable for the company while ignoring other research that might be more beneficial to others but less profitable to corporate stockholders. 

Criticisms of the Novartis agreement led first to an internal review on campus, and then the hiring in early 2001 of the team of researchers from Michigan State’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Standards to examine the agreement, its impacts and its implications. 

Lawrence Busch, a Distinguished Professor of sociology at MSU, was named principal investigator, and Rudy and four other colleagues were chosen as co-principal investigators, aided by three research assistants. 

Their study concluded that the worst fears of critics hadn’t materialized, but they warned that Novartis affair had raised profound questions about Berkeley—and about all public universities—in the changing political and economic environments of the early 21st century. 

The lack of response to the Michigan State study wasn’t in itself terribly surprising, said Rudy, now a professor at Central Michigan University. 

“If Derek Bok, who had been president of Harvard University, can be ignored when he writes a book that says ‘hold on, we’re doing a lot of things at American universities that can have real consequences,’ then it’s not that surprising.” 

Bok’s critique, Our Underachieving Colleges, was published in December 2005. 

Rudy said he wasn’t surprised that most media coverage has ignored the key role played by genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the university’s proposal to BP. 

“The places for open conversation on these issues have not followed through,” he said. 

One result of the MSU team’s research has just borne new fruit. 

The authors of the Novartis study have revised their original report and expanded it to cover the broader issues raised for American academia. Universities in the Age of Corporate Science: The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy was published in January by Temple University Press. 

“One of the things our report concluded was that this kind of agreement was most likely to happen at a place like Berkeley, but it’s also particularly most likely to be resisted at a place like Berkeley,” Rudy said. 

“If it happened at an institution of significantly lower status, the resistance would be much lower,” he said. “But one of the things that was attractive to Novartis is the great faculty.” 

One issue of concern, he said, could be shared governance—the delicate balance struck between faculties and administration in tenure and other key decisions. 

Another issue is proprietary research and the restrictions it poses on sharing information at an institution with a primary responsibility to teach, to share information rather than hoard it. 

Engineering departments, he said, have solved the problem to a greater degree than many other specialties. “They found it quite an impediment to good science, and they have moved away from privatization” of research and away from exclusive agreements—though corporations are still willing to fund the departments, he said.  

“That’s a different model of corporate science. That’s a suggestion, but I don’t know if it’s right for biotech and agroecology,” he said. 

Another, and potentially deeper structural problem lies in a political environment where both left and right have raised neo-libertarian critiques of government. The future of the state-supported university is in flux, he said. 

“Michigan is in a severe fiscal crisis,” he said, “but in no way can anyone talk about new taxes. Government is held to be evil and the market is the solution. Yet people also get upset that their garbage isn’t being picked up and their streets aren’t being cleaned.