Last May, UC Berkeley professor Ignacio Chapela's tenure case won approval from his department and was forwarded on to the College of Natural Resources for final review. Chapela's case should have been decided in a matter of a few weeks to a couple of months. But no decision has been reached, and his case has been languishing in administrative limbo for a year now. Chapela's contract expires in June.

Today's Daily Cal reports that there is growing concern among Chapela's colleagues at Berkeley and beyond that political concerns are affecting his case. Chapela is an ardent and outspoken critic of biotechnology; specifically, he has been adamantly opposed to the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology's lucrative and controversial 1998 deal with biotech firm Novartis (now Syngenta). The five-year, $25 million dollar deal runs out this year and shows no signs of being renewed. Chapela and his supporters are concerned that his career may be the latest in a series of academic careers that have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed.

In recent years, corporations with vested interests in certain kinds of research and certain kinds of research outcomes have been forging huge research deals with universities (Stanford's new $225-million, 10-year Global Climate and Energy Project, for example, is sponsored by Exxon Mobil, while Princeton's 10-year, $20-million Carbon Mitigation Initiative is funded by BP and Ford). Not suprisingly, these deals have raised real concerns that corporations have not only effectively acquired the power to displace academic freedom, but have corrupted university research by turning it into an increasingly corporate venture. Among other things, this means that academic researchers with strong financial interests in the biotech industry have the power to strategically affect hiring and promotion decisions, and are apparently using it. A case in point: one of the nine faculty who make up the committee that has been sitting on Chapela's case for the past year is the founder of a biotech company. He is also a vocal critic of Chapela's work. The conflict of interest is palpable--but he has not recused himself.

The Nicholas de Genovas, Dennis Daileys and Lynn Webers of academe tend to shape the public debate about the merits and limits of academic freedom. The issue tends only to attract attention when someone on campus says something stupid or offensive and someone else responds by trying to punish said stupid expression. But it's worth remembering that for every noxious professorial comment and stupid pedagogical decision, there are necessary critiques that need the protection academic freedom provides. It's also worth reflecting on what happens to free expression in those parts of the university where there is major funding to be won and lost. The academic freedom debate--not to mention the tenure debate--has centered almost entirely on the irresponsible ideological antics of humanities professors and administrators. That's because those are the easiest, most accessible academics to monitor and to criticize. But the debate will neither be balanced nor wholly responsible until it takes the situation in the sciences into account as well.

It's more likely Chapela's failure to get tenure is related to a cloud over his most famous research finding, that transgenic corn is spreading through Mexico despite being banned by the Mexican government. Many scientists think his methodology was deeply flawed--that his claimed results arose from laboratory contamination of the test samples.

http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_info/articles/invadedmexico.html

My own experience as a grad student in biochemistry, working for an advisor who was on the scientific advisory board of a biotech company, is that the company didn't tell us what to work on or, what would have been worse, insist on particular results.

While vigilance regarding potential industrial infringement on academic freedom is appropriate, there's an incentive to industry to not interfere with research outcomes: companies make more money if they find the correct result than if they find a pleasing but incorrect one.

This is not a new phenomenon. Before corporate partnership in research became an issue, government partnership (usually involving the Defense Department) was controversial.

My first job out of college was working for the organization that later became the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). We built one of the first supercomputers, and the money came primarily from the Department of Defense. (In fact, a large share of the research money that lead to the development of the personal computer came from the same source.) This was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and our departmental director tried to bail from his contracts with the Defense Department in the middle of the project as he became increasingly disenchanged with the war. DOD said no, it's ours.

The Holodeck project (on which I am one of the millions of little worker bees) is financed by an assortment of corporations and start-up firms working with dozens of universities all over the world. The goal of creating practical applications is essential to the success of such research projects. If you are interested in one of the most successful and advanced departments doing practical research with corporate partners, I'd suggest that you visit the website of The Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois.

I'll throw a wrench into this discussion from the get-go. In such research projects, the long-term consequences are impossible to predict. While the director at NCSA believed that our supercomputer was destined to be used for evil purposes, it turned out that that was only true in the short run. The computer was purchased by NASA and DARPA and used to model the effects of explosives in three dimensional spaces. 35 years later, however, the research that built that project has morphed all over the place, resulting in such things as MOSAIC (the precedessor to Netscape's browser), advanced 3d graphics, environmental modelling, and on and on.

So, here's what I'm saying. Current political issues may seem awfully important here. Over the long run, technology has a life of its own. I have a hard time buying into the "corporate greed" language. Greed is good. The notion that research can be crafted so that only humane and lofty goals are achieved is probably false. You do the research work, you build your boxes, and then a totally uncontrollable process sets in. Engineers in garages all over the world read your papers and run with the new knowledge. Things that you never dreamed had any relationship to your work happen. Trying to rationalize this process into a system that strikes one as "morally good" seems futile to me.

Big research projects require astronomical investments. Would somebody please explain to me how the partnering of corporations intent on creating practical products sullies this process? To be blunt, I don't understand.

The potential impact of corporate or government grants -- especially matching grants -- on university academic freedom was an issue in Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in America and Barzun's The House of Intellect in the 1960's, so I agree this isn't a new issue. I would guess that Stephen's sense of the outcome is also correct.

But what we're doing here is tying putative gloom and doom to one individual's career problems (which is also what we did with Prof. Lang). Mary McCarthy's novel The Groves of Academe is about an assistant professor who thinks it's likely he's not going to get tenure, so he deliberately sets himself up to be denounced as a communist sympathizer so the political brouhaha will cause the university to grant him tenure to protect its "academic freedom".

We may have sympathies with one or another view of academic policy, but I suspect it's never going to be disinterested or pure if we tie it to one individual's tenure prospects.

A Problem of Governance

I donít know if Chapela is good professor or yet another academic flake, but this incident touches on some interesting issues.

Since the modern university has trouble standing up to hysterical undergraduates it stands to reason that it will not stand up to a major donor. It also seems unlikely that the control-freaks who promulgate speech codes will allow junior faculty to mess with their turf.

University politics aside, at the very least Chapela, who has taken up the cudgel against another departmentís funding, should not be surprised that the other department is not on his side. In trying to run another department, Chapela also seems to be trying to run things far above his pay-grade.

It is unclear what Chapela thinks he is trying to do and why he has a right to do it. It would not be surprising if he is being smacked-down.

On the larger issue of corporate funding, it seems absurd to assume that a corporation hiring a university to do R&D is necessarily corrupting. The university takes itís marching orders from many sources of funding: the government, foundations, wealthy donors, andóyesócorporations. All have their agendas and it is the administrations responsibility to decide which they will associate the university with.

Normally we see the self-appointed activists demanding a voice, but unlike them a company would seem to at least have a right to a seat at the table. They presumably have a serious program of research they would like to see carried out and are willing to back it with serious money. This is of a different order than refusing to wash and carrying protest signs.

I am one of your biggest fans, but I think you may have made unwarranted assumptions in this case.

I have been involved in hundreds of clinical trials sponsored by giant pharmaceutical companies, many at major medical school hospitals (e.g., Stanford, St. Louis, etc.), over the last twenty years. I have negotiated the research contracts on behalf of the schools/hospitals and have served on dozens of institutional review boards (IRBs) overseeing the trials.

I don't recall a single instance of the sponsor interfering with the results or the researchers in any way. And, believe, me the academic researchers/physicians who sit on IRBs are at least as sensitive to interference or unethical behavior as was the fairy tale princess to the pea.

Perhaps my experience is not ideally probative, but it is difficult to conceive what any corporate research sponsor could hope to gain by going after the Chapelas of the world.

I think in the absence of enough facts you have assumed that the Chapela matter is attributable to malice rather than other more benign factors. As the old saying goes, "Never attribute to malice what can otherwise be explained by stupidity."

By the way, nothing corrupts academic and research institutions like the lure of US government money. For prime examples of this phenomenon, take a look at the PATH investigations of Stanford and Penn (among others).

To clarify: I am aware that corporate sponsorship of university research can be conducted ethically, and aware, too, that corporate sponsorship is increasingly necessary to fund academic research. I am also aware that as non-corporate sources of funding dry up, the direction of academic research is increasingly dictated by the companies that are willing to sponsor it. My father spent a career doing research on osteoarthritis; one of his ongoing struggles was to find funding for research that challenged the premises upon which the drug companies were operating.

That said, my post is not intended as a unilateral slam against corporate funding sources but, rather, a reminder that such sources can be abused and sometimes are. From what I can tell--and I freely admit that I am not an expert--the situation at Berkeley is well worth watching closely, as is the more general situation of biotech companies' involvement in university research. I was particularly struck by this quote from the Daily Cal article: "'Dr. Chapela is just the latest in a series of academics and government researchers whose findings, and indeed their very careers, are threatened by corporations with a clear vested interest in biotechnology,' wrote professor E. Ann Clark of the University of Guelph in Canada in a letter to Chancellor Robert Berdahl this month." Perhaps Professor Clark is talking through her hat. But it seems more likely to me that she knows what she is talking about. In any case, she has put her professional reputation on the line by involving herself in Chapela's case in this manner. Clark studies plant agriculture and has written about the corporatization of research in Canadian universities.

Clark's homepage is here. Chapela's is here. And here is a 1999 article from Nature detailing Berkeley's Novartis deal and the concerns of some--among them Chapela, who is quoted--that the deal would endanger academic freedom for faculty and grad students working in Berkeley's College of Natural Resources.

I'm actually getting my PhD in microbiology right as I write this (waiting for committe signatures). I know people in the department, and they've all said (outside of his lab) that the science he's done regarding the "pollution" of native plants with transgenes is crap. These people are no friends of industry either--you're standard Berkeley issued Communists.

I've read his papers. I agree. You can't tell one way or the other. It's just not quality science--he didn't use the right controls.

Chapela's problem is an example of a more insidious problem infecting science these days--politics inserting themselves into actual experiments.

The money from corporations you can see, track and monitor for any fudging. You can't really do that with political views.

Corporate funding is not invariably or automatically corrupting, but it is an area that requires vigilance. The enormous gains in scientific, technological and medical knowledge over the past two centuries (and these gains are real), depend upon the ability to conduct free and disinterested inquiry. This freedom could potentially be compromised by any number of institutions, including church, state or corporation.

That should be "your standard Berkeley-issued Communists."

I know enough grammar to know that's wrong;)

So, taking some of the (ostensibly expert) opinions in this thread at their word, how does that change the larger picture?

Well, we've got loud mouth ideologues in the humanities saying stupid (often vicious) things that attract attention and then claiming "academic freedom" as the impenetrable invisible forcefield around their bank accounts. Now (again, taking folks at their word) we've got an instance of a professor engaging in that ol' bad science and seeking to cast his delayed tenure (and possibly unrenewed contract) as a Big Business conspiracy to undermine his "academic freedom."

Meanwhile, we've got a tenured Brooklyn College professor being edged out of his job, through manipulation of the school's actual procedures, for grading too harshly (read: honestly).

Maybe not going to graduate school did leave me stupider... but it does seem as if this "academic freedom" thing isn't quite working out like it's supposed to!

"The academic freedom debate--not to mention the tenure debate--has centered almost entirely on the irresponsible ideological antics of humanities professors and administrators. That's because those are the easiest, most accessible academics to monitor and to criticize."

I'm not sure that's it. What I do see is the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome, resulting from the knee-jerk appeals to "academic freedom" every time an academic gets in trouble for saying something stupid, whether he said it in an academic context or not.

For the "A is A" crowd, doesn't corporate control of research funding create the most efficient, self-regulating, and honest form of scientific inquiry achievable?

For the non-committed, how can you worry about corporate influence in academic science and still be a libertarianrw?

The other problem here with the assumptions about this case is that "biotechnology" et al is another one of those issues which a group of otherwise not completely unintelligent people have turned into an intellectual fetish.

Frankly, a lot of this nonsense, which has already peaked in Europe and may well result in the starvation of much of Africa as the result of pressures not to import genetically modified food, can be traced to the utter failure of science education at the university level.

The result being that we're turning out generations of students whose verbal skills exceed their scientific knowledge by some great order of magnitude. A person who doesn't know that the earth is roundish can hardly be expected to understand any of the current science issues--so the comments in the student newspaper in this case are essentially worthless.

The interaction between corporate sponsors and academic researchers hardly results in the multiplication of evil, but it is related to the collapse of science and math instruction. What we're seeing now, among other things, is the result of decades of scorn and neglect.

In other words, the frenzied pursuit of external grants in the sciences is more or less parallel to the frenzied pursuit of politicized trivia in the humanities. The one fuels the other.