Simpson
4-19-2007
Meeting in a special session, UC Berkeley’s faculty senate struggled with parliamentary procedures to reject resolutions that would have asked Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to delay signing a $500 million deal with oil giant BP to create an alternate energy research institute.
With the facuty’s failure to stand up, the UC Board of Regents needs to prevent Cal Berkeley from becoming Big Oil U.’s next campus, UCBP.
An article by Richard Paddock in the Los Angeles Times lays out what’s at stake. He writes:
"A $500-million deal between UC Berkeley and oil giant BP to establish a joint energy laboratory has prompted growing protests by students and faculty who fear the arrangement will compromise the university’s integrity.
"Some critics charge that the privately negotiated pact will turn the campus into ‘UCBP.’ And they question aspects of the deal that would give the oil company unusual influence at the campus, including exclusive control over some of the institute’s expected findings."
The faculty senate meeting highlighted a split on campus between many professors from the humanities who questioned the deal’s terms and the secret way it was negotiated, and faculty from the sciences. Not surprisingly, the scientists are most likley to benefit directly from BP money and other corporate funding.
More attention was on the minutia of Roberts Rules of Order than on any substantive debate of the issues and it was clear the fix was in. It was obvious from the beginning that a so-called “compromise resolutions” handed out on yellow sheets of paper as the hour-and-a-half session started would carry the day.
I attended the meeting in Boalt Hall after joining Prof. Ignacio Chapela at a news conference to speak out against the deal. He was among the professors who had called for the special session. We’re not the only people asking for a delay and a full examination of the implications of the proposed deal with BP.
The Sacramento Bee editorialized:
“Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of the University of California, Berkeley, needs to delay signing a contract with the oil company BP that would create the largest academic-industry consortium in U.S. history…
“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.”
The faculty senate struggled with the parliamentary complexities and then, with little serious discussion of the issues, almost devoting more attention to the placement of a set of parentheses, rammed through the “compromise.”
It says:
“Be it resolved that the Academic Senate instruct the Chair of the Berkeley Division to advise the Chancellor that an adequately supported committee composed of four members of the Academic Senate (the chairs of the Budget Committee, the Committee of Research, the Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation, and the Committee on Academic Freedom) be constituted to serve in an advisory capacity to the chancellor in the initiation and oversight of the Energy Biosciences Institute and similar future endeavors.”
There’s an old joke that has made the rounds of most universities: Why are academic politics so savage? It’s because the stakes are so low.
Sadly, this is one of the rare cases where the profs’ votes really mattered in the world outside the ivory tower. The majority of them let us down.
Will the UC Board of Regents exercise its authority to examine the deal in detail?