Rush of UC to Agreement with BP Undermines Shared Governance and Transparency

By Professor Anne Wagner
University of California, Berkeley

[Editor's note: Professor Wagner of the Berkeley Art History Department was one of 17 faculty members who called for the special faculty senate meeting last Thursday to consider the university's proposed deal with BP. She spoke in favor of resolutions that would have delayed signing the deal and required approval by the faculty senate. Please note, these are the remarks given and not the previously posted comments.]

Let me begin by making one thing clear. The resolutions we have brought to this Senate are not born of some naïve or quixotic conviction that a great public university should have no truck with the dominant social powers in the world around it – including the great multi-national corporations.

Instead, this is a debate about the balance that ought to be struck between those massive organizations whose goal is profit, and the university, whose goals and responsibilities are different. It is about the difference between the university, or some of its members, entering into productive dialogue with this giant oil company or that network of genetic engineering firms, and the university, or more and more of it, becoming the corporation’s paid servant, with more and more of the outcomes of hired research never entering the public realm, and less and less of the actual detail of university/industry agreement being available for the university's normal oversight bodies to inspect and debate.

Of course we know that some, maybe many, universities have thrown up their hands and abandoned the idea that a difference – indeed, an active tension – might exist between what a BP wants from research and what a great university community wants. Berkeley shouldn’t follow suit. Too much about the rush toward the arrangement with BP suggests that it has.

You ask what in the moves taken toward a Berkeley-BP agreement, has set alarm bells ringing for so many of us? Of course the alarm has something to do with our skepticism of BP as a reliable and trustworthy partner. We believe we have every right, given the public record, to doubt BP’s good faith. If it proves true that the proposed contract allows BP to withdraw at any moment, more or less without penalty, then it would be hard to imagine an agreement with fewer safeguards against raw commercial pressure. And what if the head of the EBI is not a Berkeley professor? But it’s not these issues that rankle most deeply. If we knew the deal’s terms, then at least a debate could begin about their wisdom and compatibility with the university’s mission. But we don’t know the terms, and if the contract is sealed, we never shall.

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