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Corporate Sponsorship Problematic, Review Finds
By Gwendolyn Bradley
An external review of a controversial five-year $25 million corporate sponsorship agreement between the University of California, Berkeley, and a biotechnology company found that universities should avoid such arrangements. The review, which was conducted by ten scholars from Michigan State University, was initially requested by Berkeley's academic senate.
The deal between Berkeley and Novartis (now Syngenta), which ended in 2003, was unusual in that it involved an entire department of the university. Novartis provided the university's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology with research funding and access to data, expertise, and equipment. In exchange, the company received first rights to license inventions resulting from the department's research. Supporters of the agreement hoped that the influx of money would dramatically stimulate research and increase other research support, while detractors feared that it would threaten academic freedom and influence faculty research topics.
While the review found that neither the best hopes nor the worst fears had come to pass, it faulted Berkeley on several fronts. It criticized the negotiations leading to the arrangement for not following normal procedures and, in the view of many faculty members, circumventing shared governance. The report also took issue with a stipulation that Novartis could choose the best inventions to license, even if the inventions had not been directly or wholly funded by Novartis (in fact, the company did not choose to license any). Moreover, the review found that the deal may have created a conflict of interest among administrators in their review of the tenure case of a professor who strongly criticized it.
Ultimately, the reviewers said, the Novartis deal cannot be considered apart from the context of declining funding that made it attractive to some, and indeed it "highlighted the crisis-ridden state of contemporary public higher education in California, in land grant institutions, and across the country."
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