The privatization of education is scary, but so is the mutation of state institutions to accomodate political slandering by politicians who charge "inefficiency" and to generate state revenue to appear "profitable". I will be writing an article about this topic in a magazine a friend is publishing on campus next semester, can anyone point me to some resources concerning states systems and/or similar trends going on elsewhere? jason Rice
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Doug already gave the site for the excerpt below. It begins mid-way through a description of the Novartis/UC Berkeley deal in the Plant and Microbiol Biology Department.
I used to work in this department as a research reader and lab tech/goofer for a blind post-doc friend of mine--on a variety of NSF, NIH, and NASA grants. If you think it sounds grim, consider that my buddy had just received his PhD in biophysics, in the nick of time, since the university closed that department down the summer he graduated. The biophysics dept's critical mistake was to not make themselves sufficiently income baring (grad students, research grants and contracts) or politically threatening enough to survive. Their last great hope was a deal with a local hospital consortium to build a heavy particle accelerator to use in radiation treatments of tumors. The technique depended on the fact that the acceleration of heavy ions can be fine tuned to deliver their momentum at impact (hence radiation) in a narrow focal plane. This allows a thin cross-section of radiation delivered to targeted cells and minimizes damage to the surrounding tissues. It is very effective in killing tumors and cancer cells in certain tissue density ranges particularly in the eye and brain and leaving the path to the target and the background un-effected. Whatever. The deal collapsed, biophysics disappeared.
These privatization pressures were a direct result of the state government budget cuts in higher education ('91-2) directed by then governor Wilson. It's hard to describe the impact without sounding hysterical (May He, and all his spawn hereafter suffer, rot, and die of tertiary syphilis, falling to their eternal dismay into the freezing decrepitude of the ninth circle of everlasting hell.)
So, then after two decades of declining support for higher education (70s-80s), and following a series of severe budget cuts (90s), the stage was set for a long list of sell outs to private corporations in a variety of formats. The same declines and pressures have effected the whole of public education (K-12) in California so that at the beginning of this political process (70s) Calif was ranked first or second in general academic ratings with New York, and now sits somewhere at the bottom, about 48th the last I noticed.
And what was the popular political motivation? The most venal of all, theoretically lower taxes (regressive shifting to sales taxes, fees, etc) via a variety of ballot initiatives and state legislation (thanks to a conservative and self-insulated suburban voter death grip on state politics--reptiles one and all. Thankfully some of them got theirs in the current earthquake insurance, state-run fraud schemes of our now dearly departed insurance commissioner, Chuck Quackenbush--may he join the grand lizard Wilson in the big freezers below)
I could rag on for hours.
Chuck Grimes
(from `The contract and the code, when corporations own knowledge, to do research you have to make a deal', by Kristi Coale, from http://www.universitybusiness.com/9910/novartis.html)
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THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE
What was clear to Rausser [neo-liberal lizard of the first order, CG] and his colleagues long before they began their quest for a research partner was that the funding of agricultural research had changed and that the fundamental structure of public-private partnerships worked against the public interest. Land-grant colleges like Berkeley once could count on several federal and state resources for research dollars.
Chief among these monies were allocations made under the Hatch Experimentation Station Act of 1887, which sought to stimulate research adaptable to the immediate needs of farmers. Funding from the Hatch Act and other traditional sources of money for agricultural research reached its zenith in the 1960s and early 1970s, says Fred Buttel, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Buttel, who studied agricultural research issues at land-grant colleges for an upcoming book, says these funding sources began declining in the early 1980s, in part due to the general decline of federal funds for higher education. Noting that every major university had to make cuts, Buttel said cuts made to schools of agriculture were sometimes disproportionate. For example, Wisconsin let 200 faculty go as part of downsizing measures in the 1980s; 70 of them came from agriculture studies.
But though federal funding decreased, the federal government got actively involved in generating other sources of cash for agricultural research. In fact, the government has played a major role in stimulating private-sector research. The Plant Patent Act of 1930 gave protection for plants reproduced through methods other than seeds. The Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 extended intellectual property protection to many sexually reproduced plants.
A decade later, agricultural inventions--as well as those in medical biology--were given even higher status as intellectual property when the Supreme Court, in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, ruled that General Electric could patent a genetically modified bacterium. This decision paved the way for scientists of all stripes engaged in biotechnology research to patent genes and gene sequences.
Congress also gave corporations and universities an incentive to reach out to one another in 1980 when it passed the Bayh/ Dole Patent Act. Bayh/Dole granted university researchers the right to license patentable inventions developed from federally funded research. Potential licensees, of course, were mostly corporations.
The message sent by these congressional and judicial acts was that there were private funds to be had in agricultural research. Further confirmation of this came in 1982. Buttel recalls a report jointly issued by the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Office of Technology Policy from a conference on science in agriculture where roughly half of the attendees were R&D representatives from private industry, and the other half, researchers from universities and other nonprofit organizations. At the conference, private industry had its own message to deliver: Agricultural research was not serving private industry. "This was both a threat and a promise," says Buttel. "If agriculture schools shifted their research focus, industry would provide the funding."
In response to this and other pressures, Buttel says land-grant colleges rejiggered their faculty and resources to emphasize biotechnology. But the shift didn't bring the windfall that universities expected, and cultural clashes with corporations over academic freedom made researchers cautious, Buttel explains. Through his studies of the land-grant colleges, Buttel found that one source of public funding for research has been increasing since the early 1980s: the National Research Initiative general research funds that come from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Agricultural schools have been able to qualify for these funds as they have shifted their focus to molecular biology and biotechnology.
And this, says Buttel, has skewed research at land-grant colleges away from their mission. In a survey for his studies, Buttel asked university researchers to list who they see as the target clientele for their work and who was being served the least among a group that includes farmers, consumers, and industry. Many agricultural researchers saw farmers as less and less a direct target of their work.
At Berkeley, Rausser, a resource economist, conducted his own study of land-grant colleges and found that fundamental and "public good" research were being pushed aside for the sake of "private good" research. But Rausser came to a different conclusion than Buttel: The solution is not to look for multiple public sources but for strategies to make the private partnerships work better for the university. In the Novartis deal, Rausser wanted to structure the relationship so that the university would have a say in what projects get funded. To this end, the deal provides for a review committee of three Berkeley and two Novartis representatives to allocate funding.
LINING UP RESOURCES
No doubt most people are familiar with the Human Genome Project, a publicly funded endeavor to map out the DNA of humans, mice, and other nonplant species to find the triggers that determine, for example, what makes one person left-handed and another person right-handed or what makes one person more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than another. But who ever heard of the public corn, potato, or soybean genome projects? Until 1998, such projects were virtually nonexistent.
Late that year, the government launched the National Plant Genome Initiative, a public project that will receive $320 million during its first five years. While laudable, the project will be playing catch-up with private industry, which began its big push to control the elements of agricultural biotechnology--seeds, genes, and genetic information--in 1995.
Between 1995 and 1998, major agrochemical companies, including Monsanto, DuPont, and Novartis, spent $30 billion worldwide in alliances with and acquisitions of companies involved in seeds, crop protection technologies, and life sciences. In the same period, these companies plowed another $983.2 million into research efforts in genomics.
As a result of all of these investments, acquisitions, and mergers, the ownership of the genes, as well as the tools for analyzing and generating information about them, is in the hands of these agrochemical companies. This is creating a scientific no-man's-land that the government will eventually have to confront, but that university scientists--and even corporate researchers--are struggling with today.
Donald Penner is in this state of limbo now. The Michigan State University professor was part of a team that developed a genetically engineered turf grass that was resistant to the herbicide Liberty. The grass had commercial potential. But to produce it, Penner had to round up certain research tools that his university didn't have.
Tools of the trade in biotechnology research include cell lines, viruses, DNA sequences, and genetic-mapping information. Because of the head start they have had in developing genetically engineered crops, the agrochemical companies already have a wealth of devices for developing new crop traits. Penner says that it's possible to develop one's own tools, but it costs time and money. Better to use innovations that are already proven, he reasons.
For his grass, Penner had to go to four companies to get all of the resources he needed; and this meant negotiating four separate materials-transfer agreements, each with different terms. Once he saw he had developed something of value, Penner had to go back to each of the companies, ask permission to make his invention public, and offer each of them a chance to reap financial rewards from it. One, Monsanto, turned him down. The reason: The new grass would encourage the use of Liberty, and Liberty was in direct competition with Monsanto's herbicide RoundUp. The invention sits on the shelf.