Digging for Oil on Campus

The hunt for lower-cost oil and natural gas has taken ChevronTexaco Corp. from Alaska to the Middle East.

Now the search has brought the San Ramon, Calif., company to a truly exotic location: USC.

ChevronTexaco is giving $5 million to USC’s School of Engineering to develop advanced technologies that will, the company and USC hope, figure out how to suck fossil fuels from the ground more cheaply and efficiently.

“We, in effect, are opening a company office at USC,” said Donald L. Paul, vice president and chief technology officer for ChevronTexaco.

Corporate-college research linkups aren’t new. But USC and others have become increasingly aggressive in seeking out company money to replace eroding government funds and offer programs that will attract students who want degrees they figure will lead surely to jobs.

Critics call these efforts the “corporatization” of academia and see the potential for conflicts of interest and other problems, such as companies trying to squelch the release of research they helped underwrite. Corporations, which have long shelled out big bucks to get their names on buildings, now are trying to influence the curriculum, the detractors say.

“There’s a very important and legitimate role for universities to play in working with industry to try to speed the translation of academic research findings into useful products,” said former Harvard University President Derek Bok, who has written a book on the subject. “But universities need to be encouraged to do it the right way and not get into bad habits.”

The origin of research funds can affect not just the research subject but also the results, studies show. In a report published in January in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., Yale University investigators said that industry-sponsored biomedical research was 3.6 times more likely to produce results favoring the company footing the bill than research funded in other ways, such as by the federal government and foundations.

Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor of urban and environmental policy and planning, has spent more than two decades probing the relationship between researchers and corporations, including financial connections between faculty and companies. The results are troubling, particularly in the arena of biomedical research but also in other areas, said Krimsky, author of the newly published “Science in the Private Interest.”

“In how many of the chemicals that we do not regulate, or regulate poorly, was the research based upon studies that were funded by the chemical companies?” Krimsky asked.

He argues that a hard line should be drawn, particularly in drug and other research that directly affects consumers.

“Why are we treating scientists differently from judges or politicians?” Krimsky said. “In most of those areas, we have prohibited conflicts of interest, but in science it’s quite different.”

Last year, Stanford University was criticized when it announced plans for a $225-million center that would develop technology to combat greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. Much of the money for the 10-year Global Climate and Energy Project would come from companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp., that produce the oil and gas blamed for generating the emissions. Stanford is moving forward with the project anyway.

UC Berkeley was blasted in 1998 for accepting a five-year grant of $25 million to its department of plant and microbial biology from biotechnology corporation Novartis Co. The money represented more than a third of the department’s annual funding, and naysayers feared it would give the Swiss company too much leverage over research. But despite fears of conflicts sharp enough to prompt state Senate hearings, that five-year affiliation ended quietly last month with scant evidence of problems.

So far, USC has largely avoided controversy, though it has been aggressive in pursuing corporate support. The university says it has controls in place to preserve its academic integrity. In the case of the ChevronTexaco partnership, university officials say both sides clearly will benefit.

The grant is bankrolling the establishment of the Center for Interactive Smart Oilfield Technology, where corporate and university scientists are to work side by side to create oil fields that pretty much run themselves.

The plan is for ChevronTexaco to contribute production data from its oil fields -- normally closely held corporate secrets -- and for USC researchers to supply such developments as three-dimensional imaging technologies and expertise in signal transmission. Ownership of any software or gadgets invented by researchers would be subject to negotiation.

The effort could lead to a way to remotely drill and operate wells in water too deep for divers to navigate or to allow faraway experts to diagnose problems in balky equipment, said Iraj Ershaghi, director of USC’s petroleum engineering program. Robotic devices would first have to be invented that could travel through miles of water, dirt and rock and transmit signals to experts on shore, said Ershaghi, who will run the center with an executive from ChevronTexaco.

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‘Advance the Science’

“We hope to be able to advance the science part of it, but also we hope to come up with gadgets, software and all kinds of hardware to make this thing possible,” Ershaghi said.

These days, he added, research without any thought of a practical application is an unaffordable luxury. “We don’t have the resources anymore in any area to do fancy work that nobody ever would benefit from.”

The ChevronTexaco oil field center will be similar to an aerospace industry center at USC established a year ago with $10 million from Korean Air Lines Co. and Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp.

The Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering is exploring the use of Internet technologies in aircraft maintenance and repair, and “everyone is delighted with the project and its progress,” said Robert J. Keady, Pratt & Whitney vice president for the Asia Pacific region. “I only see an upside for us and for the university.”

Both grants were pulled in primarily through the efforts of the USC School of Engineering. The school’s dean, C.L. Max Nikias, won that job two years ago partly on the strength of a detailed PowerPoint presentation laying out his proposed strategy for winning new funding from government and corporate sources.

Among engineering schools, USC leads the pack in terms of funding dollars from all sources per tenured faculty member, at nearly $1 million each, according to the latest annual ranking by U.S. News & World Report.

That puts USC in the eighth spot overall among the nation’s engineering education powerhouses. Nine years ago, when Nikias formed the school’s celebrated Integrated Media Systems Center with funding from the National Science Foundation and corporations, the school ranked 21st.

“Part of my strategy is to establish relationships with large corporations,” Nikias said. “We listen to industry, and we react to what their needs are.”

Several corporations have signed on to the school’s “distance education network,” which broadcasts graduate-level and continuing education classes over the Internet to more than 800 students around the country.

The program, like a souped-up correspondence school, has doubled in size in the last two years as more companies encourage employees to pursue advanced degrees and other training remotely, Nikias said.

Despite the engineering school’s growing success in attracting industry money, most of the school’s nearly $135 million in annual funding expenditures still comes from federal grants, Nikias noted.

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Life After University

Ties between companies and universities have been a perennial source of debate, said James Baker, chief executive of Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, the research arm of Fuji Xerox Co.

Baker, who chairs the industry advisory board of the USC Engineering School’s media lab, said he had worked with schools whose graduates have complained that their coursework wasn’t practical enough. “The university owes it to their students to prepare them for life after the university,” he said, and that can mean accepting corporate alliances.

Former Harvard President Bok frets in his book “Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education” that corporate sponsorships “may be changing the nature of academic institutions in ways we will come to regret.” He finds total abstention to be an unrealistic goal and suggests colleges develop stiff guidelines to prevent conflicts of interest.

“These institutions are all highly pressed for money,” Bok said in an interview. “It’s especially unlikely that you are going to forgo what you see as a profitable opportunity if you see other universities doing the same thing.”

USC officials say the university has a written policy that clearly spells out the limits of influence on research by any funding source, whether a corporation, government or a foundation. The details of all research relationships are monitored by the university’s office of compliance.

“Sometimes there are difficult ones, but you just have to sit down and peel it like an onion, layer by layer,” said Cornelias Sullivan, vice provost of research. “In my six years in this job, we have never had a problem.”

Nikias acknowledged that there can be gray areas involving conflicts between researchers and funders. Even so, he said, “without compromising academic integrity, we can be very flexible in how we negotiate with industry.”