Robert Oppenheimer is Rolling In His Grave
Although we accept the fact that corporations run the world and will drive us out of our homes, place us in small cubicles and drain our minds of any creative thought, can’t they at least wait until we graduate?
Not a chance, proclaims BP.
ON FEB.1, the oil giant BP announced that it had chosen UC Berkeley, in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to lead the largest academic-industrial research alliance in U.S. history. If the deal is approved, BP will give $500 million over 10 years to fund a new multidisciplinary Energy Biosciences Institute devoted principally to biofuels research.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, UC administrators and BP executives immediately proclaimed the alliance — which is not yet a done deal — a victory for higher education and for the environment. But here’s another way to see it. For a mere $50 million a year, an oil company worth $250 billion would buy a chunk of America’s premier public research institutions, all but turning them into its own profit-making subsidiary.
We find it ironic that UC Berkeley is taking the lead in helping out oil corporations, even for a supposed cause for good, and that they’ve allowed the company to subsidize public institutions for their own private benefit. Won’t see many protests about this though.
Big Oil Buys Berkeley [LA Times]
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August 8th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
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