Faculty debate UC's role in national labs
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
The intense systemwide debate on whether the University of California
should compete in a bid to continue managing three national labs
took center stage April 6 at a campus forum sponsored by the UCLA
Academic Senate.
For more than half a century, UC has administered three prestigious
facilities on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy — Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the Los Alamos National Laboratory
(LANL) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
In 2003, following several highly publicized security lapses at
LANL and LLNL, Congress mandated that the management of all five
national labs, including the three run by UC, be open to competitive
bidding by other universities as well as corporations. The strongest
competition is likely to be for LANL — the University of Texas
System and Lockheed Martin Corp. have already expressed interest
in bidding. UC’s management contracts for all three labs will
end on Sept. 30, 2005.
Making a case for UC’s continued management of the labs
was William Frazer, professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley
and UC provost emeritus. He argued that UC’s management of
LANL and LLNL is not so much in the university’s interest
as in the national interest.
“It’s amazing how many people I meet who are unaware
of UC’s management of the labs or why we do it,” Frazer
said. “They assume it’s for the money.” UC gets
an annual reimbursement of $17 million for management costs incurred,
he continued, plus $15 million as a sort of contingency fund, with
another $15 million for collaborative research between the labs
and UC. “Add that up and compare it to the UC budget of $19
billion, and I don’t think we’re in it for the money,”
he said.
Nevertheless, collaborative research “is a real plus,”
said Frazer, pointing to two vital multicampus research units supported
by DOE funds: the Institute of Geophysical and Planetary Physics
and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. But above
all, argued Frazer, UC’s stewardship of national labs improves
the quality of the science there in addition to fostering intellectual
freedom and promoting open scientific exchange despite the pressures
for increased security.
But science that advances classified war-related work is “not
consistent with UC’s mission and commitment to openness,”
countered Walter Kohn, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of
physics at UC Santa Barbara. Scientists at LANL and LLNL design
the nation’s nuclear weapons as well as develop counterterrorism
devices. Kohn said that while he supported UC’s work at LBNL,
which is unclassified, “UC’s reputation provides a deceptive
mantle of academic respectability and ethical probity for LANL’s
and LLNL’s military programs.”
Kohn said he understood the labs’ argument that “the
UC connection enhances their ability to attract superior candidates
into their military programs.” But, he continued, “I
consider the emphasis on increased military programs excessive,
especially when compared to the relative neglect of other urgent
issues such as global warming, population growth and the growing
economic disparity between the world’s rich and poor.”
He proposed that UC phase out its involvement with military work
over the next five to 10 years.
For now, as UC President Robert C. Dynes has indicated, the university
will not decide whether to compete for LANL and LLNL until the DOE
formally invites bids. But to preserve UC’s option to compete,
the regents took action last January to allow the university to
continue preparing for competition.
In a recent Web chat with LLNL employees, Dynes said that, on
the DOE’s urging, UC is considering teaming up with corporate
partners for the continued management of labs. But Dynes stressed
that “a key principle in our partnering will be to maintain
the university’s values with respect to operation of the labs.”
A systemwide poll of Academic Senate members regarding
the management of national labs will be held May 3-16. |
