Berkeley Denies Tenure to Ecologist Who Criticized University's Ties to the Biotechnology

The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The Faculty
January 9, 2004

The University of California at Berkeley has denied
tenure to Ignacio H. Chapela, an assistant professor of
ecology and an outspoken critic of the university's
ties to the biotechnology industry.

The professor and other scientists critical of academic
links to corporations and of genetically modified crops
have anxiously awaited the tenure decision for three
years.

"My immediate reaction was extreme disappointment in
the chancellor," said Mr. Chapela, who joined the
university's department of environmental science,
policy, and management in the fall of 1995. "I hoped he
could see the evidence and take his role as a leader,"
he said of Robert M. Berdahl, the chancellor.

The university's decision, which was first reported in
the December 11 issue of the British journal Nature,
overruled recommendations for tenure by a faculty
committee in Mr. Chapela's department and by an ad hoc
panel of specialists in his field. A committee of the
Academic Senate had recommended against tenure.

Mr. Chapela and his research became controversial when
he published an article in Nature in November 2001 that
said that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated
by material from genetically modified corn. (A 1998 law
had made it illegal to plant transgenic corn in
Mexico.)

Six months after the article appeared, and after
receiving a number of letters contesting the research,
the journal published an editorial note saying that
"the evidence available is not sufficient to justify
the original paper" and that the editors wanted "to
allow our readers to judge the science for themselves."

Mr. Chapela said at the time that he suspected he was
the target of pro-industry scientists and of the
biotechnology industry itself. He had been a vocal
critic of a deal the university made in 1998 with
Novartis, a Swiss-based biotechnology company, in which
the company paid Berkeley $5-million each year for five
years in exchange for early review of all proposed
publications and presentations by faculty members whose
work the company supported.

George A. Strait Jr., assistant vice chancellor for
public affairs, said he was surprised that the news
media would be interested in Mr. Chapela's case.

"He didn't get tenure, period," Mr. Strait said.
Berkeley's tenure process, he added, "is among the most
strenuous, the most fair, and the toughest in the
country. ... No one person, no one institution, no one
group has any undue influence."

Mr. Chapela's findings, made with a graduate student,
David Quist, and reported in the 2001 article about
Mexican maize, were important -- and controversial --
for several reasons. First, agricultural companies that
have produced genetically modified plants have said
that the engineered material does not travel from one
field to another. Second, Mr. Chapela and Mr. Quist
contended that the transferred genes that appeared in
the genetic material of native Mexican corn were
multiplying and hopping around inside the plant's
genome, which could interfere with the normal
functioning of other genes.

"This opens up the whole question of what happens in
the next generation of transgenics," he said. "The
finding means there is no control ... especially in
plants that are wind pollinated," like corn.

UNANIMOUS RECOMMENDATION

Mr. Chapela had been unanimously recommended for tenure
by his department's tenure committee. The decision then
went to a committee of the Academic Senate, which
appointed the ad hoc group of specialists to give an
opinion. The ad hoc committee, whose membership is
normally secret, unanimously said tenure should be
granted, according to Wayne M. Getz, a professor of
environmental science who identified himself as a
member of that committee after he found out that Mr.
Chapela was not getting tenure.

"I've been here 24 years, and my understanding is that
if the department and the ad hoc committee recommend
for tenure, you get tenure," he said.

Mr. Getz wrote a letter to the vice chancellor for
academic affairs questioning the process, and sent
copies of the letter to the ad hoc committee members.
The chairman of the ad hoc committee then notified Mr.
Getz that the senate's committee had asked him to
reconvene the ad hoc committee to review Mr. Chapela's
research again.

At that point, Mr. Getz says, the chairman resigned and
disavowed the committee's report, saying he did not
have the expertise to judge Mr. Chapela's research. The
chairman, whose name Mr. Getz declined to reveal, did
not tell any of the members of the committee about his
decision at the time, Mr. Getz said.

The senate's committee then advised the chancellor to
reject Mr.Chapela's tenure bid -- which the chancellor
did.

"I have no direct evidence of anything," Mr. Chapela
said of the chancellor's decision. "But the crown jewel
of Berdahl's chancellorship is a bioengineering
building." "There's still an enormous amount of
animosity against me because of [my criticism of]
Novartis," Mr. Chapela said. "I cannot help but think
that this influenced the decision" on tenure.

Mr. Chapela said the Academic Senate's tenure committee
had recognized him as an excellent teacher, but cited
the serious challenges to his research and an
inadequate publications record.

Mr. Getz said that the ad hoc panel had carefully
considered Mr. Chapela's research record, but after
noting both the Nature controversy and the amount of
research, decided to recommend tenure anyway. "It's
clear that plant geneticists don't contest his
findings, but his methods," he said.

"I believe the [Academic Senate] committee was pushing
to get a different outcome" from the ad hoc committee,
he said. Mr. Getz is in the same department as Mr.
Chapela, but he is not close to him either personally
or professionally, he said. He called the tenure
review's result "disgraceful" and added that he feared
that powerful researchers who benefited from the
Novartis deal had made Mr. Chapela a victim of
politics.

In June, Mr. Chapela staged his own protest, decrying
the length of his tenure process. He moved a small
desk, two chairs, tea, biscuits, and books outside of
California Hall, where the senate's committee meets and
where the chancellor has his office. For five days and
nights, he held a vigil to protest the unusually long
time that the university was making him wait for a
tenure decision.

Now Mr. Chapela says he plans to appeal the decision
within the normal university process. However, he says
he also plans to sue the institution: "In the last few
days, I've had a lot of phone calls from attorneys."

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