A University Cuts a Tricky Deal : UC Irvine lets a foreign company move in under the same roof

While some in American industry were preoccupied with mergers and takeovers in the 1980s, foreign businesses, primarily Japanese, built relationships with one of the great resources of the United States, the institutions of higher learning. It was possible in part because U.S. universities were increasingly under pressure to come up with money to finance facilities and endow chairs.

This is what happened at UC Irvine, where Hitachi Chemical agreed in the mid-1980s to to build a biotechnical research center to be shared, duplex-style, with university lab facilities. It opened on campus with the arrival of the new decade. Here was an example of how a foreign company, shrewdly looking to the future, found a ready intellectual gold mine to serve a growing appetite for long-term research.

But this marriage of convenience would prove to contain fuel for today’s soul-searching about America’s economic competitiveness. The much-lamented lack of commitment to research and development by U.S. firms--which might well have cut such deals for themselves--is an element in the United States’ current stock-taking.

The fact that the Irvine agreement involves biotech also reflects the concern about American know-how getting away, for this is research on the cutting edge. And with Japan-bashing in full bloom, critics wonder why a public university in trend-setting California let the Japanese build on taxpayers’ land and move in under the same roof.

The university prefers to regard this as “a duplex� tenancy arrangement, one with built-in protections for university research. But this understandably is a highly charged arrangement, getting a good deal more attention than the same kind of setup the university previously had with an American pharmaceutical company.

Though such public-private university tenancies are expedient, the question is whether they are wise. The willingness of a university, starved for capital, to allow private industry to build on campus--and inevitably to have access to leading researchers--must raise concern. The 1960s campus activists clearly saw one relevant point in this kind of situation: Although the university serves the larger community and exists in the real world, it is a special place that must be protected from corrosive influence.

The reality is that the UC Irvine-Hitachi deal is not very different from many other existing campus-industry arrangements. But such arrangements will be trouble- some if public universities find themselves granting access and leaking knowledge in return for much needed lab space. UC Irvine expresses confidence that it has built in sufficient safeguards. Still, this is a fine line indeed--and it would be so whatever the nationality of the firm.