The process of forging the alliance

Students for Responsible Research are concerned that the decision to enter into this alliance was made largely behind closed doors. This represents a minority in CNR who quickly and quietly pushed the alliance through, before opposition could develop.

In Sept. 1998, the Research Committee of the alliance met and elected members, two months before the contract was signed.
In Oct., 1998, the general CNR community discovered of the proposed alliance in October from a newspaper article.
Repeated attempts to see the alliance documents have failed. In one case a student examining documents he was handed by the Dean's secretary in the Dean's office had his notes confiscated.
In response, SRR gathered over 400 signatures on a petition to the UC Board of Regents and presented the Regents with the petition during the October Board meeting. We were later chastised by the Dean for going outside of the College.
More recently, we drafted a letter to the Dean, the Chancellor, the President of the Academic Senate and the President of the University of California requesting that they NOT support the alliance. We received no feedback from any of the administrators.
The Dean used the "bully pulpit" of Breakthroughs, the glossy color publication of the Office of College Relations sent to donors and alumni of the College. In the issue sent Friday Nov. 13, he announced the Novartis deal as wholly beneficial for CNR, without opposition, and nearly complete. "We have held several College wide forums on the proposed alliance to receive input from faculty, staff, and students and to provide updates on the evolving discussions." This is simply false!
On Thursday Nov. 19, the press spokesman of the pending alliance offered us a meeting with Novartis officials on Monday Nov. 23, the day of the signing. But the following day, Friday Nov. 20, he was unable to confirm, and said that he would tell us Monday morning (the day of the meeting and signing) if that was still available. We would not have time to organize on such short notice.
The full details of the contract became available Nov. 24, the day after the alliance was signed.

The Dean has also closed the debate to faculty:

The Dean sent a memo to all CNR faculty, instructing them to not talk to the press, and to instead refer the press to the new press representative for the CNR-Novartis alliance.
After much delay, the Dean finally sent out a non-binding survey. The faculty received it on Thursday Nov. 19. Yet the alliance was signed on Monday Nov. 23.
Originally, the faculty were to collect the surveys and publish the results. But then the surveys were to be sent to the Dean's office.
Then, due to a clerical error, the surveys were declared invalid, and the process is supposed to begin anew.
Finally completed, the survey revealed significant faculty opposition to many components of the alliance.
The UC Berkeley Academic Senate, partly inspired by our letter, sent a letter of concerns to Dean Rausser. Although he claimed these concerns had been addressed, on the day of the signing of the first contract, Academic Senate issued a statement stating that their concerns had not been adequately addressed and thus they could not endorse the agreement.
NO FACULTY BODY has approved the alliance.