Public universities are increasingly turning to private corporations to fund research. Increasingly, this trend includes exclusive alliances. Although these alliances bring in much needed research funding to the universities, they overlook several grave pitfalls:

The alliances can have significant negative impacts on teaching and research. For example, a graduate student in the department covered by this alliance had two years of research shelved because he or she must now work on research funded by the alliance.
This may harm the reputation of the universities and their ability to attract top faculty and students interested in sustainable agriculture.
The alliances and their process of development and implementation often create conflicts among administration, faculty, staff, and students. The process of developing and implementing this alliance has excluded the concerns of students and faculty numerous times.
By creating alliances with these corporations, the state universities implicitly supports the basic goals, methods, and record of social responsibility of the corporations. These include controversial directions such as biotechnology and genetic engineering. Specifiacally, Novartis has behaved socially irresponsibly.
In contrast, many faculty and students believe that development of less reliance on industrial agriculture is a better goal. Yet these alliance usually represent a shift in funding and priorities away from low impact and sustainable agriculture. For example, the Center for Biological Control at Berkeley has lost all funding in recent years.
This is an alliance between a public land-grant institution - which is charged with teaching the state’s students, conducting public-good research, and extending information to the people of the state - with a private company, which has as its main goal the creation of profit. We believe that creating such an alliance is in direct conflict with our mission as a public university and that establishing such a precedent, on such a large scale, is dangerous. This is especially true in the case of genetically engineered crops, which have the potential to put agriculture at risk.
In effect, many of these alliances use tax dollars for the research and development of private corporations, which may be foreign.
The alliances can create dependency on the funding from an external private organization.
The alliances can create opportunities for financial conflicts of interest. The university administrators or faculty who forge the deals often have present or potential direct or indirect interests in their successful completion. This can blind them to what is best for the greater university. Yet the alliances may have weak oversight.
The alliances may shift liability from the corporation to the public university.
Such an alliance creates a competitive precedent for other schools to follow suit. UC Davis and Monsanto as well as the University of Illinois and Pfizer are developing similar alliances.

Other projects at Berkeley: We have obtained the annual amounts of other sponsored projects at UC Berkeley, but sponsor and department are not explicitly linked: by corporate sponsor, by department sorted by amount, by department sorted by department.