NYTimes: BMW’s Custom-Made University

[RedStripe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/bu...ess/29bmw.html



August 29, 2006
BMW’s Custom-Made University
By LYNNLEY BROWNING
CLEMSON, S.C. — When Clemson University received $10 million from the German automaker BMW in 2002, the money helped jump-start a $1.5 billion automotive research and educational center. It also led to a partnership that both the automaker and the university acknowledge has grown extraordinarily close.

In return for the largest cash donation ever received by the school, Clemson gave the company some unusual privileges, including a hand in developing a course of study. Clemson’s president drives a silver BMW X5 sport utility vehicle, compliments of BMW, whose only North American plant is 50 miles away.

At Clemson’s urging, BMW in large part created the curriculum for an automotive graduate engineering school. The company also drew up profiles of its ideal students; it gave Clemson, a state-supported university, a list of professors and specialists to interview, and even had approval rights over the school’s architectural look.

With its first students to be in class this fall, the project, known as the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research, is a particularly rich example of cooperation between a multinational corporation and a university. Several automotive suppliers, including Michelin, the tire company, and the Timken Company, a maker of bearings, have also contributed financing to the project, in part by endowing professorships at the new graduate school.

But BMW is the lead player. Details about the arrangement between Clemson and BMW have emerged from a lawsuit brought last year by a Florida developer who claims the university had signed a deal with him to start an automotive center.

Clemson’s original plan with the developer was to build a high-speed wind tunnel that would cater to Nascar race teams and carmakers, including BMW. But the developer claims that BMW muscled him aside to pursue its far more ambitious plans.

Some critics wonder whether the university is blurring the line between academia and business and question how much control companies should have in such partnerships.

Alliances between universities and corporations are not uncommon, but some have drawn fire. In 1998, the University of California, Berkeley, and the pharmaceutical company Novartis reached a $25 million deal to develop drugs, which was later criticized by some students and faculty members as compromising academic freedom. Other university partnerships, some with automakers, have been less controversial. Ohio State University, for example, is working with General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Honda on fuel efficiency and other projects.

“It’s a new model to invite private interests to partner so aggressively with you,” said Robert T. Geolas, the director of the International Center for Automotive Research, which the university regards as crucial to its goal of becoming a Top 20 public university. But Mr. Geolas added that “there ought to be a way to put together the two without disrupting their core missions.”

Prof. Sheldon Krimsky, who teaches urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University and has written on the commercialization of universities, said, “It looks like you’ve got a profit-making corporation that’s calling the shots in a university setting.”

Robert M. Hitt, manager of public relations at BMW’s plant in Greer, S.C., says that “BMW has not captured Clemson.” But he later added, “Where are we going to get our future managers from, our future department heads?”

Dr. Christian E. G. Przirembel, Clemson’s vice president for research and economic development, argued that although BMW and Clemson had “two very different missions and very different cultures, we are a not-for-profit, and our core mission is to educate.”

The partnership, he said, is in line with the university’s land-grant mission of helping drive the regional economy.

Japanese and German carmakers have turned the region into a Detroit of the South. According to state figures, the auto industry employs 31,000 people in South Carolina. The BMW S.U.V. that Clemson’s president, James F. Barker, is driving is part of a pool that the automaker has provided to state leaders.

A Clemson spokeswoman, Sandy Woodward, said the car, which can be traded in every 10,000 miles, was assigned to Mr. Barker by the Clemson University Foundation. Mr. Barker’s employment contract, like those of many university presidents, includes the use of a car.

Merrill Goozner, director of the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group based in Washington, said the use of the car was highly unusual given the partnership between Clemson and BMW.

The Florida developer who is suing Clemson, Clifford D. Rosen, contends in the court papers that BMW and state officials worked together to push him out of a deal he had with Clemson. Mr. Rosen claims that BMW threatened to take its business elsewhere unless it could make the project serve its own research and educational needs.

The lawsuit has produced documents that indicate how much control BMW sought in the project.

Handwritten notes from the files of Doug Richardson, the chief financial officer of Clemson’s endowment, of an exchange between Clemson and BMW officials say that “BMW is going to drive the entire campus.” The notes, dated August 2002, were obtained by Mr. Rosen’s lawyer through discovery and later filed with the court.

The notes also indicate that BMW officials were sharply critical of Clemson officials’ initial plan to include Mr. Rosen in the project.

By September 2002, a letter written by a lawyer at Nelson, Mullins, Riley & Scarborough, a law firm representing the university, said that Clemson would “ensure that while grants and endowments may be received from other automotive manufacturers, BMW will have an exclusive status with regard to the Clemson campus.”

Through its new school and unusual partnership with BMW, Clemson becomes the first university in the nation to offer a doctoral degree in automotive engineering.

The Center for Automotive Research is being built in stages on 250 wooded acres along Interstate 85 on the outskirts of Greenville, 50 miles northeast of the Clemson campus.

This fall, about seven graduate students and their professors will work side-by-side with BMW engineers, mostly on BMW-related projects, at the old Clemson campus until the new school is completed sometime next year. The program will train engineers who can design, build and market high-tech vehicles and who may likely work for BMW after graduation.

Up to 30 percent of the research that the Clemson graduate students and professors will perform will be financed by the private sector, mostly BMW, Dr. Przirembel said, giving the German automaker significant control of the research results. That is nearly double what Clemson has received in other research areas.

The university will own any intellectual property that the center produces. BMW will hold licenses to any patents that emerge from its work, and Clemson will receive royalty payments on the licenses, Dr. Przirembel said.

So far, about $215 million has been invested in the project, mostly by the state of South Carolina. Over the next 20 years or so, Clemson hopes to draw in other automotive industry players to set up research and commercial testing centers, in five interconnected clusters of modern buildings erected along hilltops among dense, lush woods.

BMW’s $10 million gift endowed two professorships at the graduate school, the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. Graduate Engineering Center, named after the former South Carolina governor who lured the carmaker to the state in 1992. The state matched the pledge, and kicked in an additional $25 million to build the school.

Next to the school is the BMW Information Technology Research Center, built for the sole use of BMW with $15 million in state funds last year as part of an incentive package related to BMW’s $400 million expansion of its nearby plant. That plant now makes one in six BMW’s. The gleaming, high-tech research center, completed last summer according to BMW’s design, will use Clemson graduate students to work on BMW’s custom-ordered, proprietary projects in museumlike, airy bays.

While Clemson ultimately did not hire any people on the BMW-provided list of professors and engineers, it did ask its candidates to sit through interviews with BMW. A network council composed of BMW managers meets monthly to advise Clemson on the curriculum. BMW also has a representative on the automotive school’s advisory board and will review students’ papers to ensure that proprietary information is not submitted for publication. Clemson’s new automotive school has its roots in the high-speed wind tunnel that is at the heart of the dispute with Mr. Rosen, the Florida developer.

Mr. Rosen’s lawsuit says that in early 2001, the head of the Brooks Institute for Sports Science at Clemson, who is now deceased, approached Mr. Rosen about building a world-class center focused on the motor sports industry. The plan revolved around the $50 million wind tunnel, for which Clemson would sell time at $2,000 or more an hour to Nascar and Formula One teams.

Clemson pitched the idea to BMW. But what BMW said it wanted, according to the court documents, was a pipeline of engineers through a new graduate school and a new proprietary research center right next door.

Clemson embraced that idea while continuing to work with Mr. Rosen, and by May 2002 it had signed a contract with him for the project. But by 2003, Mr. Rosen contends in his lawsuit, BMW threatened to move its research center and financing for the Clemson graduate center to Tennessee if Clemson did not work directly with BMW and cut him out.

A trial date has not been set for the suit. Mr. Rosen would only say, “I believe that I was treated unfairly.” His lawyer, James Gilreath, declined to comment.

Both Clemson and BMW declined to discuss Mr. Rosen’s lawsuit. Recently, Clemson officials filed affidavits saying that BMW had exerted no undue control over the project and that negotiations had been at arm’s length.

Outside the courtroom, Clemson officials say they are delighted with the input from BMW, whose sprawling factory churns out Z4 roadsters and X5 S.U.V.’s.

“When you’re working with the ultimate driving machine, you have to keep on your toes,” Mr. Barker, Clemson’s president, said, quoting BMW’s marketing slogan.

[stressdoc]

Cool. Now if they would just become interested in neurophysiological reactions to bimmerdom, maybe I could get an endowed chair and we could all do some interesting research on the autobahn.