“Who do we trust?”

he dark side of the knowledge economy is the sellout,” says a U of A scientist who requested anonymity because he feared repercussions for his department’s programs and funding. “Who do we trust? The people doing the [science] work, or the people who are connected to industry? The Centre for Oil Sands Innovation [at the University of Alberta] — can we really trust that? ” An industry-sponsored newspaper ad recently reassured Canadians that thanks to U of A research, “the forest can re-establish itself in a few years, rather than a few decades,” even though the Pembina Institute calculates that only 0.2 percent of oil sands territory had been certified as reclaimed in 2008. “Industry could say, ‘That wasn’t the answer we wanted,’ ” the scientist adds. “But science is all about truth. I have yet to see a large-scale company come in and try to influence things — nobody is that blatant. But if we don’t have proper safeguards in place, if we don’t have rules established to maintain the integrity of the university and the research, then it’s too late.”

U of A is Canada’s leading oil sands research and teaching centre. The method for the first commercially viable extraction process was invented here in the 1920s by Karl Clark, whose basic technology and engineering principles are still in use. The industry’s presence on campus today is most visible at the nine-storey Markin/CNRL Natural Resources Engineering Facility, with its state-of-the-art smart classrooms and specialized instructional and research labs; and at two institutes, the Centre for Oil Sands Innovation and the Oil Sands Tailing Research Facility, which house research chairs dedicated to bitumen and heavy oil development. Even the university’s interdisciplinary School of Energy and the Environment lists oil sands development as a primary field of research, followed by improved recovery, which is also about oil sands (alternative energy and energy and environment are listed as sixth and seventh, respectively). “As a publicly funded institution, we have a responsibility to enhance the public stewardship of important resources,” says Samarasekera. “Whether we like it or not, the world is still dependent on oil and gas, and until we get weaned off them we need them extracted with a much, much higher degree of environmental responsibility. I’m proud of our association with the environmental elements of oil sands work. That for us is a huge reputation booster.”

At the administrative level, Eric Newell, former chairman and CEO of Syncrude, served as the university’s chancellor and as chair of its board of governors. Tim Hearn, former chairman and CEO of Imperial Oil (also part owner of Syncrude), was a co-chair of U of A’s 2008 fundraising campaign, working with Samarasekera to exceed its goals. Prominent among funders has been the industry itself: the oil patch accounted for an estimated $50 million in donations between 2002 and 2008.

The university is also involved in provincial and federal efforts to green the oil sands. The $15-million Canada School of Energy and Environment, jointly administered by U of A, the University of Calgary, and the University of Lethbridge, was funded by the Harper government in 2008. Bruce Carson, Harper’s former senior policy adviser, became its full-time executive director following the 2008 federal election. He was said to have been instrumental in developing the Conservative government’s climate change policy, including its controversial strategy for global climate change negotiations. (“When our product is called ‘dirty oil,’ that really puts me off,” he said in 2008.) According to one energy consultant in Alberta, the CSEE is “using taxpayer dollars to create a think tank under the auspices of a university with a political mandate,” part of more than $2 billion in public funding and subsidies intended to “rapidly ‘decarbonize’ fossil fuel production” in Canada. Carson has described CSEE as a vehicle to consult with industry and government in setting the research agenda for science. “We can inform the decisions,” he told Alberta Oil. “We can do that by telling both sides — industry and government — about the science. There’s an opportunity here to make science relevant to government… We’re not just going to be an oil sands apologist.”

Samarasekera is a member of Carson’s board at CSEE, and she and Carson attended the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen as advisers to the Canadian government — he discreetly, she as a “prominent Canadian.” In a June address to the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce in Toronto, Samarasekera promoted oil sands crude to Indian markets and beyond: “With the world’s second-largest supply of non-renewable energy after Saudi Arabia, Canada is a safe, secure, and reliable energy supplier,” she said, echoing the talking points favoured by industry and the federal government. “And we take seriously the responsibility to develop energy technologies in environmentally sustainable ways. This effort to develop our energy resources responsibly has been under way for decades.”

Asked about the implications of such linkages, she replied, “There is a danger for us to be seen as partnering with industry. But it’s no different [than] accusations that may have been levelled at various universities about the pharmaceutical industry, or any other industry that the public can from time to time have concerns about. The real issue is for the university to maintain some very, very strict principles about the terms and conditions under which you partner with industry. And that this should not be about fee for service.” Still, she makes it clear that she doesn’t oppose commercialization of research. As an engineer, “the fact of the matter is, by working with that industry we actually brought improvement. So yes, a risk, but that’s what universities need to do, to not be afraid of stepping out and working on challenging issues, even at the risk of being labelled in certain ways by certain groups.”

David Schindler, Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology, does see cause for concern. “I worry a little bit about a university in a petrol state becoming a petrol university,” he says. Schindler has been working at U of A for twenty years, accumulating a large body of research on water, boreal ecosystems, public policy, and global carbon and nitrogen budgets, and he has become one of the province’s most outspoken voices on the environmental impacts of oil sands development. “Indira has a very tough job keeping the balance. We certainly do not want a university that just reflects the position of the largest industry in the province, no matter what it would be, and I think she has done a very even-handed job of that.” Although his work sometimes challenges the oil sands industry, Schindler says he hasn’t experienced direct interference. “We’ve got really good research going on in this department that is not directly connected with oil sands,” he says, “and where it is, a lot of it indicates the oil sands are not such a great idea. But I have seen absolutely no restriction on people being able to speak out and say that, if that is what their findings show.”

Schindler turned seventy this year, and he will be retiring soon. Because of erratic provincial budgets and hiring freezes, some of his well-established classes will probably disappear. “It isn’t deliberate,” he says, “but we have had no ability to recruit.” Research on the wetlands, the most vulnerable feature of Alberta’s boreal forest, will likely stop when another wetlands scientist retires, as well. Wetlands cannot be terraformed, and the parkland-style forests that industry replaces them with through “reclamation” are significantly less rich in biodiversity. Neglecting this area of research would be a prime example of how an unbalanced approach to funding research can both narrow the field of scientific inquiry, and subsidize industries unable or unwilling to solve their own problems. “I don’t think scientists should make the political decisions,” he says, “but science should be [on the table], especially environmental science. In [industry’s] view, the only thing they want on the table is dollars and jobs.”

The Unhappy Campus

amarasekera knew the honeymoon was over when the posters started going up. Last October, a group named the Samarasekera Response Team covered the U of A campus with slogans such as “WOMEN: STOP! DROP! MEN: ENROLL!” and “STOP THE FEMIMENACE” and “WOMEN ARE ATTACKING CAMPUS!” Several days earlier, in an interview with the Edmonton Journal, she had mentioned declining male enrolment, glibly stating, “I’m going to be an advocate for young white men, because I can be. No one is going to question me when I say we have a problem.” The Samarasekera Response Team took issue with her apparent lack of concern for the under-representation of women and minorities in many faculties, particularly at higher pay grades. The posters made national news, and not only because Samarasekera had opinions about the boy crisis in education (a big deal in a province that has the lowest levels of university and college participation in Canada). It was news because campus security rounded up the Samarasekera Response Team, and, as team member Derek Warwick tells it, threatened them with disciplinary action under the university’s student behaviour code, which meant possible suspension or expulsion. They were told “we weren’t ever to post posters on campus again,” he says.

The original idea was to do something “fun and political,” says Warwick, although for some of the others it was more than an attention-getting ploy. Student expenses had been rising for years, including annual, incremental increases in tuition fees and the introduction of a new non-instructional fee of $290 for such amenities as common student space, sustainability and services. Many saw the new fees as a cash grab at time when the university appeared to have money to build new buildings, pay its president $830,000 a year, and take out expensive ads in the New York Times to raise its profile.

In the following months, other, less playful posters turned up. One declared, “President Indira makes more than President Obama!” and provided a comparative salary breakdown for the university’s executive team — half of whom, incidentally, are women. The poster claimed that their salaries had increased by a collective 88 percent since 2004. While these new posters were anonymous, speculation pointed to staff, possibly tenured faculty. The Samarasekera backlash had begun. Some people had quietly ridiculed her plan to make the university a world-beater from the outset, but the economic hardships brought on by the recession had multiplied the number of critics. “This year, it’s been a setback for us, there’s no question,” she admits. “We had so much momentum, and like overnight, we had to take $60 million out of our budget. That’s a pretty big number, even for a $1.45-billion budget.”

Class sizes at U of A have increased, while course selection and lab space have decreased, yet students are paying higher fees and incurring more debt. Even the prestigious medical school is offering fewer spots in the fall of 2010 (167, down from 188 in 2009). Carl Amrhein, U of A’s provost, admits that the university has about 500 fewer professors than it should. “The current economic climate has cost us some capacity, so we do the best we can,” he says. He monitors the price of natural gas daily, having learned that when it hits $9 or $10 a unit the university enjoys funding increases from the province. Lately, prices have been stuck at less than half that, which doesn’t bode well for the immediate future. “We’re stalled,” he says. “But if you scan North America, we’re still doing pretty well. It’s nothing like what California and Washington are facing.”