Issue of
February 11, 1998

Casper calls for ‘common sense’ in regulation

BY GERHARD CASPER

When the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education visited this fall, I raised a seldom-examined pressure on university costs (and, thus, indirectly on tuition): excessive government regulation. Tuition does not pay for regulatory costs ­ indeed, even full tuition covers only about two-thirds of the true cost of attending Stanford. However, the university is forced to pay regulatory costs from unrestricted gifts, endowment and investment earnings that otherwise might be applied to restraining tuition.

The costs of complying with federal, state and local regulations are considerable at almost any organization in American society. However, research universities bear some particularly irrational costs. Let me give you an example. Our dean of research, Charles Kruger, was working with a new faculty member to put in place some combustibles for a lab. These were non-toxic fuels and no unusual gases were being used, but meeting the government regulations still cost $600,000. Dean Kruger asked how many kilowatts of combustion were being produced and, when he got home, looked at the amount of combustion produced by his own home's furnace and water heater. He found they were roughly the same. Now, housing in California is expensive, but no one would dream of paying $600,000 to set up a home furnace and water heater.

By extremely conservative accounting, Stanford absorbs approximately $21 million per year in ongoing costs related to compliance with government regulations. (And that figure does not include any capital costs.) This equals approximately 7.5 cents of every tuition dollar. And it does not even count the value of the time spent in compliance-related meetings and paperwork, which reduces the time available for teaching and research ­ probably another 5 cents of each tuition dollar.

When I say "government" regulation, I do not wish to imply one uniform set of regulations. Take a one-pint bottle of alcohol, which could be found in most of our medicine chests. If in a university laboratory, it falls under the scrutiny of at least six different regulatory agencies, all of whom have varying administrative requirements for that same container. These include:

• The air quality management district, which regulates the use of material to minimize air releases.
  
  
• The sewer district, which regulates storage and disposal of material.
  
  
• OSHA, which regulates use, handling and storage.
  
  
• The local fire department, which regulates the amount, use and storage of the material.
  
  
• The county environmental health department, which regulates use, handling, storage and disposal.
  
  
• The state hazardous waste agency, which regulates handling and storage of material when it is no longer wanted in the laboratory.

Even when dealing with a single agency, we often are confronted by regulations intended for an entirely different setting. California developed hazardous waste regulations aimed at large-scale industrial settings. That was a wise decision, because 99.99 percent of all hazardous chemical waste comes from manufacturing and industrial processes. State officials freely admit that the regulations did not take into account the nature of universities ­ which typically deal in water-glass­sized containers, not 55-gallon drums, and produce less than 0.01 percent of the waste. Nonetheless, the California EPA has chosen to rigidly apply the same rules to university labs.

For example, state regulators require that every lab container carry a special label itemizing six specific pieces of information, even if the chemical is in its original container labeled by the manufacturer. An error on any item is a violation. In one actual incident, a Stanford graduate student put the wrong date on a bottle because his calendar watch was off by a single day, and a state inspector that day noted the resulting labeling violation.

Far more difficult for us than labeling are such complicated issues as authority over laboratory practices, the definition of laboratory, the requirements for supervision and storage of chemicals, the length of time substances can remain in a lab, when a substance becomes a waste, and training documentation.

Universities certainly are not above the law and we care about true protection for people and the environment. However, there must be a place for common sense. It is the country that will suffer if the research enterprise is smothered by irrational red tape. And, I will add, it is students and families who suffer as funds that could go to academic purposes and perhaps greater tuition relief are eaten up by excessive regulation. SR