In my opinion the academic freedom argument is just a cop-out for not having an adequate safety program.  Does this faculty member have the "academic freedom" to expose and injure students and other people in the building?  Does he have the "academic freedom" to violate the law?

Also, the article seems to imply that lab safety costs a lot of money.  This is a myth.

My lab safety program in my research lab at Michigan Tech REDUCED my research costs by an estimated 15 to 20%.  These cost savings occurred by reducing the time to graduate for my grad students doing experimental work.  I estimate that my safety program reduced the graduation time for a PhD by 1 year and for an MS by 6 months.  This time reduction resulted from the rigorous Job Safety Assessment (JSA) review that was used BEFORE the grad student could even begin to order any equipment for their experiment.  The rigorous review by the very experienced JSA committee always found significant improvements in the apparatus and procedure.  When I was in grad school in the 1970s it was more of a "trial and error" approach to building my apparatus - which took a lot of time.  Not so much with a JSA review.  There are also cost savings by not ordering equipment that later turns out to be unnecessary.

I was on the committee for an MS student for another faculty.  He was building a really complex apparatus to produce a fuel additive.  We did several JSA reviews and made very significant modifications to his original design - the original design by the student would not have worked.  The experiment worked the first time it was turned on.  The student ran the experiment continuously for 2 days and produced the required quantity of fuel additive. I estimate he would have spent another year by the trial and error approach.

My industry friends tell me that process safety - which is a bit different from lab safety - costs 2% of the bottom line.  But it returns 6% for a net increase of 4% - this is huge.  A companies profitability is closely coupled to their safety program.  With process safety the process works better, product quality is improved, down time is reduced, and there are less incidents with resulting reduction in legal cases, accident investigations, regulatory fines, and so forth.  

Safety saves money - period!  No matter where it is applied.

Dan Crowl

Professor Emeritus, Michigan Tech

Adjunct Professor, University of Utah

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 9:48 AM Ralph Stuart <000005bc294e9212-dmarc-request**At_Symbol_Here**lists.princeton.edu> wrote: