I checked this out since I wanted to release code I wrote for my research under the GPL: Where I work (UCSC), the employee owns the copyright to code he writes,

I checked this out since I wanted to release code I wrote for my research under the GPL: Where I work (UCSC), the employee owns the copyright to code he writes, unless the code was part of a deliverable for some grant (in which case it generally belongs to the grant-awarding institution). For general research grants, that's not the case. If there are potential patents, the university does claim right to those, but if there aren't, there was no problem.