…has resigned her tenured faculty position:
A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.
How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).
Despite the fact that she was protected by tenure, I suspect that she will be able to speak out even more effectively now.
[Update Thursday morning (London]
Thoughts from Mark Steyn.
Saturday-morning update]
Tucker Carlson interviews her.
[Bumped]
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
And, he might have added, that elite may not choose to pursue knowledge in an unbiased fashion.
“She…”
I think Bart was quoting Eisenhower.
He was quoting Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. The most famous part of that address mentioned the military-industrial complex. His warning about public policy becoming captive of a scientific-technological elite gets much less coverage.
“Despite the fact that she was protected by tenure, I suspect that she will be able to speak out even more effectively now.”
I doubt it. When she goes into the private sector, she’ll just be accused of being a shill for the oil industry even more than she has been in the past.
See how much trouble you can get in for unattributed quotes …
🙂
I doubt it. When she goes into the private sector, she’ll just be accused of being a shill for the oil industry even more than she has been in the past.
There are diminishing returns to being louder.
Last night at Instapundit, I quoted the whole relevant passage from Eisenhower’s farewell address. Here is the speech on YouTube. It’s only 15 minutes long. I watched it a couple of years ago and noted that he spoke to the American people as responsible, intelligent adults. I have a hard time imagining any politician making such a speech today. And, of course, much of the population has been dumbed down considerably since then.
Today, while driving back to work from lunch, I listened to Mark Steyn guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh. He spoke of the time he and Judith Curry testified before the Senate, and his account was blistering. The segment occurs from about 57:05 to 1:06:59 here. Check it out.
I forgot that the Steyn link was cued up to a different spot in the show. Just use the slider to locate the segment I mentioned.
Steyn hasn’t let up on Mann. Not one bit. I think he’s going to actually enjoy going to trial.
Going to trial can actually work to one’s advantage especially if one doesn’t have much to lose. A classic example of how hate speech and slander/libel laws can backfire spectacularly comes from the Wiemar Republic era of Germany. The Nazis were subject to numerous prosecutions and lawsuits and lost many of the cases (supposedly one particularly vigorous opponent of the Nazis had 40 lawsuits going and never lost any of the ones that reached judgment). But these cases served to popularize their movement and undermine their foes.
While no one likes being compared to Nazis, it remains a demonstration that attempting to bully opponents with lawsuits instead of civil discourse has a tendency to backfire badly.
Maybe a better reference would be to the Streisand Effect.
Coincidentally, I looked up the history of the PhD program. The modern program started at the University of Berlin in 1810. According to Timothy Lenoir, funds to a PhD program could be cut off if politically unacceptable.
This tells me that there has always been a flimsy facade of objectivity in academia. If there has been objectivity it is only by accident.
Source, Wikipedia and Timothy Lenoir’s “Revolution from above: the role of the state in creating the German research system, 1810–1910.” American Economic Review (1998): 22–27. JSTOR.
Not all PhDs are state funded. Some are corporate funded (if a company is large enough it may fund employees to get their MScs or PhDs) and sometimes people self-fund their own PhDs out of pocket. I taught classes at University to partly pay my own way through.
Companies like Intel fund employees who want to get an MsC or PhD and allocate some spare time for it and pay their tuition, for example. Typically the employees choose a research topic which is related to their work to some degree.
That doesn’t really change anything. I doubt corporations want research that disagrees with them. I doubt a pharmaceutical company is going to continue funding for keto diets.
Tolerance was only pushed in the 70’s and 80’s so that the hippies and marxists wouldn’t be tossed out of teaching jobs. Now that the hippies and marxists are in control, tolerance has no place in the system.
Her detractors have said a lot of nasty things about her but she is doing something that they do not, put her money where her mouth is.
She will inhabit a world where failed predictions means financial punishment rather than the world her detractors live in where failed predictions means just make up even crazier predictions for more government money.
Let’s hope you are right. That would be a better world.
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect results. ”
– Dr. Raymond Stantz, Ghostbusters