My friends at NAS.org have posted on the “Climate Conspiracy” that broke when hackers revealed global warming scientists had apparently manipulated data, organized attacks on skeptics, and much more. Surprise, surprise.
The timing couldn’t be worse for those who would cripple economies with the plaintive cry: “Do as we say or we all die!” Worldwide there is growing skepticism about the benefits of micromanaging every aspect of daily life while measuring “carbon footprints.” The Wall Street Journal even contributed to this Nanny Project with a long piece measuring the carbon footprint of various common products. I was relieved to see that beer had the lowest carbon footprint.
How far have we gone when we decide whether or not it is “good for the planet” to drink beer? Now we must ask: Did German scientists manipulate the beer data to preserve their national beverage? (I’m kidding). It’s a good cause (beer drinking) but who studies this stuff? And when is enough enough?
To read more, click here.
In case you missed it, there was a remarkable story by Eli Saslow in yesterday’s Washington Post about the terrible job market facing recent college grads. Saslow’s article illustrates the problem as it effects one individual. It’s extremely well-written and is currently at the top of the WaPo list of most e-mailed articles.
Dr. Tim Ball has written an article in the November 21 Canada Free Press in which he calls leading climatologists “frauds.” He bases this on computer-based information obtained by someone who hacked into the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit server. The pro-anthropogenic climate change media, such as Associated Press and the Washington Post, emphasize the ethical issues associated with the hacking of the computers but downplay the implications for the credibility of pro-anthropogenic academics. The damage seems to be more serious than the Post yet admits.
In his Canada Free Press article Ball raises questions not only about the credibility of climatological research but of the academic peer review process generally. Given widespread public interest in this topic, increased public scrutiny of peer review and of university research may be a collateral effect of the scandal.
Concerning the peer review process generally Ball writes:
I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.
We may ask whether this kind of bias exists elsewhere in universities. If climate change has been politicized, what about studies like labor relations, law, sociology and economics?
Given the problems facing higher education today, this speech on the purpose of college delivered by Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford at the Sesqui-Centennial of Dartmouth College in 1919 seems as timely as ever. Here is an excerpt:
(The spirit of college) has shown itself in men who never knew how the inside of a college looked. When Lincoln jotted down the main facts of his life for the Congressional Directory, he wrote: “Education defective.” And yet, tried by the test we are applying now, he was college-bred. The question is not, whether you studied Euclid in a classroom or stretched out on the counter of a country store. The question is, whether you mastered it. Lincoln did. And the thews and sinews of his mind, which he developed so, stood by him in the day when he threw Douglas down. John Keats was as innocent of the Greek language as the new curriculum assumes all men should be; yet out of some stray book on mythology the ” miserable apprentice to an apothecary ” contrived to draw into his soul the very spirit of Hellenic art, until he left us poems which Hellenists declare to be more Grecian than the Greek. He, too, was college-bred, as we now mean it, for he was impelled by that determination to subdue and fructify his powers, with the aid of all the past has left us, until they yielded something glorious and undying for his fellow men. His spirit was not the spirit of the dove, but of the eagle:
“My spirit is too weak! Mortality
Weighs heavily on me, like unwilling sleep;
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die,
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”
If I am right, there lie wrapt up in this determination those three aims: (1) to discipline one’s powers and make them fruitful; (2) in order to accomplish this, to make use of all that men have gained before us; and (3) to devote these powers and acquisitions to the common weal. The advantage the college has is this: that here the determined spirit finds the tool-shop and the arsenal. That spirit itself the college can foster and encourage but cannot create. It can and does lay open to its use the weapons and the tools. It can and does teach, in a fair, general way, what men thus far have done. It leads the newcomer to the point where they left off, and says: “Begin here, if you would not waste your time. This territory has been conquered. Go forth from this frontier.” It also shows the worker of the present day what other men are doing. It brings him into touch with them, that he may put his effort forth where it will tell the most.”
Stafford’s entire text can be found here.
Many professors in the humanities and social sciences have been taking heat for years about the quality and integrity – in particular, the tendentiousness – of their research and teaching.
But, now, along comes the worldwide airing of data obtained by a hacker implicating a major group of UK university scientists in what seems to be deliberate fraud — a long and systematic effort to manipulate data to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media speculates where these revelations, if confirmed, may lead:
If these files are eventually corroborated and verified, it is a bombshell indeed — evidence that there has been a literal conspiracy to push the anthropogenic climate change agenda far beyond the science.
It will mean the end of some scientific careers, and it might even mean those careers [sic] will end in jail.
I subscribe to a sustainability listserv through the University of Chicago. This came in the mail today:
I wonder what it means by “true meaning of Thanksgiving.” I wrote to the host of the event and asked for more information and whether the event will focus on the story of the first Thanksgiving. I haven’t yet received a reply. Hmm…
In praise of choosing community college: http://www.collegezombies.com/ (3-minute video)
Compare with “Why It’s Worth It to Send My Kid to Yale” at Huffington Post.
Around 10 B.C.E., the Roman poet Horace asserted that poetry’s purpose is “to delight and instruct.” More recently, in the Wall Street Journal, James Collins declared that in her novels, Jane Austen delights and instructs in how to live a moral life. He asks, “What, then, are the values that Austen would teach us? Value-laden words and phrases appear again and again in her work, often in clusters: self- knowledge, generosity, humility; elegance, propriety, cheerful orderliness; good understanding, correct opinion, knowledge of the world, a warm heart, steady, observant, moderate, candid, sensibility to what is amiable and lovely.”
Austen’s words boggle the modern mind as quaintly alien and vaguely religious. They are signifiers of archaic virtues foreign to our national conversation. Today, there is only one master virtue that trumps all others: tolerance.
However, real moral instruction is predicated on narrative, the arrangement of events in Time such that choices and actions have perceptible consequences. Unfortunately, our wired and wireless world tirelessly militates against narrative. On electronic networks, as Sven Birkerts put it, everything is “laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative” and what comes before is unrelated to what comes after. The hyperlink replaces the transition word (linking may be a major factor in the decline of student ability in logic, grammar, and narrative understanding). Students don’t even perceive cause and effect relationships because they have returned to an Eden-of-the-screens, outside of Time, dwelling in what Lewis Lapham called “the enchanted garden of the eternal now.”
NAS members and AQ subscribers, the December issue is available online. You can log in and download and print individual articles or simply read them on your computer. If you are a member/subscriber, click here to find out how to access the journal online.
If you would like to subscribe to NAS’s quarterly journal Academic Questions, the easiest and most affordable way to do so is to become a member of NAS.
James Taranto has an excellent analysis of the controversy at NYU over Professor Tunku Varadarajan’s column on the Fort Hood massacre. In “The ‘Diversity’ Sham,” he notes NYU President John Sexton’s timorous reply – “I found it offensive, too” – and points out the problem with ‘diversity’ in higher education:
This is how “diversity” works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a sea of emotion, much of it phony. Members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with “pain” and “shock” and accusations of “hate,” and university administrators make a show of pretending to care.
Taranto’s article comes at a good time, as hate studies is now somehow an academic discipline…
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