Climate skeptic instructor fired from Oregon State University

Green is the new McCarthy…

Very interesting that he should not be given a reason for dismissal. In the UK this simply would be impossible. Employment law demands that a written reason for dismissal is provided and it has to comply fully with strict laws of employment and termination. There would have to be strong disrepute or gross misconduct charges laid for there to be an instant dismissal. There would have to be a series of verbal warnings leading to formal written warnings and then dismissal if this was a long term issue between the parties.
It is impossible to dismiss someone now under the guise of “it’s just not working out” unless they are in a probationary period and even then you as the employer have to practically beg or pay them off to quit so there are no reprisals.
Even if you dismissed a person saying “we can’t afford to keep the position you hold so you have to leave” causes problems for the employer who then can’t offer that same position to another, different person for at least 2 years.
Just not being given a written notification of reasons for dismissal within 14 days ( I think, that may have changed) is grounds for a case of unfair dismissal and these are often won in favour of the employee.
The behaviour of this University baffles me. but then I’m not in the US.

I am convinced that the present university system is going to come crashing down as let’s face it the majority of its research has zero impact in the real world, though some people might think that is a good thing! There is no academic freedom, just dogma from a small tenured elite…

Don’t you have unfair dismissal law in America?
Isn’t this slander/libel?

….it’s a religion of peace

If the cause really is a difference in ideology, (and all the evidence suggests it is) this is disgraceful…..how can they sleep in their beds?

For our non-US friends:
I don’t know about Oregon, but many states in the USA are what is called ‘at will’ work states (such as my home state of Ohio). This means that employment is considered to be voluntary by both parties. One can be dismissed from a job (unless you are a protected minority) for pretty much anything, including picking the wrong luncheon meats for your packed lunch, just as the employee has the right to terminate employment for any reason. The benefits of this arrangemt include the inability of an employer to enforce any non-compete clause, such as when an employee leaves to work for a competitor.
Different states vary in these laws, and adding in a state-funded institution undoubtedly complicates the situation, but termination without cause is often quite legal (again, unless you are a legally protected minority).

THIS is the “Land of the Free”?
No dissenting opinions allowed?
and…
No reason given, no severance pay?

Anthony: it appears to me that several paragraphs of Dr. Drapela’s two email statements are not in italics when they should be.

Sorry, no sale. In this litigious day and age no one with the slightest level of sophistication fires someone with no cause and with out making that cause known to the person fired (as an employer of 350 people, I know from painful personal experience). It’s a great way to rally the troops but I’m calling BS here.

If that were my state, I would be rattling the cages of the Board of Regents for an answer. If I was an alumni I would be deeply ashamed of my college.

This is what a consensus looks like.
Academic and political freedoms look entirely different.

File an action under the FIRST AMENDMENT.

Assuming that freedom of expression is still a “constitutional provision” within the state of Oregon, I suspect OSU will have to budget for some legal fees.

Along with legal actions for breach of contract and violation of statute, a fired employee may have a wrongful discharge claim. Even though Oregon generally recognizes the at-will employment rule, certain discharges are considered by the courts to be wrongful. For example, it is wrongful to discharge an employee for complying with a public duty, such as jury duty. Oregon courts have found it wrongful to discharge an employee for filing a workers’ compensation claim, for resisting on-the-job sexual harassment, or for refusing to sign a statement attacking the character of another employee. The general rule is: it is wrongful to discharge an employee for fulfilling a societal obligation or asserting rights directly related to his or her role as an employee that are guaranteed by contract, statute, constitutional provision or a public policy.

http://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1100_RightsLoseJob.htm

An interesting fact about OSU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Robinson_%28basketball%29

can we contribute to help with medical and legal?where do we send our money?

Well, here’s his problem.
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=130822&page=1
Can’t have teaching excellence, now can we.
Note that his lowest score is for “easiness”, so it’s not just that he is chums with his students. And there were 122 responses!
Of course, we know from the Penn State “inquiry” that it’s attracting grant money that is the true test of a University professor’s worthiness.

Look, you really ought to think twice before setting up laws that make it difficult to fire unwanted employees. In Japan twenty years ago it used to be — and perhaps still is — practically unheard of for white-collar employees to be fired. Then came the great Japanese crash, and lots of companies had to downsize. The story back then was when an employee didn’t leave voluntarily, management would put him deep in a sub-basement office, give him nothing to do, and gradually turn down the lights. Presumably as darkness crept in toward his paperless and computerless desk, the employee would eventually give in and “voluntarily” leave.
If the people you work for don’t want you around, it is bad for both them and you to force the association to continue. Bad for them because their character becomes degraded as they treat you unfairly, and bad for you because you not only end up accepting their unfair treatment — degrading your character also — but also waste finite working years sitting alone in the dark (only metaphorically, I hope) in return for a paycheck.
If you stumble across something illegal at work and want to spend the time needed to bring criminals to justice, by all means go ahead and make the effort, cooperating with whatever government or private agencies seem appropriate. What happened at OSU, however, doesn’t sound criminal — just unethical and hypocritical, and there’s a lot of that everywhere — though usually not so obvious to outsiders. The Dilbert comic strip should be your guide as you search for your next job (all too often the attitudes presented there are not at all exaggerated but rather the stone cold truth about how large organizations work.)

Here’s Nick Drapela’s web page.
http://chemistry.oregonstate.edu/~drapelan/drapela.htm
There is a section on climate change that does not appear to have been updated since 2009. It’s not contentious, but it is opinionated.
I suspect he was fired for venturing outside his field of expertise and publicizing his views. If that is the case, OSU is in trouble. This could turn into a cause celebre unless there is something we are not being told that is a genuine cause for firing. If his firing was based on ideological differences with a majority of the science faculty on the subject of climate change, then he has been unfairly terminated and Oregon State is guilty of violating the conventions of academic freedom

A personal tragedy for Dr Drapela, that’s for sure but, until and unless this is brought out transparently, a huge question mark about American democracy and sense of fair play.
I’ve got my fingers crossed.

hmmmmm….I wonder if anyone here knows how to use the freedom of information act to access information from Universities…if the reason for Dr. Drapela’s dismissal WERE related to his views on AGW, we have the opportunity to catch them red handed.

Well, by my reckoning, OSU is squarely within the unofficial “nation” of Ecotopia. Being that’s the case, and being that Vera Alwen (sp?) set up a nearly perfect Allendeian People’s Republic, it stands to reason that Capitalist Gaia Hating Pigs need to be silenced and reeducated. To the camp! /sarc

IF you google “Nickolas Drapela global warming” you will find a power point presentation he did in March of 2008 (“Global Warming is a Lie”) that is fairly tendentious. I’m guessing his problems with the science faculty began around then.

Robert E. Phelan says:
June 11, 2012 at 6:16 pm
It should be pointed out that Dr. Drapela was not exactly “fired”, although in many respects it looks like that; rather he was not reappointed. OSU apparently offers contracts for a year at a time, so-called “fixed-term” contracts, and the handbook doesn’t seem much concerned with “timely notice of non-reappointment” for such faculty. A law-suit for wrongful termination probably wouldn’t go far because he was not terminated.
There is an AAUP chapter at OSU, but my guess is that they are not willing to rock the boat.
These really are a bunch of cold, cold, cold b******s, aren’t they?
————————–
Sadly, I fear you are correct (and I completely agree with your sentiment). In my experience (and I spent many years as a contract faculty member) the union is reluctant to rock the boat on such issues, and once the contract is completed the union has no interest in the instructor as he or she no longer technically belongs to the union. At my university we do have seniority rules for faculty in the continuing education (night, spring and summer teaching) division, and the union is assiduous about having hirings adhere to seniority rules. However, there do not seem to be any such safe-guards for sessional instructors in the regular term, and I’ve seen some nasty politics happen.

Drapela claims ‘it’s the Sun’,using an uncited reproduction of a graphic of Friis-Christiansen and Lassen’s 1991 paper…hmm.

Once again the eco fascists abuse their authority for all to see…. All I can say to Dr Drapela is to keep embarrassing the University as much as possible over its sacking of him while he goes about finding better employment elsewhere.
If they want to become a University renown for its ecofascism and socialist group thinking…… Then so be it. Let them rot in their own perversity, Dr Drapela wouldn’t want to work there anyway.
The times are changing anyway, in a few years Universities like OSU will be purging their eco fascists and crawling after other streams of revenue while begging scientists who have publicly maintained their commitment to the scientific method to teach in their establishments.
Like the Thompson’s, I find what has happened to Dr Drapela utterly distasteful and unfair. This period in history will be recorded as infamy and it will not be forgotten, nor the main players who perpetrated the worst excesses of the AGW scam.

It is the same even in the fossil fuel industry. It is very dangerous to speak the truth. Most large industrial companies have already several high level people whose careers are founded upon promulgating the CAGW myth, often several of the top executives have fallen for the myth. After all, CAGW is a problem of such grave proportions that all those execs, who take themselves a bit too seriously, actually enjoy going around pontificating about saving the planet – it is so much more grandiose than worrying about mundane things like “shareholders returns”!

Robert Phelan is correct and, while sad that such seemingly obvious grievous behavior is alloed to occur, the notion of “at-will” employment is not only a boon to both employees and employers alike, it is also how things should be. The workforce has grown so accustomed to being “entitled” to a job they have forgotten what a serious breach of individual rights it really is. of course, it swings both ways and he can certainly attempt to sue (though will not likely win) and embarrass them for their crass behavior (legal or not, such terminations are childish).
Hopefully he will find a better gig with a better contract, one that allows him to speak freely.
Mark

It’s just a sad, sad state of affairs that an institution like OSU would fire a good employee for (ostensibly) no reason and then run around and hide from the person they fired.
This is how the left operates…. in secret. It’s not just limited to the egregious examples we’ve all seen in climate science. It runs from the highest levels to the lowest levels. This problem is not getting the widespread attention it deserves.
I quit a special interest club a couple years ago that I had been member of for 25 years because the lefties running it would no longer publish meeting or board minutes and financial statements in the newsletter and shut down any critical comments on the mail list of how the club was being run. I was told such discussion was not appropriate.
This sort of behavior needs to be exposed wherever we see it.

To the Oregon climate change N*zis: have a nice day, buddy

pa32 I think you better rethink your position. I don’t know the details of this case. But it is certainly possible to fire a teacher in my state with no cause stated. Being a Republican or a global warming proponent or asking for a competitive wage are all things I know of that have ended careers. If you don’t have to state a cause than unfair firing laws or claimed civil service protections become meaningless.

I’ve blogged a link to the same subject matter by Joanne Nova.
Oregon State University: A Place of Dogma Training
I suggest that the OSU staff who do not protest at the dismissal and treatment of relatives of sceptics be henceforth referred to as Dogma Trainers. 🙂

Sorry to hear of your troubles. I have given a few talks down in Corvallis over the years and helped with several projects. Nice campus and much more open minded then U of O in Eugene.
Sometimes it is nice to talk to someone who understands these matters better.
For example: http://www.employmentlaw-nw.com/
OSU is a wonderful campus. In fact, Michelle Obama’s brother Craig Robinson is the head coach for the Beavers at OSU.
Best wishes.

The problem is obvious, Corvallis is in the heart of a very green green valley. The sun goes away every October not to return until the following May. In the inbetween times they suffer through intense guilt for having logged every decent hemlock and fir from Coos Bay to Hebo and a gray pergutory of cloud mass gathers and drizzles insessently, mother nature shedding her tears as only she can, until the institutional inmates go a bit clock work orange so to speak.
[Moderator’s Note: This Mike is not the same as the other Mike and this one has been commenting longer. -REP]

Oy — now they’re resorting to drive-by’s:
“I’m not sure how I will support my family at this point. We just bought a house in Corvallis. I have four kids, one of whom has a rare, blood disorder and requires regular trips to Doernbecher’s Children’s Hospital for treatment. Now we will be without health insurance.”
I hope the professor looks into the chemistry opportunity at Hillsdale.

As I’ve pointed out a couple of times here in the past, this sort of thing is old news for us fighting the smoking ban folks. Prof. James Enstrom was fired from his 30 year post at U of California because his views “conflicted with the mission” of the University. The excuse they used was some recent work he’d done on diesel emissions, but the great bulk of the thrust came from the research he’d done a number of years earlier that used a huge database to blow the ETS myth out of the water. See:
http://www.forces-nl.org/download/CPhillips.pdf
Your comparison with Lysenko is the same one that both he and I have made repeatedly over the years: See his article in Epi Perspectives:
http://www.epi-perspectives.com/content/pdf/1742-5573-4-11.pdf
As those of us in the Free Choice fight have learned, it’s very VERY difficult to fight the establishment when beliefs are so solidly entrenched and the advocates hold all the power. One place to look however is to ranks of retired academicians and researchers. They no longer have Lysenko’s noose around their necks. As Professor Phillipe Even of France’s “Necker Institute” said when he spoke out about the secondhand smoke fraud and was asked why he hadn’t done so earlier: “I’m retired now.”
Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains” and who has been in the enviable position of not HAVING a job to be fired from for his hertetical views! LOL!

‘OSU is a wonderful campus. In fact, Michelle Obama’s brother Craig Robinson is the head coach for the Beavers at OSU.’
Like a B horror-flick. Run screaming for the hills…..!

Question: what can be done about this? This is completely outrageous.

we are really faced with a Leviathan. This is somewhat OT, but I’m struck at the force that the Greens have…even as there seems to be more doubt among the citizens.
Bank of America is pledging 50B dollars to climate change.
“The bank’s new initiative includes lending, equipment finance, capital markets and advisory activity and carbon finance, as well as advice and investment help.
Bank of America will focus on promoting energy efficiency; renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydropower; lower-carbon transportation like electric and hybrid vehicles; and water and waste treatment and disposal initiatives.”
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/bank-of-america-pledges-50-billion-to-combat-climate-change-20120611-00784

Additional note: Prof. Enstrom’s actual article on “Combating Lysenko Pseudoscience”:
http://www.scientificintegrityinstitute.org/defense.html
As noted, the parallels are overwhelming.
– MJM

Mike says:”The problem is obvious, Corvallis is in the heart of a very green green valley. The sun goes away every October not to return until the following May. In the inbetween times they suffer through intense guilt for having logged every decent hemlock and fir from Coos Bay to Hebo and a gray pergutory of cloud mass gathers and drizzles insessently, mother nature shedding her tears as only she can, until the institutional inmates go a bit clock work orange so to speak.”
Funny, I was in that valley a month ago. I was logging fir. Last year I was there as well. I planted 4400 trees. Mostly fir. Lots of timber left and it was being well managed until the spotted owl fiasco. Now unfortunately those beautiful trees will rot and probably burn. Oh, and the week that I was logging the weather was sunny all week…I guess mother nature likes me and was smiling down on me for ensuring that I didn’t waste her resources by letting them burn.
Go Ducks!

don’t we wish everyone had the integrity of Nickolas Drapela?
Eric – I lived in a former logging town on vancouver island. it’s all but a ghost town, now.
every man jack of them wished the mill would return so they could get employment.
nobody feels guilt, eric. they feel poverty.
but there’s welfare- you probably call it ‘entitlement’…
i guess that can go on as long as there are natural resources to sell, though.
mining and agriculture don’t require value added. they can be run on slave labor, in fact.

I just called David Appel an ass, justifiably…
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/06/osu-instructor-dismissed-justifiably.html

gnomish,
I don’t follow your post completely did you notice that I was responding to Mike? I wasn’t the one that made the “guilt” comment.

surely the reason his contract was not renewed is that he was telling lies to the students as is clear from his slides.
people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.
For the last 12 months solar activity has been the lowest ever recorded.
The last 12 months have also been the warmest in the historical record in the lower 48.
That refutes the correlation between solar activity and temperature as would have been obvious IF he had updated his slides to include the last few decades of factual information.
Do people really want university instructors that tell their students wrong information ?

Jim Salinger was fired from NIWA allegedly for his outspoken views supporting AGW. Ain’t it weird how having views at either end of this debate are considered unacceptable by some organisations. Jim’s case is really weird because I understand NIWA still still shows on their website the manipulated temperature data resulting from Jim’s original work.

izen:
The slides were dated 2008, and he is a liar because of 2012 data? Also, he is not the first or last person to correlate solar activity to the recent rise in temps. They are all liars too? What is the difference between being wrong and lying?
Also, how many college students have been shown “An Inconvenient Truth”? Talk about teaching wrong information!

Latimer Alder;
But just one question…I see that he cites IBM among the corporates who benefit from the green gravy train. This is news to me. Can anybody give further details? >>>>>
I’ll won’t comment on the specifics regarding IBM, but I can certainly shed some light on the issue in general. Corporate data centres consume enormous amounts of energy just to run the servers and storage arrays. If the cooling systems fail, there is so much heat generated that the computers and storage arrays will actually melt.
Power companies often offer incentives to reduce power consumption to reduce load on their grid if it is approaching capacity, or for political reasons, or because it is good business (the rates many utilities are forced into for their domestic market are far lower than the rates they can get on the open market, so they actually make more money by paying their domestic customers to use less power).
Many vendors and consultants in the IT sector figured out how to show their customers a positive ROI by upgrading to newer more power efficient equipment. Many of these upgrades would not have been economical without the incentives from the power companies. Lots of consultants made lots of money building the business cases and lots of vendors made lots of money selling hardware upgrades that would not have happened otherwise.

davidmhoffer,

If the cooling systems fail, there is so much heat generated that the computers and storage arrays will actually melt.

Only melt the fuses.
Lots of supercomputers are sold to enhance the experience of climate models.
It doesn’t improve the models but spending increasing amounts of grant money on “research” tends to ensure more grant in future.
GIGO => Grants In, Garbage Out.

Drapela writes:
“I should say that they regularly read all my email communications, which is why I am writing from this private email address. That has been going on for quite some time now.”
and later on
“I find that the people who want to keep things secret all the time are usually the people that have something to hide. ”
Seems Drapela has something to hide…
I understand that’s not how the US system works, but I do think Drapela ought to have a right to an explanation for why he is fired, just as Charles Monnett should have been given a justification for his suspension.

Mike says:
June 11, 2012 at 8:49 pm
But the salmon and dungeness are good around there.
[Moderator’s Note: This one isn’t that other Mike either. -REP]
Geez, some days it seems like every Tom, Dick, and Harry around here is named Mike…

Gordon Fulks wrote:
Can it be that a university whose motto is “Open minds. Open doors” cannot abide even one faculty member who disagrees with their dogma?
The answer, as George discovered to his cost, is obviously “yes!” However the motto is not inappropriate if you interpret it in the politically correct way:
If you open people’s minds to the wrong ideas we will open our doors and boot you out!

@- Eric says:
“The slides were dated 2008, and he is a liar because of 2012 data? Also, he is not the first or last person to correlate solar activity to the recent rise in temps. They are all liars too? What is the difference between being wrong and lying?”
No, he is a liar because his slides do not show the last couple of decades of solar activity and its LACK of correlation with temperatures. Even more of a deception if the slides were made in 2008 when such data were available.
The difference between wrong and lying is that if the correct information is not available to you, you may be wrong.
If the correct information, refuting the solar/cosmic ray hypothesis, has been available, and obvious, for the last couple of decades then failing to acknowledge this is lying.

His students seemed to really like him:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=130822

Get a lawyer and sue them! As an employer in the UK, if I fire an employee without due cause or explanation I would expect to be receiving communication from the employees legal representives.

@theduke
> So what?
From Wikipedia:
> Friis-Christensen agreed that any correlation between sunspots and global warming that he may have identified in the 1991 study has since broken down. There is, he said, a clear “divergence” between the sunspots and global temperatures after 1986, which shows that the present warming period cannot be explained by solar activity alone.

Interesting that the folks who claim most to believe in academic freedom and sing the diversity song, probably do not. The story begs a few questions:
Dr. Drapela was obviously not tenured faculty. Did his contract state he was an “at will” employee. Oregon is an at-will state, so they really don’t need a reason to terminate him.
He is “without insurance”. No COBRA?
Has he discussed his employment situation with an attorney. If he believes he has cause to contest the termination, he should consult one.
OSU seems to be a place that attracts petty little tyrants. Academia has been drifting that way for a long time. One of the reasons I left almost 40 years ago. Dr. Drapela will be better off in the long run way from those idiots.

Oregon is not the only place this sort of thing happens http://www.smh.com.au/environment/scientist-quits-csiro-amid-censorship-claims-20091203-k8vb.html.

Latimer Alder says:
June 12, 2012 at 12:30 am
‘blade computing’ = ‘lots of cards in a box sharing common services’, was the latest way to cut down those utility bills
Virtualization is the latest thing: one physical server running multiple virtual machines.

There is no diversity when everyone thinks alike.

I had no idea that in the U.S. one can be fired with no reason given and no severance (UK: redundancy) pay. In the UK you have a little thing called a contract of employment between you the employee and the employer that is signed by the employee when accepting the job. It usually includes an agreement by the employer to provide a period of notice (usually one month) and severance pay in the event that your services become redundant (often it’s one month’s salary for every year you have been employed there). Equally there is usually an agreement by the employee built into the contract to provide one month’s notice to the employer prior to leaving that employment. Do U.S. employment contracts usually not contain such clauses?

@billy liar

Virtualization is the latest thing: one physical server running multiple virtual machines

.
Ummm.. renewed popularity of a very old thing actually. I learnt to use Virtual Machine (VM)/370 in the mid 1970s, and it was already quite established. Read about it here.
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0/d6b9939ef2f3540b85256bfa0067f4d6
And it could run APL as well. I wonder if that will make a renaissance too 🙂

crosspatch says:
June 11, 2012 at 5:34 pm
Maybe Hillsdale College in Michigan needs a Chemistry professor? They do have a chemistry program and they take exactly $0 per year in government money so they can remain independent.
_____________________________________
Crosspatch, I was thinking the same thing.
To bad we are heading into a “country divided” situation with two classes and a chasm between. Just what the Regulating Class loves. Bickering among ourselves while they make away with the cheese, our wallets and our freedom.

“pa32r says:
June 11, 2012 at 5:35 pm Sorry, no sale. In this litigious day and age no one with the slightest level of sophistication fires someone with no cause and with out making that cause known to the person fired (as an employer of 350 people, I know from painful personal experience). It’s a great way to rally the troops but I’m calling BS here.”
You’re simply wrong, at least in an “at will” state in the US. Indeed, the very litigiousness you refer to is an incentive for the employer to provide NO REASON for the firing, as is explicitly permitted under the law (for certain in Massachusetts, but presumably in other at-will employment states, as well). Any reason the employer provides for termination may be subject to legal attack, but how do you attack NO REASON? Because of this, many employers choose that option to avoid possible employment litigation (indeed, they’d be fools not to).
Had Dr. Drapela been in a “protected class”, such as being female or a minority member, he would have had powerful recourse. I presume he is merely a male caucasian, and for that sin he is left defenseless.

I’m sorry, it was Dr. Drapela who was fired without cause.

OSU is behaving exactly as you would expect a cornered rat to behave. And have no doubt, Anthony , Steve and the others have them cornered.

Just send messages to Senator Inahofe and Congressman Issa with links to this story. Might help if others did the same (especially if you’re in Oklahoma or California).

Jim Watson says:
June 12, 2012 at 7:38 am
The ’60s Liberals have become everyhing they originally fought against.
They were fighting against the contemporary power elite. Once they gained power for themselves, all they did was drop the false flag and hoist their true colors.

David, UK says:
June 12, 2012 at 6:24 am
I had no idea that in the U.S. one can be fired with no reason given and no severance (UK: redundancy) pay. In the UK you have a little thing called a contract of employment between you the employee and the employer that is signed by the employee when accepting the job. It usually includes an agreement by the employer to provide a period of notice (usually one month) and severance pay in the event that your services become redundant (often it’s one month’s salary for every year you have been employed there). Equally there is usually an agreement by the employee built into the contract to provide one month’s notice to the employer prior to leaving that employment. Do U.S. employment contracts usually not contain such clauses?

It depends on what professional level you are talking about. I live in an “at will” state and for the average employee who signs an at will employment agreement, it is much easier to fire an employee. You can be called in to the personal office told you no longer work there and are escorted to your desk to pickup your things then to the door. This is in fact quite common in the IT industry due to the security implications of a worker who has been given notice.
As a matter of “good practice” employees are expected to give two weeks notice that they are leaving. In that case the employee is still immediately terminated but typically continues to receive pay for the remaining 2 weeks as though he was still working. The employee has 2 weeks paid time with no obligations to the company to look for a new job and the company does not have to worry about a disgruntled employee on the premises who still has access to confidential information and log in access to computers etc. I have seen this play out multiple times in the IT industry, a co worker violated some security guidelines and was literally walked to the door after being told he no longer worked there. In another case a department head gave notice that he had accepted another job, and was immediately terminated but payed for the period of his notice.
In blue collar jobs such as auto mechanic etc. they may or may not get the 2 weeks of paid time. Only at the higher professional level employment such as senior managers where specific employment terms might be custom negotiated to recruit the employee are you like to find a severance contract terms as generous as you say are common in the UK.
It is only in environments like government employment where it becomes extremely difficult to fire a worker. In those environments (as a protection against law suits) the managers first build a long history of the employees poor performance before firing. That is one of the reasons that in such environments employee personal evaluations are very important and are often used to “create” a history of poor performance by management suddenly giving poor reviews and finding fault with performance.
Here in America typical, employees realize that they are providing a “service” to the employer and just like any service employee can be dropped at any time. Likewise good employers realize that good employees are hard to find and try to be fair with their workers. For example a friend of mine just got advised of a reduction in force at his place of employment and told he and a large number of his co-workers would be out of work at the end of the month. To my knowledge he will get no other severance than that months paid time (although he will still be expected to do his work and close out the tasks he is responsible for in that time. His wife a few years ago got laid off from a similar white collar job and was simply let go, no notice no severance just a final pay check and a cardboard box to carry her stuff to the car.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons American workers consistently are the most productive labor force, as those of us with real (non-bureaucratic jobs), actually spend the day producing something of value.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500395_162-3228735.html

izen.
Whatever way this plays out I have learned one thing.
You are a truly nasty piece of work.

I agree with Izen. Any scientist who misrepresents or withholds data, particularly contrary data, is a liar and ought to be terminated.
Paging Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth…. please report to HR.

Izen @ “It is only possible to speculate, but while I agree that different points of view should not be arbitrarily silenced, false information presented to students as factually accurate might be a reason for non-renewal of his contract.
The final slides of his presentation contain false information.”
Izen in Australia we have a name for a person like you. No doubt the mods wont permit its use here. The man is now unemployed, has four children to support and you heap a slander on an outrage. Crawl back to from where you came.

I presume the professor was untenured? Unfortunately, this happens all the time.
I’ve been terminated in the past (unfairly, IMO) but I still respect the right for an employer to hire whom they please and fire whom they please. Contrary to the opinion one person has expressed here, we do have a social safety net in this country and most people, even small government advocates like myself, do support maintaining a social safety net.
Dr. Drapela is eligible for COBRA for health care coverage. This has nothing to do with ObamaCare and has been in place for decades. Their is also SCHIP for helping with his children’s healthcare, and again, this has nothing to do with ObamaCare.
If only Obama’s supporters had any clue about things before they opened their mouths, we’d be hearing a lot less from them.

Take the University to Court and make them reveal why he was fired. Peel back that rancid onion one layer at a time. Force the University to re-instate him with back pay and legal fees.

If one more of you say ” it is so sad” I will puke. Is that all it is, just sad? Search your vast vocabulary o all you mild mannered chickens.

[SNIP: Language with “deniers” requires you to comment under your real name. -REP]

Smokey says: There is always a reason. What was the reason, and why are they so reluctant to admit it?

Speculation isn’t evidence. (Do I sound like Mosher, or what?) Looks suspicious, yes, but who knows at this point? Reserve final judgement until all the facts are known.

“Speculation isn’t evidence.”… “Reserve final judgement until all the facts are known.”
So you want us to wait for OSU to say “Yup, we fired him because of his views on CAGW.”?
Don’t hold your breath….

[SNIP: Simple, John. Impugning someone’s integrity, as you did, requires that you post with your real name. Complaining about moderation policy, as you’ve just done, also gets snipped. If you have a complaint there is a contact option here. Maybe Anthony will take you seriously. -REP]

@Smokey: 1. The only ‘bad performance’ referred to in my earlier comment was that of UK public sector workers (of whom I have direct experience); from your self-identification as “someone whose taxes go to support [OSU]” I think it must be unlikely that you have any experience of the public sector here in the UK.
2. The comment that “Dr Drapela was fired for substandard job performance” are your words, not mine. I referred to “non-renewal of a term contract without tenure”; I think it’s clear from several other comment above that this is not unusual at this level of academia. Assuming it is somehow related to his being a Climate skeptic is speculation, absent confirmation from OSU.
3. If OSU is obliged by law publicly to state reasons for not re-engaging Dr Drapela for a new term, and does not do so, there would be at least be grounds for complaint or asserting that this was self-censorship. If OSU is not obliged by law to do this it is not censorship to remain silent – thereby allowing Dr Drapela and/or his supporters to make all the running and hopefully improve his prospects of obtaining an appointment elsewhere.
Doesn’t that make three strikes towards your troll count?

universities have a two tiered system of faculty. One has the tenured professors and then one has the lecturers. It’s almost impossible to get rid of a professor with tenure. A lecturer is often hired by the semester. These can be ‘fired’ simply by not rehiring them for the next semester. In some cases, there are even time limits of a few years which limit the number of times a lecturer can be rehired.
As such, there are no protections of law for lecturers (at least where I’m at), not even those associated with regular employees like the secretaries, grounds keepers, and janitors.
Anyone still wondering about me using a nom de net instead of my real name need to look no further.

America is broke. American state funded universities are broke. U Kentucky medical library has just had 250K knocked off its budget. UVA President has been chopped for failing to find money. Winter, Florida can’t find $4m to stop potential train noise. American public finances are a disaster. Americans may not have heard of a place called Greece, but its coming their way…..

izen likes the ‘adjusted, adjusted’ data – CRUT4
take a look at why it was adjusted – HADCRUT3 variance – adjusted global mean 1975 – 2015
izen doesn’t like it so much.

Payette wrote, “Take the University to Court and make them reveal why he was fired. Peel back that rancid onion one layer at a time. Force the University to re-instate him with back pay and legal fees.”
This is a good avenue to pursue. Earlier in this thread I told about how the same thing has happened to Prof. James Enstrom due to his research contradicting the Antismokers who rule at U of CA. And the above advice is, I believe, the recourse he followed and he is, at least temporarily, reinstated to his 39 year career there. I’ll send him the link to this blog to see if he might want to stop in and offer some advice from his experiences.
– MJM

@ DaveH : “It contains a known (and subsequently corrected) mathematical error that “hides the decline” towards the end of the graph. It is superceded by later work by Lassen and others, and there is no excuse for not acknowledging the truly massive divergence an up-to-date plot shows.”
Again, this sort of thing has been standard practice for years in antismoking research. Three quick examples:
(1) When the “Great Helena Heart Miracle” study was presented at a Heart Assn. conference in 2003, the authors claimed a 60% instant drop in heart attacks after a ban, along with a “bounce-back” to normal when the ban was lifted. That 60% drop is STILL being quoted as the official finding by the British National Health Service and others despite the fact that the authors were forced to reduce it to 40% before the Brit. Med. Jrnl. actually published it. And the “bounce-back” has been shown (from the author’s own data) to have happened right in the middle of the ban, NOT after it … but it continues to be universally misrepresented.
(2) About two years ago the Institute Of Medicine came out with a huge meta-analysis showing a 17% drop in heart attacks after smoking bans. A month later they were forced to publish a short and obscure mathematical correction in the journal of publication (JAMA?). While the text of the “correction” didn’t explain it, the result was basically a lowering of the 17% claim in the banned areas to an 8.0% drop — which was actually a SMALLER drop than the general national trend of 8.2%. The import of that change has never been publicly acknowledged beyond what I guess you’d call “ETS Skeptics.”
(3) When the massive 2006 Surgeon General’s Report on Secondhand Smoke came out they excluded Professor Enstrom’s study (which would have blown the Report’s conclusion out of the water) on the basis that the research was published “too late” for inclusion. Enstrom’s research was published in 2003. The Report however included OTHER research published in 2004 and 2005 — which years, evidently, must have somehow come before 2003 in the Surgeon General’s Office.
So as you can see, this sort of treatment of science by an entrenched political view is nothing at all new and has unfortunately been accepted as the norm. Unfortunately, as I’m sure many reading this here will be quite aware when they examine their own perceptions in this “other” area, it’s hard to overcome “the establishment” when its views are so deeply entrenched in the popular mythos.
– MJM

Wouldn’t it be easier to file a suit for wrongful dismissal as this is without cause? Doesn’t the administration risk being fired when the facts (and emails) come out?

@Smokey: please re-read my original posting. The entire thrust of it was to contrast the differences in US and UK employment practices. The second paragraph opened “Here in the UK” and clearly just dealt with UK law, and practices in the (UK) private and public sectors. It made no specific comment on Dr Drapela or the reason for his not being re-engaged. It just opened “I’m afraid that IMHO [Dr Fulk’s] article smacks of special pleading, putting a CAGW spin on non-renewal of a term contract without tenure” – in a situation where, at present, any link to the CAGW controversy is purely one-sided speculation. (One can of course appreciate the reason for the spin, to portray Dr Drapela as an excellent academic in all respects save only for conceptual differences of view on CAGW theory – good luck to him with that.)

Over ten years ago I worked with a group of engineers trained originally as climate scientists who had lost their grants through pointing out that the NASA sea anomaly plots were showing that heating was starting out localised and spreading not from any overall warming that fitted the AGW theories. This victimisation for non conformity is neither localised nor new.

Well, I’ve reblogged the mail, with a little bit of artwork to make the point:
http://quidsapioclimate.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been/

I went to Oregon State last year, and I have lived in Oregon my whole life. First off, please don’t paint all of Oregon by the actions of one school. There are a handful of massive city centers in Oregon that people look at (Eugene, Portland, etc) and assume that all of Oregon is like that. We’re not.
Secondly, Oregon’s employment laws state that you don’t have to give a reason for firing. The only way it can be disputed is if you feel that you were fired due to some discriminatory reason, such as racism, sexism, etc. It seems to me that this case could fall into that law, as the university was discriminating based upon his opinions, but I’m no law student. All I know is that I’m disappointed in my alma mater, but I’d like people not from Oregon who are reading this article not to get the wrong image of the rest of the state. Odds are good he will get picked up by University of Oregon or one of the private schools up in Portland, like Lewis and Clark or something.
Ryan

Liam says:
June 13, 2012 at 7:41 am
Why has the US so many obese, smoking, health advice denialist, oil-guzzling, gun-toting, climate change skeptic, young Earth creationists??
Answer – because we can. It is called the freedom to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of our own choosing and not at the choosing of someone who believes they know better about what is good for us.

As a graduate of OSU, I find the firing of an instructor appauling. I thought OSU didn’t play the politicaly correct game. I subsequently wrote the president of the OSU Foundation and informed him that I will be withdrawing my annual contriubutions until they come up with a valid reason why Dr. Drapela was fired. They can’t silence people like this!