Gosh, it can’t be the money, can it? There must be something else going on. The juxtaposition is priceless. From Tom Nelson:
UVA spends $500,000 on lawyers when it would cost only $8,000 to deliver public documents?
Commonwealth Foundation – Mann: From Transparency Champion to ‘Bully’ Victim
UVA has been resisting (spending about $500,000 on outside lawyers for the effort) a similar, previous request by Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who is investigating Mann under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
That the e-mails are public documents seems clear. Mann, while a professor at the school, used an e-mail account at least partially paid for by taxpayers. Just as an elected official’s or state worker’s official correspondence is open to the public, so is a professor’s at a state school.
…
The school estimated it would cost up to $8,000 to deliver the e-mails. That sounds high, but then we do not know how much of a mess their backup servers are. Whatever the accurate cost, if Marshall and friends will pay it, they do not deserve any more hassle from UVa than any other citizen seeking public records.
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Oh, you mean THIS gate key!
😉
Well it could be the math department is just as good as the climate studies department.
It is public university. It has absolutely no immunity of any kind, much less the made up privileges of its loony professors. Cough them up.
Yes, but the damage to the school if those documents are ever released will be much worse than a puny 500,000…
I’d rather they spend their research dollars on lawyers rather than on their religion of climatology. It’s still a win win for logical reasoning. The less propaganda we let them produce to brainwash the masses the better.
This has been my argument all along….
If there’s nothing to see here, why are they fighting it so hard.
Sounds like a bargain. I am not, REPEAT NOT, a “Birther,” but something over $2M in legals costs have been spent on an issue which could be solved for the cost of a simple letter of release. One wonders about how cost/benefit ratios are calcualted today.
It is because Mann’s research was funded by federal grants. If the University had any way of knowing it was bogus, it would be liable to repay those funds and would be disqualified and barred from soliciting any new grants. Grants make up a large portion of a university’s research funding.
Whom is paying the Lawyers?
The students tuition or taxpayer’s money? It’s not like UVA is using money from snack bar sales.
There is nothing to hide, right? I can think of 492,000 reasons to at least question that assertion. But what is a half a million dollars anyway?
They certainly seem to be going to great lengths to hide something….
[snip – Too many problems in this post. While WUWT is not a fan of Dr. Mann, imagining what he “might” say and printing it is just a bit OTT- moderator]
No smoke without fire. They are fighting hard over no wrong doing. So stop fighting and deliver.
It’s not the $8,000 that they’re worried about. It’s the precedent that would be set in having the right to refuse these sort of requests in the future that they’re fighting over.
But publically funded efforts require public disclosure of the results of those efforts, as long as privacy or contract issues are not being violated.
I do not know how UVa is funded, but it may be an over simplification to say that it is publically funded. For example, do the students pay tuition fees? Do companies provide research grants? Are there Awards and Scholarships not paid for out of the public purse? etc. Again, I do not know US immunity law, but there seems no obviously good reason why a university or a lecturer at a university should enjoy any special immunity dispensation.
Whilst I liked the joke about the Maths deptartment, someone must have done the sums and taken the decision that it was worth spending so much money resisting the enquiry. Presumably, this would only be money well spent if the contents of the e-mails was damning. alternatively, if a stance of principle was being taken on the basis of the thin end of the wedge etc, ie., if they were to make disclosure this time (although there is nothing to hide), it could lead to a dangerous precedent in the future when they may really have something to hide.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see the outcome of this enquiry since one way or the other, it will tell us something about the world we live in.
It’s also possible they are defending this on principle, rather than because Mann specifically has something to hide. However, I’ve been racking my brains and I can’t think of a coherent principle one would seek to defend it on, unless “academic freedom” is considered.
latitude says:
January 13, 2011 at 10:04 am
This has been my argument all along….
If there’s nothing to see here, why are they fighting it so hard.
Well, you know what they say:
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
One might question the timing of displaying principles, though.
Half a Mil here, half a Mil there, pretty soon it will be real money. Oh, I forgot… half a Tril here, half a Tril there…
Reminder to self… next time, make sure to consult government guide on what “relatively modest” funding means…
They had their chance to distance themselves from Mann but chose to join the fray and go all in with a cover up. One only has to ask why.
After applying the old skeptics-are-funded-by-big-oil smear, Mann paints himself as the victim and also as a champion of the ‘progress of science’. What a w*nker:
“There is substantial case law defending scientists and academics against such thinly-veiled attempts to suppress scientific inquiry by harassing individual scientists. I suspect that U.Va, as other great universities have in the past, will respect that tradition and stand up against these transparent attempts not just to bully me, but to thwart the progress of science,”
JohnWho says:
January 13, 2011 at 10:34 am
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
===============================================
John, they have released other people’s work, no questions asked.
It is a given that the emails will ultimately be made available; as has been stated, they are clearly subject to public access. UVA is merely stalling this as long as possible in the hopes that things will have changed and the appetite for such information is reduced. When there is no alternative to the truth, stall stall stall, then request a continuance.
http://www.virginia.edu/presidentemeritus/report10/pdf/StatementsNotes10.pdf
Small beans, you see. They only had an operating loss of ~$305,000,000.
Ironically there may be nothing within these e-mail , but who now would believe that after all the effort UVA has put into avoided their release ?
How to create a rod for your own back 101
Bob Ramar:
As I understand it, most NIH and NSF grants are applied for and issued to individual scientists, who have proprietary control over their grants. Universities usually lack supervisory or administrative control over the grants or research work.
Thus, Mann is personally liable to the state for any violation of its false claims law. There is a parallel federal law that also covers Mann’s work.