Gordon Fulks sends this summary of the situation and asks that it be distributed. I’m happy to oblige. For some background on Dr. Drapela’s skeptical views, this slideshow “Global Warming Cracked Open” might give some insight into OSU’s booting him out. – Anthony
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From Gordon Fulks:
Hello Everyone,
In theory at least Oregon State University (OSU) seems to be a bastion of academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. A wide range of ideas are openly discussed. The most viable rise to the top and the least viable fade away. But it is all a fairy tale, because OSU operates under a politically correct regimen that dictates what is acceptable to say and what is not. Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.
OSU is not yet as swift or efficient as the Soviet system when Joseph Stalin was trying to quash dissent among biologists who refused to go along with Trofim Lysenko. If warnings to compromise their integrity were not followed, Stalin simply had biologists shot. That quickly thinned the ranks of all biologists and persuaded the remaining ones to comply with Stalin’s wishes. Of course, it also destroyed Soviet biology, because Lysenko was pedaling nonsense. And Russian biology has never recovered.
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
What could possibly have provoked the OSU administration to take precipitous action against one of their academics who has been on their staff for ten years, just bought a house in Corvallis, and has four young children (one with severe medical problems)? Dr. Drapela is an outspoken critic of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Democratic Party, and Governor John Kitzhaber.
Five years ago, Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor went around quietly saying that he was not a believer. Then Governor Ted Kulongoski and many faculty at OSU including Dr. Jane Lubchenco made life impossible for Taylor, and he retired. (Lubchenco is now head of NOAA in the Obama administration.) Under those currently in charge, OSU climate research has grown to be a huge business, reportedly $90 million per year with no real deliverables beyond solid academic support for climate hysteria. A small army of researchers ponder the effects of Global Warming on all sorts of things from tube worms living along the Oregon Coast to butterflies inland. When the climate refuses to warm (as it has for the last twenty years), they just study ‘warming in reverse!’ Most of us call that “cooling,” but they are very careful not to upset their Obama administration contract monitors with politically incorrect terminology.
Skeptics of Global Warming who oppose the OSU approach and oppose the politicians who make it all possible but do not work for OSU also find themselves attacked. Dr. Art Robinson who is running against Peter DeFazio for an Oregon Congressional seat found three of his children under attack at OSU. All were attempting to obtain advanced degrees in the Nuclear Engineering Department and were threatened with dismissal. Because Robinson fought back, we understand that the OSU administration backed down.
As to the latest victim of political correctness at OSU, Dr. Nickolas Drapela gives us an excellent synopsis of what is going on:
“The fact of the matter is that it is now two weeks since I was fired and no one has had the cajones or the common courtesy to even tell me why. I have spoken with the Dept. Chair (Rich Carter) who fired me, and he refused to tell me why. I spoke to the Dean of Science (Vince Remcho) and he couldn’t tell me why. I spoke to HR who set up a meeting with me, then cancelled it an hour before. Then I went to the Vice President of Academic Affairs (Becky Warner) and she sent me back to Rich Carter, the chemistry chair.
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. I had stellar teaching evaluations, I won College of Science awards for teaching, and published textbooks. My class sections were always full and I was well-liked by students (see ratemyprofessors.com). I was doing my job very well. But I guess I didn’t march in step with their philosophies.
There were quite a few student protests over this at OSU (Barometer, Facebook, etc.) but to no avail.
I was given no severance and had no warning this was about to happen. In fact, I was lured into the chair’s office under the guise of a fallacious story before being fired.
As you know, I was probably the most visibly-outspoken critic of the Global Warming doctrine at OSU. I gave several public talks on the topic and did research in the area which I regularly posted on the web. I was also on a few talk radio shows in the area. I think they finally just said, we can’t have this.
Can it be that a university whose motto is “Open minds. Open doors” cannot abide even one faculty member who disagrees with their dogma? I suppose I am too naive, but I’m still reeling from it. Unbelievable.
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.
As far as my options at this point, like I said I haven’t even really grasped what has just happened. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or what options I have yet. I’m sure OSU wants their story to be tight and perfectly identical among all administration before coming out with an official reason why I was fired, hence the long wait and refusal to speak to me.
I truly thank you for your concern, and I hope there is some recourse, even just for the sake of exposing what is happening at OSU.”
In a separate e-mail Drapela went on to say:
“Thanks so much for your support and your concern. That’s really nice. My students were all really upset about it. They started an email writing campaign to have me re-hired but I guess no one cares what they think.
I find that the people who want to keep things secret all the time are usually the people that have something to hide. It is certainly ok by me for you to disseminate this story. But I’m sure OSU would be horrified.
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.”
We can only speculate as to how the decision to fire Drapela was made. Unlike the decision to force Taylor out (which came from the governor’s office), this decision was likely internal to OSU with the implicit backing of Governor Kitzhaber and NOAA administrator Lubchenco. I would suspect that Dr. Phil Mote (Director of their Climate Change Research Institute) had a hand in the decision, because he has previously been highly intolerant of those who oppose his ideas and could potentially threaten his business empire.
Please join with me in supporting Nick Drapela. Please join with me in supporting objective science, as well as academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. The issues here go far beyond just Global Warming and strike at the very heart of who we are as scientists and Americans.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
P.S. Please circulate this e-mail far and wide. The world needs to know what is going on here.
davidmhoffer,
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.
Funny ain’t it no debating, talking about or discussing. Just straight out the door.
America land of the free (Don’t worry over here in the UK we haven’t been our own masters since Maastricht).
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.
@davidmhoffer
Thanks for the input. A wee while back when I worked full time in IT I was one of those vendor/consultants building such business cases and I seem to remember that ‘blade computing’ = ‘lots of cards in a box sharing common services’, was the latest way to cut down those utility bills. Maybe its moved on from there. And btw it is the power consumption of the cooling systems that is the big swinger, not so much the raw power needed to run the servers. You not only have to pump the heat in, you also have to dump it out at the back end.
As a sideline, way back when IBM had the same problem with mainframes in the 1980s, and the 308x/309x line had inbuilt water cooling rather than air. Worked well, if a bit cumbersome.
There isn’t much new under the sun in computing…it just comes around again with a new name and the young turks think it is the latest newest thing….
But I was specifically interested in IBM’s specific involvement in the green gravy train, not just the general industry trend to reduced environmentals. I know that Crispin Tickell, (arch-greenie) was on their board some time back. Do we know of any other highlights?
In any totalitarian system dissent is not tolerated.
Latimer Alder;
But I was specifically interested in IBM’s specific involvement in the green gravy train, not just the general industry trend to reduced environmentals. I know that Crispin Tickell, (arch-greenie) was on their board some time back. Do we know of any other highlights?>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
IBM would have been better positioned than most to take advantage of power reduction programs because there are both a major consulting organization and a vendor of equiement, so they got to profit from both sides of the process, but they were a long ways from being the only ones. After the move ti blade centres (which you mention came the move to virtual servers (logical servers, several on each blade) which furether reduced power consumption.
The other place where IBM and others pulled dough out of the green programs was for large compute clusters to support researchers. IBM is a major player in the market for High Performance Computing which might see thousands or tens of thousands of cpu’s in a single implementation. The market to builf out these super compute environments is in the billions, and many of them are at climate research centres like CRU and GISS.
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…
Another sad example demonstrating CAGW is a cult belief and has little to do with real science. Cult believers are always utterly intolerant of dissenting opinions. Believers do not feel they have to be held responsible for their actions, as they are the pure in heart, the purveyors of the great truth etc. etc.
I think the concept of communists is totally wrong, these are just academic cultists demonstrating their intolerance towards reason and rationality.
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!
Who is contacting the US media to highlight this story?
Is there a single sceptic who is not some right wing republican who is able to distil this story into something that can easily be slotted into a newspaper and then send out the same to as many papers and media outlets as possible?
And if I hear one more person moaning “the media doesn’t listen to us” …. if you don’t speak to them how can you accuse them of not listening?
@- 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.
I’m afraid that IMHO this article smacks of special pleading, putting a CAGW spin on non-renewal of a term contract without tenure. In the land of the free and home of the brave it is surely to be expected that (as Jo Reeves says) “I do believe any company or organization should have the right to terminate anyone for any reason. I believe that telling an individual or company that you have to hire or can’t fire this person because of race, religion, sexuality, weight or beliefs is overregulation.”
Here in the UK we have gone in totally the opposite direction since the 1970’s, with the Employment Protection Act 1975 (giving the “right not to be unfairly dismissed”, to substantial damages if the dismissal is unfair and to be told the reason for any dismissal), the Redundancy Payments Act (the right to payment if laid off or the employer’s business fails); the right to minimum wages – and of course universal health care and welfare benefits. The result is that employers are much less ready to hire because it is much more difficult and costly to fire. Of course this only applies in the private sector – in the public sector nobody ever gets fired, however badly they perform.
His students seemed to really like him:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=130822
Latimer–IBM’s major business initiative is called Smarter Planet–to make the earth a system of systems. There are lots of videos of all the cities globally working with them to produce Smarter Cities.
In addition there idea of Global Innovation from conferences they have been hosting is political and regulatory.
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.
I’m surprised at the surprise some express. I would consider this “normal operating procedure” in an academic setting. Schools are notorious for this kind of thing.
Not I said “normal” and not “proper,” very much not the same thing.
It’s true that there’s a grant gravy train involved, but it’s also a very ideologically-driven “culture” in academia. I’d almost prefer they be corrupt for the sake of money and not ideology – at least they’d be predictable.
@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.
To the idea that this is somehow a violation of accreditation, the accreditors like AdvancED which owns most of the regional accreditors now outside of New England are the ultimate enforcer now for a political vision of education. Instead of learning a body of knowledge, higher ed is about developing a mindset of civic engagement. There is literally paperwork on moving beyond the rational mind of the Enlightenment towards an integral/perspectivist mind where there is no distinction between reason and emotion.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/is-accreditation-the-enforcer-for-unescos-vision-of-solidarity/
was a post I wrote to start a conversation about what the accreditors are pushing both higher ed and K-12 all over the world.
There was a very alarming report on higher ed’s new direction on making the credential about desired behaviors and attitudes released with fanfare at the White House in January.
http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/Crucible_FINAL_web.pdf
If you read closely you will see the request for the accreditors to be the enforcer for this vision. That’s why I call them the ultimate sovereigns in education. There is a belief that there are no constraints on what they can now mandate.
I happen to think the US Constitution is in their way because they are being so overt in what is being targeted. That won’t help this professor but a better understanding of how education has been thoroughly weaponized is necessary if we are to find our way out of this taxpayer funded trap.
Climate change and AGW and biodiversity are all just tools for manipulation.
Perhaps we need to fire off some FOI requests to find out who said what to who.
This victimization of a courageous scientist is an outrage. Surely we can raise the issue as part of a campaign and contribute to his costs of fighting this attempt to crush scientific honesty? By the way Appell has given us ammunition to fire back in terms of the issue. Out of the mouths of babes and asses.
Green Trekking, across OS Universe(ity),
On the Oregon gravy-train under Captain Kirzh(aber)
Green Trekking, across OS Universe(ity),
Only getting warmer ‘cos we cannot feel the cold.
We come in Peace – Shoot to Kill, Shoot to Kill,
We come in Peace – Shoot to Kill, Shoot to Kill, professors.
With apologies to Rory Kehoe
.
Well. Since Peter Gleick got *his* job back, I suppose there is some world order seesaw balance at work here….? /sarc off/ ….Lady in Red
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.
Dreadful story but a sign of the times and the power of money regardless of the method of getting it. Sounds like Joe Stalin is still around.
I assume that the US Constitution is still in force then what this gentleman said is his own affair and will fall within the ‘free speech’ bit in the Constitution.
Whilst litigation is costly in this case go for it plus a major claim for damages.
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.