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.
Would someone with Dr Nickolas Drapela’s email please inform him of an organization called Fire (www.thefire.org) As stated in their mission statement (reproduced below) they routinely fight for people unjustly terminated in academic settings. They are a great organization protecting free speach. Check out their website for success stories.
The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.
@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?
Gail Combs says (June 12, 2012 at 6:40 am): “To bad we are heading into a “country divided” situation with two classes and a chasm between. Just what the Regulating Class loves.”
Thanks for the reference, Gail. Very good essay there.
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.
[SNIP: Sorry, Bill, but this was snipped from Izen’s comment rather belatedly. If he wants to make this assertion it will have to be under his true name and not a screen name. -REP]
*whew*
I saw the snip and wondered if I’d inadvertently left my original comment in, which would definitely have been cause for snippage and a reprimand for language…
[REPLY: Your restraint, undoubtedly in the face of intolerable provocation, is appreciated. -REP]
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…..
Oregon State University is an Academic disgrace. It appears to have no moral standards at all. It looks more like a clandestine religious organisation bent of hiding the worst of its malefactions.
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.
Reblogged this on New Zealand Climate Change and commented:
The following post on Wattsupwiththat is more than a little striking. I am redistributing as it should be of interest to anyone who is concernded about academic freedom to air contrary views.
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
TimC,
I was referring to your own comment, “…nobody ever gets fired, however badly they perform.” Your implication is that he might have been fired for bad performance, and that is what I was responding to. If that is your belief, produce evidence.
Phil. says:
“Annual renewable contracts such as the one described here are subject to non-renewal for various reasons: changes in the course structure, sometimes visiting faculty to be accommodated, change in course enrollment numbers etc. I’ve seen all of these and more, it’s a precarious existence. Someone above said that his classes had lower pass rates which would certainly be a reason.”
I’ve never accused Phil. of being stupid. But if he really believes that any of those [legitimate] reasons to fire Drapela were the actual basis for his termination, then I may have to reconsider. Because if they were the reason(s), then OSU would have simply stated that. But by keeping the reason for Drapela’s firing a secret, it is obvious to even the most casual observer that the real reason was political vindictiveness for questioning the global warming scare.
Finally, izen has accused Dr Drapela at least four (4) separate times of “lying”, without inviting Dr Drapela to give his side of the issue. Izen is truly a nasty piece of work, and he fits in perfectly with OSU’s neo-nazi administration.
@ur momisugly 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
Izun @ur momisugly “One would hope that his students have the personal initiative to not take his claims as authoritative, and with the ~2 mins of study needed found out the inaccuracy of his scientific claims.”
Izun he presented those slides as a theory or hypothesis. But now we know how the wretched
” consensus” is enforced and policed. In the restitution of honesty and integrity to climate science that will surely come, institutions that wish to restore intellectual credibility have a model. And cobber lets hope they use it as ruthlessly and piteously as you are advocating against a man who taught science in accord with his conscience.
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?
It is akin to the Hollywood stories of scientists making a truthful discovery, then being escorted to a hidden facility or removed from service immediately. We all know it, and we all have watched it – even if only in ‘the movies’. Is anyone truly surprised this would happen with a dedicated individual making epic discoveries and conclusions? Wrongful dismissal? BAH! Depending on the laws in Oregon, that doesn’t mean diddlly squat and will get you no where. The intellect, intuitions, and science for this man is what he will be relying upon for his future. Most likely he is purely dedicated to his work, and will find a place to begin anew… albeit with trepidation and a little disappointment. One can only hope he and his family can work through this ‘situation’, to continue his superb work in opening all of our eyes to the truth the world we are responsible for.
@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.)
Open minds. Closed doors.
Closed minds. Open doors.
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.
“[REPLY: Your restraint, undoubtedly in the face of intolerable provocation, is appreciated. -REP]”
This is perhaps the most impressive moderation note I’ve ever seen.
Restraint is the most important human quality.
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/
Why has the US so many obese, smoking, health advice denialist, oil-guzzling, gun-toting, climate change skeptic, young Earth creationists??
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
Wow. Never have I seen so many people jump to conclusions on the basis of absolutely zero evidence.
The only “evidence” of the reasons for Drapela’s alleged firing is sheer speculation on his and Fulks’ parts. OSU hasn’t commented – and most likely can’t due to employee privacy laws.
OSU is in the midst of the 3rd straight biennium of budget cuts, the last being 11%. Now, who gets “fired” when the budget gets cut? The Nobel Laurette? the full professor with tenure? No. It is the contract employee like Drapela, hired for a single year at a time with no guarantee of renewal, particularly in these trying economic times.
How many other contract employees were “fired” this year? Was Drapela the only one?
People should get some facts before posting diatribes like those here. Again, the only “evidence” of Drapela being let go presented here is his own and Fulk’s SPECULATION – and we’ve never seen an employee make something up when they’ve been let go, have we?
Get some facts, then judge. Don’t judge and hope the facts back you up.
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.
[SNIP: Your first comment here and snipped for policy. This thread is not your political soap box. IF you wish to comment, stick to the topic and don’t try offending half the people who visit here. -REP]