Reposted from Polar Bear Science
Posted on October 21, 2019 |Susan Crockford
Last week I wrote about my loss of adjunct professor status at the University of Victoria (UVic), preceded by my expulsion from its volunteer Speakers Bureau. It provided background to an op-ed that appeared in the National Post on Wednesday (16 October) by journalist Donna Laframboise exposing this travesty of academic freedom. See also an article in the Washington Times that came out yesterday and note that the GWPF has issued a press release condemning the suppression of academic freedom at UVic and has released a briefing paper called The Defenestration of Dr. Crockford: Silencing Dissent at the University of Victoria.
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Today I’m in London preparing to give another lecture about the Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened. Donna has published more detail on the questions she asked UVic but which they refused to answer after nearly three weeks. It’s critical to understand that the university is determined to keep any and all details about these events secret.
Here is an excerpt from Donna’s report on her investigation:
“My first group of questions merely attempted to verify dates and basic information. Double-checking facts with both sides of a story is important, but UVic made that impossible. If my understanding of events was inaccurate, this was UVic’s opportunity to let me know. Instead, it chose to stonewall, refusing to say if the Speakers Bureau had ever given Crockford negative feedback, or if anyone in the Anthropology Department had advised her she was at risk of losing her adjunct status.
My next six questions were emphatically not about identifiable individuals. I asked how many people had been on the committee that revoked Crockford’s adjunct status. How many had voted for her versus against her. How many were zoologists? How many adjuncts had the Anthropology Department severed ties with over the past decade? How many adjuncts had UVic as a whole severed ties with? I also asked about safeguards that would prevent adjuncts from being punished for politically incorrect views.
Answering those questions would have violated the privacy of absolutely no one. It’s hilarious that, when I then asked how many UVic professors had matched Crockford’s achievement by being recently published in a prestigious scientific journal, UVic declined even to answer that. University PR people spend their days boasting about this sort of thing. They normally send journalists press releases begging for celebratory coverage.
My final group of questions concerned Crockford’s banishment from the Speakers Bureau. The first one asked why Stahl had refused to endorse – and had therefore silenced – Crockford. This clearly involved identifiable individuals, but the eight questions that followed did not. Here are four of them, typo and all. I’ve inserted the italics here:
ii. Since 2017, how many other UVic adjunct professors (within and beyond the Anthropology Department) are no longer participating in the Speakers Bureau due to a similar refusal on the part of their department chair?
iii. Since 2017, what percentage of UVic graduate students participating in the Speaker’s Bureau have been similarly required to secure written endorsement from their department chair?
iv. How many of these graduate studetns have been refused? [sic]
ix. What mechanisms exist to vet the content of Speakers Bureau presentations, particularly regarding controversial topics such as climate justice, renewable energy, Israeli-Palestinian relations, restorative justice, and so forth?
That last issue is of particular importance. Either there’s a system to vet presentations or there isn’t. I was seeking basic information, trying hard to understand what’s normal, sincerely trying to sort out what had transpired. UVic felt absolutely no need to explain, to reassure Canadian taxpayers that it had behaved honourably and fairly.
Let me repeat. The University of Victoria was given ample opportunity – 18 bleeping days. Like an untouchable and unaccountable monarch, it chose not to answer a single question.”
Read her entire blog post here.
………….and who were the politicians behind this?
Keep up the good work Dr. Crockford.
And who were the people behind the politicians…
We’ll never know because it is clearly has been a very subjective exercise. Best we all can do is badmouth UVic at every opportunity – alarmists play dirty and unprofessional all the time and I think it is time for sceptics to return the favour. Some of the good people at UVic may then feel motivated to go public and reveal what has happened.
I still bet it was Michael Mann and his lynching mob who has repeatedly attacked anyone who disagrees with his catastrophic beliefs.
The Big Green are well-connected, well-paid, and powerful, so this comes not as a surprise.
It is a zeitgeist to ‘deplatform’ inconvenient truths, the more compelling, passionate, and true, the surer the deplatforming efforts. Peak stupid.
They won’t honestly reply but the answers are not particularly elusive. Intellect is most unwelcome in the current educational academy that aspires to a choke hold on permissible thought instead. The truth — hey, who cares? We’ve got a worldview to push upon the whole populace and so won’t tolerate the slightest ‘resistance’ (well, except our own favored street mob form).
To your point Doc, I am sure that Greta Thunberg would be granted a stand at the podium and all the lecture time she needed (she really enjoys that lecturing others bit).
Nothing to learn there but much to applaud. With her newly anointed celebrity status, there would be an auditorium filled with climate clowns cheering her on
A purported university where the brightest are removed for telling the truth will very quickly cease to be a university. Not only will they end up with at first the mediocre followed closely by the downright stupid, the potential students will avoid it like the plague. Well done UVic!
Ed, you need to remember that these “potential students” have been inculcated with the leftist beliefs — on environment, climate, ‘right-thinking’, and so on — since they were five. Susan (and others) represents a threat since she is debunking the received wisdom and thereby threatening the continuation of the (in this case, climate) paradigm.
Western universities are slowly turning into factories designed to turn out intellectual clones and their raw material has been pre-processed during the previous 12 years or so. Greta and her fellow teenage protesters are extreme examples of this process.
Not so fast. In 1974 I listened to a lecture from Dr. Torben Wolff at The University Of Copenhagen. It was about Global Warming or CAGW: Do not dig up energy stored over millions of years and blow it all off at once, as the Earth’s climate is in a very delicate balance. Dr. Wolff was an excellent speaker and gave us something to think about, the oil crises was still in our minds. There was a tremendous lot of left wing BS going on back then as of today.
Bottom line, I believe universities are holy self-governing institutions, untouchable by the public and controlling our future.
Still, I believe it is important to do as much as possible to protect employees and associates at any educational institution, from political selection.
So Susan Crockford decerves all help and publicity for the sake of freedom of information and the freedom to choose.
keep up the good fight – what a champion – all these exampleS of bullying will contribute, eventually, to the TRUTH coming out in the end – it always does in Science – look back – the consensus on blood letting, for example, took a bloody long time until finally the TRUTH trickled down though to the mob mentality.
If I had an intelligent hamster…I wouldn’t send it to the University of Victoria.
And if I were hoping to hire an employee who could think logically, I would not be interviewing at UVic.
Andrew Weaver, head of the Green Party of BC, and so a member of the current minority government of BC, graduated from the U of Vic, was a professor there for many years, and was a heavy weight in Western Canada’s high performance compute initiatives, coordinating between researchers, universities and government funding agencies. If you’re looking for the man in the shadows… start there.
I usually post under my own name. Not on this one. Could cost me a healthy chunk of my livelihood.
oops, I forgot.
He’s a “climate scientist” of the alarmist variety. It was a total surprise to me that he didn’t interfere with Crockford sooner.
He is also the author and creator of the second worst GCM of the lot, as I recall. He is the one who created the output of over 6 C warming for a doubling of CO2.
Andrew Weaver is a good place to start. Maybe also Thomas F. Pederson, Executive Director?
https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-payments-university-victoria-professor-susan-crockford-probed
You can always try and force their hand through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It’s at least somewhere to start as at minimum an explanation must be forthcoming, especially if a future prospective employer wishes to know why.
Does UVic get public funding? And does Canada have a FOIA law? Seems there should be some way of obtaining the public information, or what should be public, on the procedures for such things. If the procedures were not followed that should be actionable. If the procedures do not exist, that would be damning.
Susan Crockford, in Canada this winter there will be a heavy frost due to the lack of El Niño and a minimum of solar activity. Maybe that’s why such sharp attacks?
If University study has ceased to be about seeking fundamental truth, then what function does University study perform.
With this latest example of the unseen often unknown authorities taking down an honest well researched leader in the field under question who is safe to say anything truthful?
Susan’s credentials are well known, well respected and well proven. Now can UVic tell us who, are these doyens of authority within their walls, that decided an international scientist of repute such as Susan Crockford, should be silenced.
Canada. Please tell me you didn’t re-elect the clown prince of wokeness, the king of virtue signalling and all round berk.
Sorry, Chris, I just saw a news report that said Tradeus’ liberal side has enough votes to form another liberal government. Part of his platform was to fight Climate Change, because, you know, Canada likes being known as the Great White North, and they don’t want to spread out from living near the USA border. Let’s wait for the good news that Susan Crockford has landed at some important research establishment and can get on with her work.
Susan, fight them all the way,for your own sake,and the sake of all university’s, the integrity, standing of all university’s is being called into question ,my partner who is a academic in a university here in the UK is disgusted by the treatment you have received,
Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves.
I would take from the utter refusal to answer ANY of the questions presented as a pretty good indicator of an oh shit moment and the knowledege that answers will show them up for the bullying liars they appear to be
I hope Donna can keep up the pressure and publicity about their evasion
I doubt it’s a revelation of any sort. I’d bet it’s just the usual “you’re too unimportant for us to consider a response” sort of thing.
Go Fund Me awaits. Peter Ridd has shown the way.
Mixed bill of health for the Great Barrier Reef
https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summary-2018-2019
The propagandists are out in full force this morning.
The condition of the GBR has nothing known to do with CO2 emissions.
Neither does the current post-LIA warming.
If you ran a university would you be happy that your biology chair were to go around the world stating that your university believes evolution is all lies and biology should be based on intelligent design?
If your head of geology went round the world using your university name lecturing on why flat earth is truth and globe earth is fake would you allow this without taking action?
Neither of your “analogies” are even close to what happened, but lying and character assassination are part and parcel to your Warmunist ideology, so no surprise. Troll.
It really is fascinating the lies alarmists are willing to tell about others.
It’s you who’s doing that, ghalfrunt. CO2-induced warming is climate-creationism.
Your bible is the IPCC SPM, your high priest is Jim Hanson, Mike Mann is your Savonarola, Judy Curry is your heretic, and Anthony Watts is your Giordano Bruno.
And don’t think your lot wouldn’t be carrying out show trials and object-lesson executions were they able.
Exactly! Classic projection, once again.
Her “side” has “proven” exactly NOTHING, and have no “evidence” in support of their alarmist nonsense at all – all they have is their pet hypothesis, the endless insistence that it applies absent its key caveat of all other things held equal, and endless extrapolations and bullshit piled on top.
OK ghalfrunt, I’ll answer your ridiculous hypothetical questions: No, I wouldn’t be happy in either very unlikely situation. But I wouldn’t secretly censure them either. They would get a fair hearing, according to the written rules, all above board and as transparent as possible. Only scoundrels operate star chambers and hide their deeds in the darkness. It’s telling that you don’t have a problem with that way of doing things. I wonder if your attitude would be different if it were you instead of someone you disagree with?
Certainly not. I would first ask them to defend their views and show the evidence supporting them- which most probably they would not be able to do. I would, if I ran a university, also do the same with the idiots who keep claiming they can control the weather/climate through policies designed to destroy modern civilization by reducing the small fraction of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere each year from the combustion of fossil fuels. They too would fail to support their arguments with evidence as the past few decades have shown. They have only unvalidated models that get nearly every prediction wrong. The evidence on the other hand suggests CO2 influence on climate is barely detectable and in all probability beneficial for the environment and human society. The fact that Susan Crockford has spend her time and energy reeducating the public about the real state of polar bear stocks when a cadre of radical environmental activist “scientists” keeps misrepresenting the truth would make me a very proud university president if she were one of my own. She is pursuing science while others pursue self interest and political leverage.
“If you ran a university would you be happy that your biology chair were to go around the world stating that your university believes evolution is all lies and biology should be based on intelligent design?”
But wasn’t Crockford just being heretical only about polar bears, not climate? She’s got a provable case wrt polar bears, and there’s no supposedly overwhelming case for polar bear doom.
Evolution cannot be a “lie.” It is an after-the-fact explanation of how we have ended up where we are.
You can only lie about a fact, some observable phenomenon. No one has observed evolution. What animal is in the zoo now that was not there 100 years ago?
The theory of evolution has been developed, in hind-sight, Hypothesizing After Results Known / HARK, in order to form a theory of our world where we can ignore God.
Relevance ?
This sounds exactly like the Peter Rid episode at
James Cook University .He won in court with a million
dollar compensation to be paid to him.This has now
been challenged by JCU and so back to the courts .
These “ institutions of excellence “seemingly will
stop at nothing to stomp out legitimate research
and the conclusions there authors come to.All this
institutional behavior is very Orwellian and a huge
threat to open mindedness,free speech and of course
scientific method
Was JCU given leave to appeal? The court has to grant permission, the appeal doesn’t happen just because they want to.
And let’s notice the participation of female academics in suppression of freedom of speech, conscience, and intellect.
A new kind of #MeToo; a much more common and noxious kind. In this case, directed against another female.
It should be obvious now, that the culture war is about individual freedom for all. Identity politics is just a cover for totalitarianism.
right on!
This is a wonderful example of how “Privacy” legislation is used as a smokescreen by governments and institutions to hide agendas. These invidious statutes were passed with barely a whimper from a trusting public. They enshrined a perpetual information asymmetry between those who were “in” and those who were “out”.
Just as campaign financing laws were designed to help incumbents and hinder challengers.
Does the University of Victoria recieve taxpayer money?
I guess it wouldn’t do any good going after the taxes now that Trudeau has be elected again. What a disappointment! I blame misinformed voters for this tragic turn of events, and for that I blame the Mainstream Media for promoting a false reality that socialism is good and human-caused climate change is real, very effectively.
When you vote fools into office, expect bad things to happen in your future.
Tom, Angela Merkel has repeatedly been elected in Germany, despite the wholesale screaming disaster of her policies.
Don’t chalk up to misunderstanding what can be explained by utter righteous stupidity.
U Vic hosts the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions which was begun with nearly $100 million from the BC government, the largest foundation grant in Canadian university history. “PICS shares a global vision of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century”, hardly an “Academic” pursuit. https://pics.uvic.ca/about/mission-and-objectives
Given the choice, the public will always vote for Boaty McBoatface.
Good administration is not easy, not excusing them, but more difficult than teaching which is more difficult than research, on average, that is. With the increase in administration made necessary by law, regulation, university ambition , etc. some of this is unavoidable. “You wouldn’t want them in the classroom” has enough truth in it to understand, if not tolerate, their position. However, if you add on the politicization of academia, it has to change. Too many are in it for the money and the power, that will never work.
Most businesses fail, suspect that it has been also increasingly true for administrators. Faculty Senates must have gone down the tubes.
This is absolutely sickening UVIC! Telling kids what to think not how to think is a crime against humanity. How are this entire generation going to feel when they finally realize AGW is massive fraud?
As an alumnus at UVIC I can’t wait for the next universtiy fund raising call…
The honest alumni/supporters need to demand answers and hold all their support until they get it. That’s the only way to get to the people that run the University – hit them in their wallets. Money talks.
Sue them and get the girl that won for admiral Norman. We can run a crowd fund for this. DO not wait. Someone contact her and start a Gofundme for this.
I see where Rush Limbaugh has mentioned the University of Victoria’s attack on Dr. Crockford on his radio show today.
Rush said the polar bear aspect of human-caused climate change will be downplayed in the press going forward because the polar bears are thriving and are no longer useful as a predictor of coming doom for the Earth. I think Rush said this was going to be the new policy of a certain news organization but I didn’t catch the name of that organization. Possibly the Guardian.
Maybe someone should tranquilize some polar bears and release them at the University of Victoria, in order to prove that polar bears still exist, and Dr. Crockford is telling the truth.
I think we should have one join every meeting of the “Speakers Bureau” and the “Anthropology Department” of UVic to give them the “truth” about Polar Bears from the source, as it were, and keep doing so until they get the message – or cease to exist.
By the time people wake up and understand the impact that allowing one ideological side to maintain control of education through illegal discrimination in hiring practices, we’re going to be living in a socialistic, welfare society.
Maybe Dr. Crockford’s termination was a condition of Weaver returning to the University
having steeped down as a Green Party politician ?
Stay tuned .
It’s circle the wagon time at the University of Victoria . A little cult of cowards .
I would think this childish ploy will not silence Dr. Crockford .
The Polar bear mascot was a big investment by the earth has a fever industry .
The bears are fine and the biggest risk is other human cowards that shoot the bears for fun .
Did Weaver use Polar bears as a talking point at the University of Victoria to paint scary global warming stories ? Are the Kennedy’s gun shy ?
Dr. Crockford probably wouldn’t want to work for a propaganda factor .
I would find a lawyer to investigate suing the university as Peter Ridd has done in Australia. Winning in court is a good way to teach these Eco-fascist a lesson.
Obviously over the target, considering the amount of flak.